Provisionality and the Poem: Transition in the Work of du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noel (Faux Titre 278)

Provisionality and the Poem Transition in the Work of du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noël

FAUX TITRE 278

Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

Provisionality and the Poem Transition in the Work of du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noël

Emma Wagstaff

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2006

Cover illustration: From Sous le linteau en forme de joug, by André du Bouchet and Pierre Tal Coat (Lausanne: Françoise Simecek, 1978), 28.3 x 18.8 cm. Pierre Tal Coat-© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006 Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN-10: 90-420-1939-5 ISBN-13: 978-90-420-1939-3 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in The Netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

7

List of Illustrations

9

Introduction

11

1. Poetry in Time

29

2. Words in the Air

59

i. ii. iii.

Du Bouchet: Entering Matter Jaccottet: Floating Images Noël: Exchanging Places

64 91 115

3. Art and the Book: Du Bouchet, Noël and the Visual Arts

139

4. The Foreign Language: Jaccottet, du Bouchet and Translation

165

5. Silence: Noël, Jaccottet and the Limits of Language

189

Conclusion

213

Illustrations

223

Bibliography

227

Index

239

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Trinity College and St. John’s College, Cambridge, where I was respectively student and research fellow, for their intellectual and financial support. Jean Khalfa supervised the PhD project from which this book has emerged; I am indebted to him for introducing me to modern poetry and for many years of inspiration and advice. I am grateful to my PhD examiners, Malcolm Bowie and Andrew Rothwell, and to others who offered criticisms and suggestions, especially Peter Collier and Andrew Brown. Yves Peyré, director of the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, has allowed me to see livres d’artistes and organised the photographs reproduced here. The estates of Pierre Tal Coat and Olivier Debré have kindly agreed to my use of the illustrations. Quotations are reproduced, and translations included, courtesy of Éditions Fata Morgana, Éditions Flammarion and Éditions Gallimard. I have used some of the material in this book for an article in Dalhousie French Studies, 71, and for my chapter in the catalogue The Dialogue Between Painting and Poetry: Livres d’artistes 1870-1999, and I am grateful to the editors for permission to include it. Bernard Noël and the late André du Bouchet generously agreed to talk to me about their work; it was a great privilege to meet them. I should like to thank personally all those who have helped and supported me over the past few years, especially Edmund Newey, Mairi Ryan, Joanna Shearer, Matthew Treherne, Victoria Treherne and my family, Edward, Peter and Rosemary Wagstaff, to whom this book is dedicated.

ILLUSTRATIONS All photographs by Michel Nguyen from books held at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris. Cover illustration From Sous le linteau en forme de joug, by André du Bouchet and Pierre Tal Coat (Lausanne: Françoise Simecek, 1978), 28.3 x 18.8 cm. Pierre Tal Coat-© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006 Plate 1 From Sous le linteau en forme de joug, by André du Bouchet and Pierre Tal Coat (Lausanne: Françoise Simecek, 1978), 28.3 x 18.8 cm. Pierre Tal Coat-© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006 Plate 2 From Le Livre de l'oubli, by Bernard Noël and Olivier Debré (Marseille: Ryoan-Ji, 1985), 38.7 x 31.6 cm. Olivier Debré© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

INTRODUCTION Setting the Scene La poésie se poursuit dans l’espace de la parole, mais chaque pas en est vérifiable dans le monde réaffirmé.1

Yves Bonnefoy asserts here that poetry has a connection to the real. Writing may take the form of words on a page, laid out in printed space, but it is not simply a system of signs divorced from the things they evoke. Bonnefoy does not insist that words represent the world, but that they exist in a dependent relationship with reality. Poetry recreates the world on the page; the real, meanwhile, keeps a check on language. Bonnefoy belongs to a generation of poets writing in French, many of whom are still working, who began publishing after the Second World War. Their poetry is often described as metaphysical, because it aims at approaching Being, at evoking the encounter between the self and reality; it does not express the sentiments of an individual subject. The speaking voice has become depersonalised, which means that there is room for the resistant presence of reality in the text. The human subject is not absent, but comes up against the world continually, perceives it and acts within it. Bonnefoy employs the word “pas” to describe the progress of poetic creativity. Every utterance is a step towards the world, taken in recognition that Being might be approached, but never attained. The movement itself is the goal of poetry, because each step is measured against the real and brings it into being on the page. Movement is of central importance to post-war poetry, even in texts that are primarily spatial. The written poetry of the period is often original in its use of space. Sometimes criticised for publishing hermetic poetry, writers achieve many of the effects deemed to obscure understanding by exploiting the space of the page. Images might be juxtaposed without narrative, context or obvious links, through careful positioning of text on the page. When there appears to be no overall control of the poem’s progression, when multiple meanings are projected and no precedence granted to any single interpretation, the text comes to generate its own significance rather than reflecting an individual’s 1

Yves Bonnefoy, L’Improbable (Paris: Mercure de France, 1980), p. 130.

12 Provisionality and the Poem

train of thought. The time in which it might have unfolded has been spatialised. The modern poem’s relationship to memory is profoundly different from that of verse in oral traditions. Poems need no longer be constructed according to metrical rules and rhyme schemes, because these are not required to aid the recall of the poet who will recite. Rather, memory can be a property of the text, as it sets up echoes and allusions from one line to the next, or across pages of a volume. If words do not need division into lines and stanzas to be memorable, then the layout of the text on the page takes on a new role. Giorgio Agamben has suggested, for example, that the only criterion for distinguishing between poetry and prose might be enjambement.2 Agamben cites Paul Valéry’s definition: “le poème – cette hésitation prolongée entre le son et le sens.”3 Here poetry is understood as enacting a hiatus and granting equal status to form and content. A poem is not prose because its content cannot exist without its form. If different words were chosen, the poem would not express the same thing differently; it would be a different poem. Jacques Roubaud writes that poetry cannot be paraphrased.4 Valéry’s insistence on prolonged hesitation incorporates silence into the poem, and also suggests breathing, because pauses between lines give it a structure and can be used to question apparently transparent meaning. Final interpretation remains only potential; the significance of the text is found in its movement, rather than in conclusions. Even texts considered spatial are on the move. The image of the horizon is developed by Michel Collot to link recent poetry’s concentration on the real with the importance accorded to the page. He writes that post-war French poets seek transcendence in the heart of reality, and define themselves by “being in the world”. They make the horizon the emblem of their desire for the real and of the text on the white page; the vanishing point shifts as the text moves from word to word. 5

2

Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem, trans. by D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 109. 3 Paul Valéry, Œuvres, 2 vols, ed. by Jean Hytier, II (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 637. 4 Jacques Roubaud, Poésie, etcetera: ménage (Paris: Stock, 1995), p. 77. 5 Michel Collot, L’Horizon fabuleux II: XXème siècle (Paris: Corti, 1988), pp. 14-17.

Introduction 13

Post-war poetry is distinctive in that it does not separate reality from the text. In the modern philosophical climate, where writers have been shown not to be present to their utterances, a distinction is made between phenomenological consciousness of something beyond the subject, and the structuralist model of language as operating through internal difference. But this opposition is overcome in poetry because it does not propose a representation of the real. Since its form and substance are interrelated, it cannot imitate transparently. It creates a world in language through engagement with the non-linguistic. An encounter with the natural world is essential to many poets, but their interest in what is beyond language takes a variety of forms; bodily imagery may be important, and the visual is often paramount. A majority of twentieth-century French poets has collaborated with artists to produce livres d’artistes that testify to the complex interrelationship of word and image. Rejecting naïve mimesis, such poetry is obliged to investigate the link between the real and language. Indeed, it is noted for examining its own processes. The figurative is blended with metadiscourse, as words are made novel through an interrogation of their creative potential. In turn, this has caused criticism of poetry to become poetic criticism; if the form of a text is inseparable from its content, and an investigation of language always accompanies creativity, then the critic cannot operate at a distance from the text. A feature of much writing on post-war poetry is its integration of a figurative dimension.6 Indeed, many critics are also poets, and in some cases, little distinction can be made between their critical and creative texts. Noël, Jaccottet and du Bouchet The poets presented in this study all examine language and they all engage with what is beyond language. In this they are typical of their literary context. The work of André du Bouchet, Philippe Jaccottet and Bernard Noël exemplifies a trend in modern poetry, among a generation that has been publishing for the last fifty years, motivated above all by transitions. All poets of the impersonal subject, 6

Collot is cited, among others, by Denis Bertrand and Nathalie Beauvois in their discussion of this phenomenon in “Entre substance et figurativité: Le discours critique de la poésie”, Études Littéraires, 30, 3 (1998), 33-45 (p. 34).

14 Provisionality and the Poem

they seek encounters with the real, producing texts in which meaning is continually opened up and deferred. Images do not illuminate clear comparisons, but create movement through echo and suggestion. They link the space of the page and singular experiences of reality with change in perception and language. But they do this in distinctive ways, and thereby demonstrate a wide range of formal temporal structures and images of transition that are present in contemporary poetry in French. They also discuss the processes of writing and a variety of non-linguistic experiences, such as bodily sensation and the visual. The resulting texts, which often blur the boundary between criticism and poetry, enact transitions between modes of expression. In so doing, they delve into language and renew the potential significance of the words they employ. All three authors have earned at least a partial living from writing. Jaccottet has been a journalist and translator, and has undertaken editorial work. Du Bouchet published translations and texts about artists. Noël, among a range of projects, has written a number of commercial books on art. André du Bouchet lived from 1924-2001, Philippe Jaccottet was born in 1925 and Bernard Noël in 1930. Jaccottet grew up in Switzerland, but has lived in France since the 1950s. Du Bouchet’s family left France for the United States before World War II; he studied and taught in universities there before returning to Paris. They have all lived in the South of France, and northern Provence is the landscape of Jaccottet’s and du Bouchet’s texts. The autobiographical element of their work extends no further than the presence of this landscape. A striking similarity between the poems of Noël, du Bouchet and Jaccottet is the role of the speaking “je”, or poetic subject. The “je” is a constant reference throughout their texts, and yet it is impersonal. We learn nothing about its past experiences or characteristics that would help us to place it as we would a character in fiction, or even a self expressing emotions or thoughts in Romantic poetry. “Tu” figures are often invoked as companions or interlocutors, but these are similarly undefined. 7 7

The “je” in Jaccottet’s poems of mourning in Chants d’en bas and Leçons appears more individuated, but it is still primarily textual rather than expressive. They are reprinted in Poésie 1946-1967 (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); Leçons: pp. 7-33, Chants d’en bas: pp. 35-65.

Introduction 15

In du Bouchet’s poetry, the “je” walks in the elemental landscape, entering into the substance of the earth and air, and marking the text by its steps and breathing. The “je” in Jaccottet’s work notices moments of change in the natural world, and while it may provide a way for the poet to offer reflections on the relationship of the human figure to nature, it is by no means personalised. Identity is explored in Noël’s texts, but rather than elaborating a rounded persona, he focuses intensely on our experiences of the human body and its relation with the world around. Movement and change characterise the poetry of all three authors: movement in the natural world and through the text. Walking is a central image for du Bouchet, momentary hesitations and thresholds for Jaccottet and, for Noël, inexorable changes affecting identity. The poetic subject does not pre-exist the text as a fully formed entity, ready to observe and represent the world. Rather, it is the means by which the human encounter with its surroundings is enacted, and it comes into being as the poetry unfolds. Noël’s early texts include Extraits du corps, from 1958, where violent and disturbing images present the parts of the body as constantly on the move, and disrupt the boundaries between what is internal and external.8 His original exploration of time, death and personal identity is inseparable from his materialism, as the body and perception determine thought and writing, and contact between the body and the elemental world is paramount. À vif enfin la nuit, for example, presents a poetic subject reduced to the most fundamental experience of air, earth and darkness through the medium of the body (Poèmes 1, pp. 153-166). Features of Noël’s early work that have attracted the most interest are also those that set him apart from du Bouchet and Jaccottet: his focus on violence, sexuality and censorship. Alongside poetry, he has composed a number of texts on art, ranging from studies of well known painters such as David, Géricault, Magritte and Matisse, to many more contemporary artists. Extracts from some of his catalogue texts were collected in the award-winning Journal du regard.9 8

Extraits du corps, in Poèmes 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), pp. 29-73. See Magritte (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), Matisse (Paris: Hazan, 1983), David (Paris: Flammarion, 1989) and Géricault (Paris: Flammarion, 1991); Journal du regard (Paris: P.O.L., 1988). 9

16 Provisionality and the Poem

His more recent publications have tended towards an examination of the spiritual, while retaining the interrogation of vision and thought that has always been vital. 10 Unlike du Bouchet and Jaccottet, Noël has explored the genres of drama and the novel, which will not form the focus of this study. The novels and plays also testify to his preoccupation with identity and language. 11 His poetry of the 1970s and 1980s sets up distinctive times of expression and reading that cannot be achieved in prose. Collections such as La Chute des temps and L’Été langue morte tend to be structured in sequences, and consist of long, unpunctuated poems with short lines, which demand a rapid pace from the reader, and create a sense of acceleration and self-generating language. 12 The temporality of du Bouchet’s writing is very different. It also contains movement, but this is produced by intervals. They intrude as gaps between words, through punctuation marks such as dashes and ellipses that require the reader to pause, and, above all, in the importance accorded to the white area of the page around and between sections of text. Phrases are dispersed across the page and the margins of his poetry from the 1970s onwards are highly mobile. Enjambement, juxtaposition and uncertainty over the direction of reading all serve to disrupt interpretation. It is hard to isolate distinctive volumes in du Bouchet’s œuvre. His analysis of Pierre Reverdy’s poetry could equally be applied to his own; du Bouchet’s and Reverdy’s writing can be “ramenée à un poème unique | – jamais le même – interdit à la mémoire”. 13 It seems to belong to a single, inaccessible poem, which cannot be reduced to any individual example. Nevertheless, du Bouchet’s earlier work is more easily classified as either poetry or poetic prose than are the later texts. Dans la chaleur vacante, for instance, is his best known collection of poetry. Laisses, a volume of poetry, and 10

See, for example, Le Tu et le silence ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1998). His plays are La Reconstitution (Paris: P.O.L., 1988) and Onze voies de fait (Montde-Marsan: L’Atelier des brisants, 2002). He is in the process of writing a series of prose monologues for P.O.L., each focusing on a different pronoun. They include: Le Syndrome de Gramsci (1994), La Maladie de la chair (1995), La Langue d’Anna (1998), La Maladie du sens (2001) and La Face de silence (2002). 12 La Chute des temps, suivi de L’Été langue morte, La Moitié du geste, La Rumeur de l’air, Sur un pli du temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). 13 André du Bouchet, Matière de l’interlocuteur ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1992), p. 39. 11

Introduction 17

L’Incohérence, a collection of prose pieces, are considered companion volumes. Poetic prose tended to dominate his later publications, which ended with Tumulte in 2001.14 In common with Noël, he had a keen interest in visual art, although his writings on artists such as Tal Coat and Giacometti are more obviously poetic than are Noël’s catalogue texts. Du Bouchet has translated from English, German and Russian, which links his professional activities with those of Jaccottet, who translated from German, Italian, Spanish and Russian, and has written more than du Bouchet or Noël about other authors. In Après beaucoup d’années, Jaccottet expresses his wish to present the natural world as transparently as possible: Pourtant, que je ne l’oublie pas: ce n’est pas une voix, malgré les apparences; ce n’est pas une parole; ce n’est pas “de la poésie”… C’est de l’eau qui bouscule les pierres, et j’y aurai trempé mes mains. Il ne faut ni orner, ni troubler, ni freiner ce cours.15

The real is paramount, and must not be contained or embellished. After the publication of his early poems, which were rich in imagery, Jaccottet did not write until he encountered the Japanese haikus of Bashô. His subsequent collection Airs, which appeared in 1967, first demonstrated his aim of employing simple, pared-down language that would allow things to emerge in the texts rather than drawing attention to stylised imagery. 16 Simultaneously, his writing acknowledges that the world will always remain beyond the grasp of language. The ephemeral in Jaccottet’s work emerges through hesitant images that hover and are then left behind. This is the striking temporality of his verse and prose poetry. Fleeting instants of perception are not so much described as recreated in the light, gentle poetry that distinguishes Jaccottet from the “élan” of Noël and the rupturing intervals in du Bouchet’s texts.

14

Dans la chaleur vacante, suivi de Où le soleil (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). Dans la chaleur vacante has been translated by David Mus as Where Heat Looms (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1996). Laisses (Paris: Hachette, 1979); L’Incohérence (Paris: Hachette, 1979); Tumulte ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 2001). 15 Philippe Jaccottet, Après beaucoup d’années (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 88. 16 Airs, in Poésie, pp. 93-155.

18 Provisionality and the Poem

Jaccottet’s work is the most widely read of the three in France. His collections, which include À la lumière d’hiver and Pensées sous les nuages, were accompanied by reflections in prose in volumes such as Paysages avec figures absentes. The more recent works, Après beaucoup d’années and Et, néanmoins, combine prose and verse poems. 17 Contemporary Differences The writing of Jaccottet and du Bouchet contributes to a trend in contemporary poetry that is remarkable for its focus on landscape. Yves Bonnefoy is the best known of these poets in the Englishspeaking world; among others of the same generation is Jacques Dupin. Often classified with du Bouchet, Dupin also bases his poetry on the mountainous landscape of southern France. It is pervaded by images of disruption, but the violence that is more or less explicit in his work is distinct from the interrupting intervals so particular to du Bouchet.18 These poets do not see the natural world as offering the observer a source of images to aid self-expression. Rather, it is the object of poetic exploration. Texts recreate the experience of being in brute reality, while the real repeatedly intrudes to question language and reconstruct accepted perceptions. Images emerge, change and disappear. Richard Stamelman writes of this kind of poetry that it is “capable of being written and unwritten”. 19 An extract from a prose text by du Bouchet reveals the rigour with which he undertakes this process:

17

À la lumière d’hiver, suivi de Pensées sous les nuages (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Paysages avec figures absentes, rev. edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); Et, néanmoins (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). Derek Mahon has translated and introduced Jaccottet’s poetry for Anglophone readers in Words in the Air: A Selection of Poems by Philippe Jaccottet (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1998). 18 Du Bouchet, Dupin and Bonnefoy were among the founding editors of the review L’Éphémère, which appeared from 1967 to 1972. It was intended to provide a forum for the mutual questioning of its editors’ work, and was also notable for publishing poetry in translation and the work of visual artists. Jaccottet was an occasional contributor. 19 Richard Stamelman, Lost Beyond Telling: Respresentations of Death and Absence in modern French Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 161.

Introduction 19 dans l’agrégat ruiné des signes, le monde net aura – et pour le clarifier aujourd’hui, comme aujourd’hui l’emporte, fait sous les yeux, et jusqu’au centre sans nom, retour. (Matière, p. 19)

Abstract signs are given concrete form, “l’agrégat ruiné des signes”, and reality, “le monde net”, emerges at the end of a complex linguistic process in which clauses qualify and subtract from one another. If we isolate the main clause, we see that the action is a simple one: “le monde net aura […] fait […] retour”. The process is hardly obscure; it takes place “sous les yeux”. Yet the world comes back as the result of sustained abstraction. Examples such as these, which are a particular feature of du Bouchet’s writing, take performativity beyond the restricted sense of utterances that carry out actions in certain situations.20 The effect is produced through syntax as it is evoked. Here, the principal statement is interrupted as it unfolds, because perception and language operate in the present instant; emergence is both described and enacted. Reality appears through words, but it seems that this can only occur once language has first been dismantled. Despite a shared insistence on the reworking of language through an encounter with reality, poets of this generation cannot be classified as a group. They did not operate together in a movement, and they have important differences in approach. The poetry of du Bouchet and Jaccottet, for instance, is not overtly philosophical in its focus on the real. This sets them apart from Bonnefoy, whose writing has been described as “une tentative quasi philosophique de définition du réel”. 21 It is a quality that links Bonnefoy to writers such as Michel Deguy, who “serait philosophe ‘avant’ d’être poète”. 22 Noël’s writing resists all definition within modern poetic trends. The landscape emerges in fragmented images of the elements, and human experience of presence in reality is evoked above all through bodily sensation. But his poetry is not anchored in the natural world. Images follow fluid association, and reflections on time and 20

J. L. Austin categorises these as verdictives (for example, “I convict”), exercitives (“I appoint”), commissives (“I promise”), behabitives (“I apologise”) and expositives (“I deny”). How to do things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 132146. 21 John E. Jackson, “Yves Bonnefoy”, in Dictionnaire de poésie de Baudelaire à nos jours, ed. by Michel Jarrety (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), p. 74. 22 J.-M. Gleize, “Michel Deguy”, in Jarrety, p. 188.

20 Provisionality and the Poem

identity are motivated more by the internal resources of language than by philosophical considerations. He occupies a unique position in the contemporary poetic climate in France, and can only be situated as distinct from the major poetic movements of the post-war period. For instance, he frequently structures his poetry according to metrical constraints. He tends to favour the eleven-syllable line, which suggests and simultaneously undermines the traditional alexandrine. But he insists that such rules are not language games, as they would be for members of the OuLiPo group, who adopt constraints in their reworking of texts or in their own writing, with the stated aim of releasing the potential of literature (the name stands for “ouvroir de littérature potentielle”). For Noël, establishing a structure means that the words can emerge freely, even precipitously, an approach that is far from the mathematical experiments of Jacques Roubaud and Raymond Queneau, the best known poets of OuLiPo. Du Bouchet and Jaccottet can also be considered in the light of their differences from this and other recent developments in poetic writing. Among the poets of their generation and the next are the proponents of sound poetry. Its novel use of the voice sets this strand of poetic creativity apart from poetry written to be read, in which the space of the page often plays a central role. Sound poetry can take a variety of forms, from Bernard Heidsieck’s use of recording technology to superimpose sounds and voices, to Christian Prigent’s unique ability to incorporate vocal utterances – repeated phonemes or non-verbal sounds – into his spoken work. Performance poetry is an increasingly popular art form in France. Sound poets, in their use of the performer’s voice and body on stage to disrupt the audience’s expectations of language, are influenced by Artaud and the dadaists. They believed that violence must be done to poetry, performance, and the comfortable assumptions of bourgeois society. Art reacted directly to the context of its creation. Twentieth-century literature has engaged with its historical circumstances in a variety of ways. Committed poetry is a distinct episode between surrealism and various post-war movements. In recent years, numerous writers have attempted to explore the difficulties, or impossibility, of representation since the Holocaust. But poetry whose reference is the natural world appears far removed from such engagement. Why does it not testify to the traumas of our history? Why does it adopt an impersonal subject alien

Introduction 21

to the increasingly sophisticated investigation of self and identity undertaken by autobiographers and theorists of cultural identity? Du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noël make only occasional mention of major collective experiences such as the Second World War. In a very early publication of 1946, Requiem, Jaccottet expresses his horror at the deaths of soldiers in the war, and du Bouchet’s carnets, published many years after the notebooks were in use, contain references to the devastated landscape of France after the war.23 Du Bouchet’s only publication to discuss the contemporary political climate is his piece in the issue of L’Éphémère that followed the events of May 68: “Sous les pavés, la plage”. Jaccottet later commented on this issue of the journal, saying that he found the haiku poems of Bashô reproduced in it more truthful than any of those contributions that dealt with politics.24 Noël has authored a number of prose texts on power and censorship, among them Le Sens, la sensure and Le Château de Cène, and his interest in the events of his time is clear from texts such as URSS, aller-retour. He has described being obsessed with the Algerian War between 1956 and 1958.25 But all direct references to historical events are absent from their poetry. The anti-biography that opens the bibliography in one of Bernard Noël’s publications is written in the third person. He insists that “les événements qui l’ont marqué sont ceux qui ont marqué sa génération” and that “la biographie s’arrête aux actes publics qui sont les publications” (Chute, p. 265). We learn nothing about Noël from this, and the “je” that is present throughout his poetry cannot be interpreted autobiographically. His reticence is shared by du Bouchet and Jaccottet. Nevertheless, they do not ignore circumstances of overwhelming importance to their peers and readers. Human concerns are 23 See Jaccottet, Requiem suivi de Remarques ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1991), and du Bouchet, Carnets 1952-1956 ([Paris]: Plon, 1990). 24 L’Éphémère, 6, 1968. Jaccottet’s comments were made to Jacques Laurens in an interview for a documentary: Les Hommes-Livres: Philippe Jaccottet. Dir. François Barat. Co-production INA-Centre Georges Pompidou, in association with France 3. 1992. 25 Le Sens, la sensure (Le Rœulx: Talus d’Approche, 1985); Le Château de Cène (Paris: Pauvert, 1971); URSS, aller-retour (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). He discusses the Algerian War in an interview with Jacques Ancet, published in Ancet’s Bernard Noël ou l’éclaircie (?: Opales, 2002), p. 23.

22 Provisionality and the Poem

not absent from their work. Our perceptions, engagement with our surroundings, and changing identity are explored in universal terms, and not through writing based on individual or collective experiences. Modern Preoccupations Although the poets’ approach appears unrelated to much recent French prose writing, it has a more complex relationship with the major poetic movement of the century: surrealism. The real was not dismissed by the surrealists. Ferdinand Alquié explains that the force of the imaginative derives from its tendency to become actualised.26 But emergent images motivated by unconscious desires have a radically different basis from poetry that is grounded in the real and constantly affirms reality as check and reference. Paring down a visual image to its simplest form, which is the aim of Jaccottet, and du Bouchet’s precise interrogation of words and perceptions, are far removed from the idealisation of an image “avec le degré d’arbitraire le plus élevé”.27 This poetry is affected by surrealism through its very rejection of the movement’s principles. Noël has moved away from surrealism’s influence to establish his highly original formal and stylistic approach, but this is the result of an early engagement with it. He continues to create surprising effects by juxtaposing unexpected images, and his preoccupation with the body and with the fragmentation that besets our sense of identity is ongoing. Perhaps the greatest influence on Noël’s writing is the work of Georges Bataille, whose poetry he has edited. Noël is particularly fascinated by the notion of expenditure, and much of his work can be seen to explore and enact the “informe”; both concepts are central to Bataille’s writings. 28 It might at first appear that du Bouchet fits more squarely into the French poetic tradition, through the importance, since Mallarmé, of the visual aspect of the text. “Un coup de dés” was clearly decisive in the subsequent development of spatialised poetry, but du Bouchet 26

F. Alquié, La Philosophie du surréalisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1955), p. 170. André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1995 [1924]), p. 50. 28 He prepared the critical edition of Bataille’s L’Archangélique et autres poèmes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1967) and prefaced the Dictionnaire critique (Orléans: L’Ecarlate, 1993). Noël’s play Onze voies de fait was based on a short text by Bataille. See L’Informe: Mode d’emploi, by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1996). 27

Introduction 23

cannot be described as a direct successor.29 Once again, his attitude to the real is the decisive difference. Jaccottet recalls: avoir entendu un jour André du Bouchet opposer avec véhémence à la proposition de Mallarmé selon laquelle le monde serait fait pour aboutir à un livre, le vœu contraire, que tout livre finît par renvoyer au monde.30

Early in the Twentieth Century, Futurism fundamentally altered the course of typography in poetry, and exploited the space of the page to divide and juxtapose words, unsettling meanings and creating new rhythms. Futurist texts convey speed and urban excitement as well as linguistic fragmentation. Du Bouchet’s poetry, on the other hand, depends on measure and a considered depth of response to language. The only vital influence on his work is that of Pierre Reverdy. 31 Reverdy understood the image not as arbitrary, but as the bringing together of two distant elements in a necessary relation. Images are then integral to the poetic world evoked rather than a decorative or surprising addition to it, and that is their appeal for du Bouchet. His first major essay was about Reverdy, and his early poems reveal the influence of Reverdy’s disposition of texts on the page and his evocations of spatial relationships.32 Jaccottet has a diverse range of interests. His first mentor was the Swiss landscape poet Gustave Roud, who remained a constant presence. Their lengthy correspondence has recently been published. 33 Although not a literary critic, Jaccottet wrote a large number of articles on more or less well known writers for newspapers and literary journals. Many of these are collected in Une transaction secrète. His work as a translator has brought him into intimate contact with 29

“Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard”, in Œuvres complètes, I, ed. by Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 363-386. 30 Philippe Jaccottet, Une transaction secrète (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p. 267. 31 See Michaël Bishop’s study, Les Altérités d’André du Bouchet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003). Bishop examines the wide range of du Bouchet’s interests, and his generous responses to the work of others. 32 See Pierre Reverdy, Nord-Sud, Self Defence et autres écrits sur l’art et la poésie (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), p. 73. Du Bouchet’s Envergure de Reverdy, of 1951, is reprinted in Matière de l’interlocuteur, pp. 37-45, along with Interstice élargi jusqu’au dehors toujours l’interstice, pp. 14-36, also on Reverdy. 33 Philippe Jaccottet and Gustave Roud, Correspondance 1942-1976, ed. by JoséFlore Tappy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002).

24 Provisionality and the Poem

texts in German, the best known of these being Musil’s L’Homme sans qualités. He also published a guide to the poetry of Rilke. From Italian, he has translated principally Ungaretti’s poetry. 34 It is perhaps with Hölderlin that Jaccottet senses the greatest affinity. He edited the Pléiade edition of Hölderlin’s works, and devoted several reflective prose pieces to him in Paysages avec figures absentes.35 The sense of place that is so important to Hölderlin is also evident in Jaccottet’s poetry, which reveals the quest for a sacred “centre” that calls to mind Hölderlin’s lament for the gods that have abandoned the earth, although Jaccottet always stops short of religious terminology. Of the German Romantic poets, Hölderlin is the most important reference for contemporary French poets. Writers are fascinated by his innovative translations of Greek poetry, which render the German language strange. It is through his essays on Hölderlin that Heidegger became known to French poets. Heidegger’s argument that poetry is the language best able to express Being has influenced the writing and reading of a generation of poets’ work. The differences between Jaccottet, du Bouchet and Noël emerge from their similarities. They all make Being the focus of their poetry, exploring the relationship of the human subject to its surroundings. But the relationship is different in each case, and it operates in varying temporal frameworks. Forging distinct paths within and beyond modern poetic developments, they present us with poetic worlds that do not consist solely of visual imagery, of privileged instants or spatialised texts. Rather, their writing links space and time, creating provisional images and worlds in transition. Through the work of these writers, the present study suggests that transitions are vital to recent poetic writing in French. Scope and Structure The first chapter elaborates the temporal models that can be discerned in the work of each poet. Although the texts are intended to be read silently, they share features with spoken and oral poetry, including rhythm, echo and repetition. Within the context of contem34

Robert Musil, L’Homme sans qualités, trans. by Philippe Jaccottet, 2 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1995); Philippe Jaccottet, Rilke par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1970); Giuseppe Ungaretti, Vie d’un homme, trans. by Philippe Jaccottet et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 35 Friedrich Hölderlin, Œuvres, ed. by Philippe Jaccottet (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).

Introduction 25

porary poetic creativity, their work represents written poetry that enacts movement and change in three distinctive ways: the poetry of du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noël can be characterised broadly as based on the interval, the hesitant instant and the emergent impulse respectively. The following section considers the imagery that creates their poetic worlds through an examination of the element of air. Its literal and metaphorical manifestations connect the oral aspect of poetic creativity, breathing, to its grounding in the natural world. Air is the substance that fills visible volume in the material world. It is also movement, creating wind, flight and human speech. Air is spatial and temporal, physical and abstract. It can incite images of the cold and stormy weather, but it can also represent musical form. The clearest link between the poetry of these three writers is their use of the word “air” in titles of their collections: Du Bouchet published Air, Jaccottet Airs, and Noël texts entitled La Rumeur de l’air, Les États de l’air and L’air est les yeux.36 After presenting their poetic worlds through a focus on the image of air, I examine three long extracts of poetry in detail, with the primary aim of allowing the texts to speak for themselves. They are not widely available in translation, so English translations of the extracts have been included. The difficulties presented by the task of translating also highlight aspects of the poets’ work that contribute to their provisional nature, notably terms that carry multiple meanings and radiate out to other poems. The choice of poems is not determined solely by their titles. The texts chosen from du Bouchet’s early work demonstrate certain tendencies that persist throughout all his poetry. The poems by Jaccottet that are translated exemplify the performativity of his work. The long text by Noël takes only one of the various forms he adopts; it typifies the style which is the focus of this study. Air reveals how movement and transitions are enacted as well as represented in the poetry. Another kind of transition is explored in the last three chapters. They discuss how different kinds of engagement with something other than poetry allow the writers to identify what they believe is involved in poetic creativity. 36

Du Bouchet, Air suivi de Défets (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1986); Noël, “Les États de l’air”, in Poèmes 1, pp. 299-304; L’Air est les yeux (Trans-en-Provence: Unes, 1982).

26 Provisionality and the Poem

Noël and du Bouchet engage with the work of visual artists in their collaborations on livres d’artistes. The extent to which subtle connections and transitions operate between a verbal and a visual medium is extraordinary. But rather than confidently representing the visual, their work acknowledges the impossibility of such an endeavour, and creates verbal realities that complement the visual images. They explore the interaction between surface, layers, depth and volume that also characterises their poetry. For Noël, the work of art can demonstrate the mobile transitions between internal and external space that govern how we see and think. Du Bouchet focuses on the momentary revelation of depth in the apparently two-dimensional canvas or page. Du Bouchet and Jaccottet translate from one language to another and write about the practice of translating. The particular case considered here is their work on texts by Hölderlin. In their different ways, both Jaccottet and du Bouchet question the possibility of transparent translation. They emphasise the provisional nature of any utterance, including those in one’s native language. The act of translating leads them to consider the poet’s relationship with his or her language of composition. Du Bouchet considers translation as an example of the disruption of language by the poet with the intention of making language new. He shows how poetry can reveal depth between and within languages, as was represented by the visual depth of the page. Jaccottet insists on uncertainty and hesitation in the transition between languages, and this movement is a metaphor for the relationship of words to things. Both Jaccottet and Noël, meanwhile, engage with what is utterly other to language: silence. In their theoretical explorations of what poetic writing is able to express, they recognise that language has limits, and choose precisely to incorporate those limits into their own work. Indeed, it is the interaction of language and silence that motivates creativity. That is why hesitancy is so important to Jaccottet’s poetic imagery. Noël’s creation of poetry with “élan”, which pushes language to its limits, enacts his understanding of our existence as an energetic movement from our internal space into the world around. The three writers presented here are typical of recent French poets in that they examine the processes of writing alongside, and sometimes within, poetic texts. Neither clear generic boundaries nor

Introduction 27

distinct areas of interest can be located in their œuvres. They question what language can say, but do not conclude that words are infinitely self-referential, or incapable of expressing what is other to language. Transitions operate within their texts and between texts and media, as it is precisely the elusive and evocative nature of poetic language that enables the poets to explore the non-linguistic. The language of their texts is provisional because it is in constant motion, continuously made different by its own energy, disruptiveness and hesitancy. This study suggests how, in contemporary French poetry, the provisionality of language can bring poetic reality into being.

je ne logerai pas dans l’écho (Du Bouchet, Tumulte)

CHAPTER 1 POETRY IN TIME Structure Du Bouchet’s texts depend on space. In prose poems where lines are dispersed across the page, the positioning prevents any single linear reading, and therefore contributes directly to the production of multiple interpretations. In du Bouchet’s early collections, the texts are more clearly presented as poems, yet still the white area of the page makes itself known. The short poems of Dans la chaleur vacante are placed alone on the page, which is dominated by blank space; texts in Où le soleil often consist of very few lines, positioned at the top and the bottom of the page, with a gaping white area between. Of the later prose poems, Aujourd’hui c’est has a typical spatialised layout.37 It is twenty-four pages long and published in an attractive Fata Morgana edition. Sections of text are clearly separated by large stretches of blank space, and gaps are introduced within each block of writing. A new sentence often appears to take up where another left off, but without links being made clear. For instance, many pronouns are used, which could each correspond to a number of earlier nouns. Examples such as the following are frequent: c’est la pierre. laissant la nuit venir, je vois plus loin que la nuit, aussitôt c’est la pierre.

l’une contre l’autre, comme serrées dans l’air non tiré de la montagne encore. (Aujourd’hui, p. 23)

37

Aujourd’hui c’est (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994). This volume will be the principal source for examples of du Bouchet’s work in this chapter. The analysis will also focus specifically on Noël’s La Chute des temps and Sur un pli du temps (Chute, pp. 223-262) and texts from Jaccottet’s Et, néanmoins.

30 Provisionality and the Poem

We can suppose, but not conclude, that “l’une” and “l’autre” refer to “la pierre” and “la nuit”. This potential link between the two short paragraphs sets up complex spatial and temporal interaction. First, the night is seen to approach a subject who remains unnamed. By refusing to situate the image in a specific time or place, du Bouchet emphasises the timelessness of the elemental world, represented here by stone and air. Immediately, the subject sees beyond night to stone. Time does not operate in linear fashion, but through anticipation, “laissant […] venir”, “non […] encore”, and immediacy, “aussitôt”. The night is then tightly bound to the stone. But this situation is virtual. They are bound in air that has not yet been drawn from the mountain. Furthermore, they are not actually bound together, but “as if” that were the case. There is no verb to specify the connection between the night and the stone: “l’une | contre l’autre”, only a comparison, “comme serrées”, which implies that their spatial relationship is indescribable. The form of the poem must resist any clear presentation of time and space in order to be true to this experience. Du Bouchet is not, of course, the only contemporary poet to use the space of the page. Since Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de dés”, poets have dispersed lines and fragments of text over the double-page spread, so that each time the reader turns a page, s/he perceives the text as a visual image framed by the edges of the book before beginning to read the words. Among du Bouchet’s contemporaries, Jacques Dupin also experiments with layout and fragmentation. The following extract from a poem entitled “Nuit de couleur” in Le Grésil, for instance, distributes fragments of text over the page, while referring obliquely to Mallarmé’s throw of the dice: ultime lancer déchirure du roc d’où l’espace va jaillir l’espace, et glisser virer sur l’aile découpé du faucon.38

Dupin interrupts phrases as du Bouchet does. Here, form and content merge as the term “déchirure” follows a gap and is linked, 38

Jacques Dupin, Le Grésil (Paris: P.O.L., 1996), p. 55.

Poetry in Time 31

with enjambement, to the naming of rock, a solid substance. Similarly, “l’espace” is the first word to occur after a space of several lines, and it is followed by another interval. “Et glisser” operates as a transition, coming from blank space and moving into it. Afterwards, a change in direction takes place, “virer”, but the movement has not led to smooth flight because the falcon’s wings are clipped. In an article comparing Dupin’s writing with du Bouchet’s, Glenn W. Fetzer contrasts the relationship each has to space. According to Fetzer, space in du Bouchet’s texts is expanding and is entered into with a languid rhythm, while Dupin engages with it in an altogether more impassioned and disruptive way. 39 Seamless movement will never be allowed to occur in his work. This characterisation of their texts is useful because it offers a detailed analysis of the differences between two poets often considered to be close to one another, on the basis of a notion that unites them: the importance of space and its interruption. Some features of the structure du Bouchet has gradually developed render his poetic prose recognisably his own. These include his particular use of enjambement, in which a line is divided after the first one or two words, and his placing on any single page of three or four utterances, each consisting of between one and four lines only. The unique structure of du Bouchet’s texts is determined above all by the interval. It will be an important concept in this discussion of du Bouchet’s work, because it appears figuratively as well as literally in all his texts. Its formal role in the structure of the poetry is to separate and divide sections of text, phrases and words. A complex range of intervals is produced by the use of dashes and punctuation, as well as the introduction of blanks of varying size. The resulting gaps and interruptions grant the text rhythm. This often bears little resemblance to the use of strict metre in French verse, but it does complement the immediate visual impression offered by the doublepage spread. The interval is the moment and the place where time and space are linked in du Bouchet’s texts. Interruption and moving forward are central to the writing and reading of his work. Nowhere does du Bouchet clearly theorise his ideas on the importance of the interval or, indeed, on any other aspect of his 39

“Jacques Dupin, André du Bouchet and the Space of Poetry”, Language Quarterly, 29, 1-2 (1991), 115-128 (pp. 125-126).

32 Provisionality and the Poem

writing practice, but statements in some of his prose works elucidate its potential. For instance, a piece from Matière de l’interlocuteur emphasises the interval in the form and content of its title: “Interstice élargi jusqu’au | dehors | toujours l’interstice” (pp. 14-36). It is implied that interstices can approach the real by allowing access beyond the immediate visible surface of things. The insistent presence of interstices in the title, both in the phrase “toujours l’interstice” and in its division into three short lines, reminds us that an interval is necessarily only brief and must be repeated in order to take effect. In this piece, du Bouchet proposes that a text structured by gaps matches the process of reading: lecteur intermittent. lecteur intermittent. (p. 25)

œuvre attenante au

By repeating the phrase “lecteur intermittent” and introducing gaps into its layout, he demonstrates the way in which the reader moves through a text, encountering words and then leaving them behind in order to move on. This model is unlike a poem in which rules of versification are obeyed, with rhythm and rhyme schemes to connect lines into a coherent whole. It implies rather a rhythm of repeated engagement and forgetting; indeed, earlier in the text he writes: “un lecteur – oubli vivant” (p. 19). Forgetting is a motivating principle of du Bouchet’s poetry, and the reader keeps forgetfulness alive when confronted with such texts. Noël’s poetry is also marked by its refusal of linear progression, but the structures he employs are very different from those favoured by du Bouchet. La Chute des temps, for example, is divided mathematically into sections: the three “chants” and two intercalated “contre-chants” consist of the following numbers of lines: 333, 111, 223, 111 and 333, which together make 1111 lines. His choice of the term corresponds to the use of “chants” to divide up long texts, such as epic verse. It continues to be employed in modern poetry, by Valéry in La Jeune Parque, for example.40 Song suggests lyricism, and Noël both evokes this and counters it with the “contre-chants”, which briskly cut in to disturb any lyrical tone that might be discerned in the “chants”. 40

Paul Valéry, La Jeune Parque, in Œuvres, 2 vols, ed. by Jean Hytier, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), pp. 96-110.

Poetry in Time 33

The length of the poems in La Chute des temps (Chute, pp. 13-71), as in L’Été langue morte (Chute, pp. 73-105) and Sur un pli du temps (Chute, pp. 223-262), combined with the brevity of each line, creates a sense of acceleration and forward movement, often described by Noël as “élan”. This might appear to indicate linearity, but is, rather, a rejection both of the metrical constraints that can lend coherence and stasis to a poem, and of the horizontal progression of prose that is not divided into lines. The titles of the collections La Chute des temps and Sur un pli du temps support Noël’s more theoretical pronouncements on the need to eradicate the assumed model of the logical linear progression of time. He is emphatic that modern poetry is not oral and that its development on the space of the page allows it to escape the process of unfolding over time: l’écriture, tout au long de son histoire, a noté de l’oralité, ce qui l’a vouée au linéaire, à la logique du fil temporel. La poésie, en se révoltant contre la ligne, se met une nouvelle fois debout sur la page et recrée une origine.41

Poetry contains verticality through its division into lines, which removes it from the horizontal continuity of prose. It creates its own origin, because it no longer has its source in the voice. Noël sets the writing hand in direct opposition to the mouth that speaks: La main qui écrit a cessé de suivre le rythme de la bouche. La main s’est mise à écrire dans l’élan de la montée obscure des mots. La main d’aujourd’hui se révolte contre la bouche. (p. 144)

For Noël, poetic creation is not the preparation of a text to be read aloud, nor is it the recording of a performance. It has been freed from the constraints imposed on poetry in an oral tradition. While we might assume that rhyme schemes and rhythm are artificial structures into which some poets fit their work, alien to the way in which spoken language operates, in fact they represent the means by which stories and ideas became memorable, and could be passed on without being written down. In his study Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong explains:

41

Bernard Noël, L’Espace du poème: Entretiens avec Dominique Sampiero (Paris: P.O.L., 1998), p. 144.

34 Provisionality and the Poem In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence. Your thought must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions, in standard thematic settings (the assembly, the meal, the duel, the hero’s ‘helper’, and so on) in proverbs which are constantly heard by everyone so that they come to mind readily and which themselves are patterned for retention and ready recall, or in other mnemonic form. Serious thought is intertwined with memory systems.42

According to Ong, rhythmic and thematic patterns were the norm for all communication in oral cultures, because any thought or pronouncement that could not be remembered and passed on would be lost as soon as it was spoken. Noël’s work is bound up with modern written culture in that it has its origin, he claims, in the autonomous movement of language, and takes the form of the written word, through the medium of the hand. It does not need structures that would give it memorable form, and yet some of the poetic devices named by Ong, such as “repetitions or antitheses” or “alliterations and assonances”, can de discerned in Noël’s poetry, just as they can in the work of other poets of the written word, among them du Bouchet and Jaccottet. It is clear that their poetry cannot be set in straightforward contrast to verse originating in an oral tradition, and that the sound of the words and phrases still has an important role to play. Nevertheless, modern written poetry is very distinct from developments in sound poetry that are contemporary with it. For poets such as Bernard Heidsieck, born in 1928, the essence of communication is through instantaneous, physical connection between performer and audience, much as it was for Artaud.43 Heidsieck’s concept of “poésie action” includes movement and use of the voice on 42

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 34. According to Milman Parry, Homer’s poetry was not a verse rendering of prose speech. Instead, the performer would call on a stock of archetypal phrases, easily memorised because of their metrical structure, which were fitted into metrical units of the poem. See The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. by A. Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 270. 43 In Le Théâtre et son double, Artaud insisted on the importance of breath in the production of sounds, believing that it enabled direct communication between the body of the actor and those of the spectators. Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre et son double (Paris: Gallimard, 1938).

Poetry in Time 35

stage, and was also intended to stand in opposition to the poem on the page. He accused written poetry of passivity and obsession with images, something he claimed was a result of the huge influence of surrealism. He saw the sound poem as made up of events that form layers and appeal to the ear and the mind’s eye simultaneously. The voice is not the only sound exploited by such poets, as modern recording techniques have made possible the inclusion of mechanical noises in a performance. The tape-recorder is also used to superimpose multiple voices and to structure pieces through montage. A hallmark of Heidsieck’s work is the simultaneous recording of two texts that might interact with, interrupt or undermine one another. In the poem entitled “Bilan; ou, Mâcher ses mots”, for instance, the knowledgeable voice taking the listener through an informative explanation of the stages of digestion is disrupted by the intrusion of another speaker stringing together a series of everyday expressions: Au cours de ce séjour dans l’estomac, qui est une sorte de sac musculeux, cet agglomérat d’aliments est stérilisé par l’acide chlorydrique que secrète sa paroi et il s’y mélange à un mucus pour former une sorte de pâte: le chyme.

“C’EST SUR” “sans doute…” ABSOLUMENT “sans doute…” ALORS?44

The explanatory text takes the form of disembodied content, whereas the colloquial phrases have no content. Despite the essentially oral nature of the poem, it has divorced form from content, so does not correspond to an oral poem that aims at communicating with its audience. Meanwhile, although the importance of the voice links Heidsieck to other sound poets and distances him from those who write to be read, his poems also demonstrate a structural effect that can be visual: simultaneity. A transcription such as the one cited above shows how a poem has been compiled, but the confusion it elicits is only achieved when the two discourses are aurally indistinguishable, rather than conveniently set out side by side on the page. Nevertheless, the refusal of the piece to narrate in logical, linear fashion means that it operates in a similar way to a written text where no order of reading can be established. 44

“Bilan; ou, Mâcher ses mots”, CD accompanying J.-P. Bobillot, Bernard Heidsieck: Poésie action (Paris: Place, 1996).

36 Provisionality and the Poem

The temporality of Jaccottet’s poetry is distinct from the interval that structures du Bouchet’s texts and Noël’s “élan”, as well as from the oral poetic tradition and contemporary sound poetry. It is characterised above all by a concentration on the present instant, which hovers briefly before moving on. This persists through the range of forms his poems have taken. The early texts, such as those collected in L’Effraie and L’Ignorant, are relatively conventional in structure, either composed in free verse, or according to metrical and rhyme schemes.45 After a long period of being unable to write, he published Airs, which will be discussed in chapter 2. The poems of Airs are often compared to the haiku form, owing to their extreme brevity and evocation of a moment in time and space. He has also published volumes that combine verse and poetic prose. Denise Rochat suggests that the alternation in genre between pared-down poetry and meditative prose, which, she notes, is marked in Cahier de verdure by the use of italics and roman typeface, introduces rhythm to his œuvre as a whole. 46 The more recent volumes Après beaucoup d’années and Et, néanmoins pursue this combination of poetry and prose. For example, the section entitled “Violettes” of Et, néanmoins takes the form of five short variations on a theme (pp. 17-23). Each of these suggests a way of evoking a clump of violets and attempts to make them present. The following poem is typical of the short texts in these two volumes in that it combines a fragment, a line that might be a line of verse, and a prose element: Violettes Flèches à la tendre pointe, incapables de poison. (Effacer toutes les erreurs, tous les détours, toutes les espèces de destructions; pour ne garder que ces légères, ces fragiles flèches-là, décochées d’un coin d’ombre en fin d’hiver.) (Et, néanmoins, p. 22)

First the flowers are named, then they are evoked metonymically, through the shape of their leaves. Their interest for the poet stems from the disjuncture between the sharpness of the leaves and 45

L’Effraie (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); L’Ignorant (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). Philippe Jaccottet, Cahier de verdure (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). Denise Rochat, “Cahier de verdure ou ‘les méandres de la rêverie’: Remarque sur les proses de Philippe Jaccottet”, Studi Francesi, 118 (1996), 29-37 (p. 36). 46

Poetry in Time 37

their harmlessness. The final section, by far the longest, paradoxically provides the rationale for his choice of brevity to evoke the flowers. The temptations of a style that must be abandoned are named: “toutes les erreurs, tous les détours, toutes les espèces de destructions”, and the pointed fragility of the violets is repeated. In this way, Jaccottet is able to emphasise what is central to his poem: the glimpse of the plant’s leaves in a shady corner at the end of the winter. The precise time of their appearance, among the first flowers of the rebirth in spring, becomes the only moment important to the text. The brief poem is an important feature of contemporary poetry, even when poets have abandoned the longstanding forms of the epigram or aphorism. For instance, the Quebec poet André Roy, born in 1944, is known for composing poems of around four to twelve lines. The concentration of the form ensures that every part is indispensable; Alain Frontier describes the poems as creating a sense that language is coming into being. 47 Jaccottet’s texts are not always compact; indeed, the fleeting nature of the moments evoked tend to grant them a lightness that dense poems would not have. He employs the brief poem in order to suggest an instant of vision and the simultaneous birth of the words to accompany it. The poetry of du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noël is written to be read rather than heard. It does not require the conventions of oral poetry because it need not be memorable to be recorded; indeed, its emphasis on movement often means that it incites forgetting. Nor does it involve the essential element of contemporary sound poetry, performance. But it does not abandon all aspects of verse and become purely visual. Its structures are more than spatial; they create new kinds of rhythms. The remainder of this chapter will discuss the range of devices that contribute to the original rhythms of this poetry. Punctuation and Enjambement Not always of primary interest to readers, punctuation nevertheless has an important role to play in contemporary poetry, including in those cases where it is absent. As in prose writing, the function of full stops, commas, colons and semi-colons has generally been to clarify meaning. In much verse poetry, these marks occur at the ends 47

Alain Frontier, La Poésie (Paris: Belin, 1992), p. 235.

38 Provisionality and the Poem

of lines or at caesuras.48 They are seen as indicators of where to pause when reading, whether aloud or silently, and they confirm the beginning, ending or elaboration of ideas. In modern poetry, however, the concern is rarely to prevent ambiguity, and the purpose of form is to interact with content, not to explicate it. Punctuation marks, then, must either be removed or employed in a novel way. The most famous excision of punctuation in the Twentieth Century was Apollinaire’s decision to publish Alcools without any of its original punctuation. 49 Initial capital letters were also put into lower case, so the sentence was effectively no longer an element of his poetry. Noël also chooses to compose his long verse poems entirely without punctuation and in lower case letters.50 This has two important effects. First, meanings multiply because it is impossible to designate a phrase as belonging to one unit of sense rather than another. Secondly, phrases that would seem to require reading in a single breath are often carried over line breaks, thus maintaining two potential rhythms throughout. For example, in the following extract from La Chute des temps, divisions between ideas do not correspond to line endings: qui donc voudrait sentir sur la peau de ses yeux autre chose que le vide du monde l’aile a le même besoin d’abîme et nous passons dans l’air oubliant que la vérité se tue elle-même. (Chute, p. 22)

We might expect divisions to occur after “d’abîme” in the fifth line and “l’air” in the sixth. The positioning Noël has chosen creates a

48

The exclamation mark, conspicuous by its absence in most modern poetry, was frequently placed at the end of an alexandrine in order to emphasise the utterance in its formal completeness. 49 Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools, in Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Marcel Adéma and Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), pp. 37-154. 50 One of the ways in which the influence of Bataille on Noël’s writing can be discerned is through Bataille’s little known poetry. He also abandons all capitalisation other than for the first letter of a poem, and writes entirely without punctuation. Visually, his texts in collections such as L’Archangélique resemble Noël’s brief poems that appear almost square on the page.

Poetry in Time 39

limping rhythm reinforced by the rhyming of “dans” and “oubliant”, echoed also in “passons”. The brevity of the line “l’air oubliant” could suggest that it marks the end of an idea. Forgetfulness could qualify either “nous” or “l’air”; in both cases, it would be left hanging in the air. But the following line opens with “que”, which introduces the “vérité” that we tend to forget. Ironically, this is that the truth is self-destructive, which brings us back to the “vide” and “abîme”. The reading of Noël’s long poems involves a constant reassessment of meaning, as potential elements of an idea must be retained in case they will be resolved later on, and then left behind so that new images can progress. Noël’s absent punctuation interacts with the verticality of the poem and enjambement, as it contradicts the breaks suggested by its division into lines. The version printed on the right suggests what the punctuation in this extract from La Chute des temps might look like if it were introduced: mais quoi le corps n’a pas lieu tout le temps et l’émotion est chose muette comme l’est toute chose le je appelle pour être tutoyé dans l’innombrable nous prendrons le large les syllabes feront voile l’avenir n’est pas un jour plus un jour il est maintenant (Chute, p. 25)

Mais quoi? Le corps n’a pas lieu tout le temps et l’émotion est chose muette, comme l’est toute chose. Le je appelle pour être tutoyé dans l’innombrable; nous prendrons le large; les syllables feront voile; l’avenir n’est pas un jour plus un [jour: il est maintenant.

Of course, this is not an exercise in reinstating the punctuation that Noël might have imagined, then decided not to include. In particular, there is no reason to suggest that the semi-colons should not be replaced by full stops or commas. It does emphasise, however, that the pauses we would expect to make when reading do not occur solely at the ends of lines. In particular, it is difficult to read “le je appelle pour être tutoyé dans | l’innombrable nous prendrons | le large les syllabes feront voile” without taking enjambement into account. The result is that we tend to pause neither at the line breaks, nor where we would expect to see a punctuation mark, and that our reading takes on a sense of acceleration. Du Bouchet also refuses the syntactical unit of the sentence in some poetic prose by employing only the lower case. But he does not

40 Provisionality and the Poem

remove all punctuation from his work. Rather, he employs judicious punctuation in order to include intervals and silences where we would not expect to find them. He uses full stops and commas, but his poetic prose is especially recognisable by the dashes and suspension marks that pepper the pages. Dashes are more frequent in French than in English, and are not restricted to the role of enclosing a parenthetical idea. In French, they can also imply a qualification or an extension to an idea, and, most importantly, introduce a gap whose length is indeterminate and could come anywhere on a scale that ranges from the comma, through the semi-colon and colon to the full stop. Frontier quotes Rimbaud’s poem “Marine”, in which lines end with commas or dashes, and points out that the function of the dash is to interrupt the flow of words and introduce a silence. Poetry is therefore distinguished from prose not by cadence or metre, but because it breaks the text into isolated fragments (p. 196). This is very useful to du Bouchet, whose writing is characterised by fragmentation. Not only do the gaps produced by dashes force the reader to stop frequently and perceive silence in the text through the medium of a space, they also complicate and multiply the potential links between isolated elements. Dashes and commas are particularly prevalent in Aujourd’hui c’est, occurring in short sections of text such as the following: s’il y a – dans la récidive, moi survenu, comme rupture, c’est, où j’aurai été, disparaître aussi. (p. 11)

A complex process of repeated emergence and disappearance is expressed semantically and formally in this extract. The principal statement: “s’il y a […] moi survenu […] c’est […] disparaître aussi” suggests that the subject’s presence must be interrupted if it is to occur at all. This is inscribed in the utterance itself through the disruption of the phrase by the fragments “dans la récidive” and “comme rupture”, which both describe and enact repetition and rupture, and the temporal and spatial complexity contained in “où j’aurai été”. Du Bouchet often employs the future perfect tense to include time and space that are virtual, but have the potential to become real.

Poetry in Time 41

The punctuation works alongside enjambement to fragment the elements of the phrase into a maximum of five syllables. The commas introduce repeated breaks, forcing the reader to see a gap and hear a brief silence, and they render the rhythm of the phrase very stilted. The dash is confusing, as it appears neither to open a parenthesis nor to qualify an idea; it operates above all as an intrusion, similar to a comma, but one of undecided length that refuses to be integrated into a structure of regular rhythm. Du Bouchet and Noël are two poets who exploit punctuation and enjambement to make their texts more opaque in both senses: they block clarity of interpretation and oblige the reader to take notice of the matter of the text. Punctuation in modern poetry does not serve meaning transparently and it is not secondary to the words; rather, it contributes to meaning by being part of, and drawing attention to, the form of the text. Punctuation is not exploited by Jaccottet in such novel ways; it is usually as discreet as every element of his texts. But close examination reveals that it plays a significant role in determining the way in which the poems are read. Michel Sandras explains that it introduces pauses corresponding to the momentary retention of breath.51 For instance, the first poem of the suite “A Henry Purcell” opens: Écoute : comment se peut-il que notre voix troublée se mêle ainsi aux étoiles? (À la lumière, p. 159)

The colon after the initial command to listen literally forces us to pause before continuing to read, as if we were present at the scene evoked. Question marks are also a feature of Jaccottet’s more recent work, introducing enigmas and arresting any text that tends towards certainty. Jaccottet insists that images are precarious and must be held at a distance, because once a text is fixed, it no longer pays careful attention to the multiplicity present in nature.52 He writes, in a phrase whose meditative pace is determined by a series of commas:

51

Michel Sandras, “La Prosodie dans les poèmes de Philippe Jaccottet”, in La Poésie de Philippe Jaccottet, ed. by Marie-Claire Dumas, Collection Unichamp, 12 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1986), pp. 113-122 (p. 120). 52 Philippe Jaccottet, À travers un verger (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), p. 36.

42 Provisionality and the Poem des milliers de petites choses, ou présences, ou taches, ou ailes, légères – en suspens, de nouveau, comme à chaque printemps. (À travers, p. 11)

The intervals that du Bouchet introduces within lines of text create new starts at points that do not correspond to the beginning of a line. His characteristic technique of splitting a line in two by pushing all but the first few words over the line break is a constant reminder that he is writing poetry and not prose. Aujourd’hui c’est contains numerous examples, among them the deceptively simple phrase: encore tout de même – dans l’épaisseur – à avancer. (p. 24)

The break between “encore” and the rest of the phrase underlines the forward movement described, while the reinforcing of “encore” with the similar “tout de même”, along with the separation provided by dashes, creates a sense of moving through thickness for the reader trying to proceed through the text. Enjambement can be particularly powerful in du Bouchet’s texts when it combines fragmentation with projection. In some instances, words appear to have been launched ahead, even to the point of being pushed onto the following page: coulé, ou, par là, ayant dû couper – mais coulé, c’est encore avoir rejoint par le PAGE BREAK fond. là même, le point aéré d’où, partant, j’ai dû m’écarter aujourd’hui. c’est, de nouveau comme la ligne longuement se tire, le point de départ. là je m’arrête, là, longuement. (pp. 21-22)

Most striking here is the development of paradox. “Flowed” is compared to “cut”, a link reinforced by the similarity between the two terms in French, “coulé” / “coupé”, and it is also connected to depth; the word “fond” is delayed as the reader has to turn the page to discover the masculine noun that follows the article left stranded on the previous page. As well as implying the opposite of a flowing movement, “fond” seems too weighty a word, both semantically and phonetically, to have been thrown over to the top of a new page, and it lands heavily. Combined with its isolation, this creates a sense of soli-

Poetry in Time 43

dity that is reinforced by the repetition of “là”, which occurs three times in the subsequent text. But “là même” is itself paradoxically described as a “point aéré”, which implies once again movement rather than stasis. By now, the two have become intertwined, and they represent the effort made by the subject to move forward: it must separate itself from the static place, which therefore becomes a point of departure. The repetition of “longuement” evokes the stretching out of the line of poetry, which is interrupted by gaps and yet persists over more line breaks, and mimics the subject’s inclination to remain in one place, the place that is both solid depth and repeated departure. Du Bouchet’s writing always combines isolated moments with transitions because he insists that perception and thought operate in this way. He writes that the power of poetry lies in its ability to reveal the process by which the mind moves on: ce que la poésie en voie de réalisation incessante peut dans son inachèvement placer sous les yeux, c’est comme par surcroît le point momentané où l’esprit a cessé d’avoir prise. (Matière, p. 26)

Poetry such as his own is in constant flux; it is coming into being yet never quite complete, but this, again paradoxically, is what gives it the power to create instants of stillness: “placer sous les yeux”. It is typical of du Bouchet’s questioning of all his statements that he should interrupt the word that evokes such a moment in time and space, “placer”, by making it the site of enjambement. Instances of presence do occur, he believes, but only because they are also points of departure. When we perceive something, we are always about to move on from that perception. Forgetting is vital to du Bouchet’s work; it is what allows perception to operate in time, and it must also be incorporated into texts if they are accurately to convey perception. He writes: “nul, dans cet instant, n’a precédé” (Aujourd’hui, p. 27) and on the same page has already stated: “pour, en avant de soi, tracer | la trace” in a complex interplay of anticipated past action. Writing, in other words, must leave vestiges of itself in order to be able to forget and move on, but, in doing so, necessarily leaves those traces. Language is not relegated to the recording of past movement. His texts aim at revealing the moment when language becomes more than a sign and takes on the role of creator of reality:

44 Provisionality and the Poem sur une ligne de fracture où pour reprendre le large, elle [une parole] basculera, sitôt prononcée, hors de la langue. (Matière, p. 32)

Once again, enjambement is used to divide a word, this time one that evokes projection forward. This can only happen in the fraction of an instant when a gap is revealed, in language and in perception. Breathing and Measure Du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noël rarely read their work in public, and when they did so, they read written texts; they did not give performances. Jaccottet is the most reluctant of all, reading in Paris for the first time in February 2001. Du Bouchet reveals the extent of the importance of the blank page in his readings by introducing pauses of varying length, although no exact correlation can be established between the size of a space and the length of a pause.53 The rhythm that he introduces into his texts is made plain; the listener can sense the breathing of the poet, and even the rhythm of walking that du Bouchet always linked to the act of breathing and to perception of the landscape.54 Noël reads his long, unpunctuated texts, such as those considered above, not according to sense groupings of words across lines, but rather with a break at the end of each line, which runs counter to the frequent enjambement.55 He therefore insists on their poetic, vertical structure, and makes it harder for the ear to isolate possible units of meaning. Jaccottet speaks the lines of poetry in the most traditional way, as if they were regularly measured and rhymed, even when examination reveals the use of irregular line lengths and assonance in preference to rhyme. 56 The listener is left with the impression that some texts that might read as poetic prose are in fact undeniably verse. While their texts are not written primarily to be heard, the poets’ readings remind us that breathing has not been abandoned in 53

This was clear in a broadcast of his readings on France Culture in the programme “Surpris par la poésie”, 21 April 2001. 54 Yves Peyré writes that the time of the poem is its movement, which takes the form of breathing. See Yves Peyré, “La Coïncidence des temps”, in Autour d’André du Bouchet, ed. by Michel Collot (Paris: Presses de L’École Normale Supérieure, 1986), pp. 41-52 (p. 42). 55 Based on a reading given at Trinity College, Cambridge, 5 May 2001. 56 Based on a reading given at the Centre culturel suisse, Paris, 2 February 2001.

Poetry in Time 45

favour of simultaneity. However, their understanding of the role of breathing in a text is still very different from that demonstrated by contemporary sound poets. In Bernard Heidsieck’s works grouped under the title “Respirations et brèves rencontres”, the role of breathing is emphasised by pauses in performance. He wrote that: “Le poème est porté par le souffle”. 57 When the sound poet Christian Prigent, born in 1945, performs his work, he often expels air and words with a force and speed that astonishes the listener. He does not hide the deep breaths that this obliges him to take at intervals, and these emphasise that the body and its functions are inseparable from the words of the poem. This is far from the gentleness that is vital to Jaccottet’s evocation and creation of breathing and movement. Unlike du Bouchet and Noël, he often refers to music in his discussion of poetry. 58 Sandras comments that Jaccottet’s poems produce a sense of cadence, owing to their decreasing line length (Sandras, p. 119). Jaccottet himself stresses not the cadences of music, but something much more ephemeral; he said he would like to write poetry as “cristalline” as music (Interview). The choice of term suggests that his frequent references to clarity, light and shimmering movement need not necessarily be conceived of as purely visual phenomena: Songe à ce que serait pour ton ouïe, toi qui es à l’écoute de la nuit, une très lente neige de cristal. (À la lumière, p. 162)

The extract is taken from the suite of poems “A Henry Purcell”, which makes repeated reference to the sense of hearing in surprising contexts. A blanket of silence imposed by falling snow would be a more usual image, but here Jaccottet invents a sound we would not actually hear in order to link light with aural clarity. Sandras quotes Jaccottet as saying that “la poésie n’a jamais été autre chose à [s]es yeux qu’une respiration juste.” (Sandras, p. 120). It is important to stress that he is not classifying his poetry as 57

“Notes convergents”, cited in Bobillot, p. 352. In a radio interview he describes the importance music has always held for him, and cites in particular Monteverdi, Purcell and Schubert. Interview with Alain Veinstein, 12 February 2001, France Culture. 58

46 Provisionality and the Poem

oral: the breathing of the poet is not that of the performer. 59 Instead, it aims at creating rhythms determined by the kind of movement and musicality of language that seems, to the poet’s ear, to be the most “juste”. How does the poet judge what is appropriate? He is concerned above all to capture instants of movement and change in the natural world. Our normal speech patterns cannot be employed if the text is to be in tune with the natural world, but neither can artificially constructed metre. In Jaccottet’s later work, it is the prose poem above all that seems appropriate to convey the subtle rhythms that govern moments of perception. It does not foreground its formal construction, but it does convey a sense of lilting movement and measured progression that resembles breathing. The French poetic tradition since Baudelaire has placed great emphasis on the prose poem, in which language can appear more freely rhythmical than in poetry governed by metre. Yves Bonnefoy has emphasised the specificity of French poetry, required by the nature of the regular stresses in the language to construct lines according to the number of syllables, and link them through equally artificial rhyming constraints.60 The exception to this, he argues, is the mute e in French, which alters speech rhythms and can be used to provide unexpected effects and rhythmical structures. He situates the use of this feature of French not merely in poetry (he would single out Rimbaud and Mallarmé), but also in poetic prose and prose poetry, citing Rousseau’s Rêveries, Chateaubriand and Nerval.61 Jaccottet’s poetic prose contains a number of devices that set up new rhythms. A text from the last section of Et, néanmoins, “Aux liserons des champs”, deals with the relationship of the observer to a flower, which is described as causing him to see properly, in an image of the flower simultaneously opening, and opening his eyes: Toute fleur qui s’ouvre, on dirait qu’elle m’ouvre les yeux. Dans l’inattention. Sans qu’il y ait aucun acte de volonté d’un côté ni de l’autre. 59

Isabelle Lebrat insists that, for Jaccottet, the voice is “ni chant, ni parole, ni transcription de l’oral”, in Philippe Jaccottet, tous feux éteints: Pour une éthique de la voix (Paris: Bibliophane – Daniel Radford, 2002), p. 22. 60 “La Poésie en français: rapports entre une langue et sa poésie”, lecture, Institute of Romance Studies, London, 3 December 2001. 61 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, ed. by Henri Rodier (Paris: Garnier, 1960).

Poetry in Time 47 Elle ouvre, en s’ouvrant, autre chose, beaucoup plus qu’elle-même. C’est pressentir cela qui vous surprend et vous donne de la joie. Alors même qu’il vous arrive désormais, par instants, de trembler, comme quelqu’un qui a peur et qui croit, ou prétend ne pas savoir pourquoi. (Et, néanmoins, p. 77)

The repetition of “ouvre”, with the variation in pronoun, gives unity to the first lines of the first two sections, and links them to one another. “Elle-même” is recalled in “alors même”, and the words “qui” and “que” dominate the whole text. The rhyming of “joie” with “croit” and “pourquoi” grants the last two phrases a lilting rhythm and a sense of finality. The rhythm ensures that the text is perceived as a prose poem. For instance, the succession of short units in the third section is divided by commas to produce musical phrasing measured by breaths: “désormais, par instants, de trembler” This is reinforced by the alliteration and assonance set up through the pair “désormais” / “de trembler”. Several phrases conform to traditional metrical units in French, with phrases of three, six and twelve syllables dominating the text: “elle ouvre, [3] en s’ouvrant, [3] autre chos[e], [3] beaucoup plus [3] qu’elle mêm[e] [3]”; “par instants, [3] de trembler [3]”; “dans l’inattention” [6]; “d’un côté ni de l’autr[e]” [6]; “c’est pressentir cela” [6]; “sans qu’il y ait aucun acte de volonté” [12]; “alors même qu’il vous arrive désormais” [12]. The last two phrases are not immediately read as alexandrines, however, as there is no caesura after the sixth syllable. Caesuras can be made after four and eight syllables of the former example, but in the latter even this is impossible. It is not the metre, therefore, that strikes the reader first. Above all, the mute e disrupts the regularity of the rhythm by altering the speed at which groups of words are read. The long “ou” sound in “ouvre” is contrasted with the elision of “s’ouvre, on” and “elle ouvre”, and by the “e” that comes before and after it in “qu’elle m’ouvre”. The word “joie”, which ends the second paragraph, is highlighted by the rapid succession of syllables in the phrase “donne de la” that precedes it. Even where metre is observed, the poem introduces unpredictability into its rhythms. The tone is not conver-

48 Provisionality and the Poem

sational, but rather follows the barely noticeable movements made by the flower as sensed by the subject. Repetition and Echo Poetry that aims at expressing the singularity of a brief moment appears, at first sight, to be far removed from verse based on the repetition of certain elements. The refrain, for instance, is a poetic device that is frequently employed to link the stanzas of a poem, and it can lead to a sense of stasis that is quite different from the poetry of transitions examined here. But repetition can still be an important means of lending coherence to a text; in the hands of some poets, it is developed into a complex process of repetition with variation that refers back and forward in a text and allows progression to occur. Repetition of this kind is an important structural element in du Bouchet’s work, and it contributes to the unique rhythms set up by his texts. He employs a deceptively simple lexicon that serves to establish a limited number of images as his own, and to create echoes, as the reader encounters the same terms several times within a text, and through the reading of several different volumes. 62 Terms including “la faux”, “un pas” and “de nouveau” are found in all of his texts; their frequency helps establish the continual interaction between intervals and movement that disrupt and carry forward the progress of the subject and the reader through each text. The simplicity of his vocabulary hides the fact that numerous subtle variations are possible within the repetition of basic terms. This may take the form of variation in the words that qualify nouns: le fond instantané. le fond momentané. (Aujourd’hui, p. 8)

62

Henri Maldiney writes that all of du Bouchet’s phrases come from all of the others. See “Les ‘Blancs’ d’André du Bouchet”, in L’Ire des vents, 6-8 (1983), 195-215 (p. 211). Lucie Bourassa explains that movement operates from one collection to another as well as within each volume. See “De l’espace au temps, du voir à la voix”, Poétique, 91 (1992), 345-358 (p. 356).

Poetry in Time 49

Here the apparent fixity of the image of depth is destabilised because the idea is not repeated exactly. Alternatively, repetition may reinforce pared-down statements such as: l’air oblige.

air qui oblige. (p. 31)

Variation is often established within the form of a single word. For instance, the first page of the text includes the verb “couler” and its conjugated form “coule” (Aujourd’hui, p. 7). On the following page, this recurs as a past participle, “coulé” (p. 8). When we come across the noun “coulée” (p. 15) several pages later, this echoes the terms we read earlier without actually repeating them. Examples of this kind can be found in all of du Bouchet’s poetic prose, but it is always necessary to read the texts repeatedly and look back and forth through them in order to establish precisely which forms have been used. Repetition with variation creates change and progression, and it also prevents the poem from becoming linear. Du Bouchet’s poetry is known to be “forgettable”, owing to the intervals that introduce space and silence between utterances and within them. 63 But interstices do not divide the text into isolated elements with no connection to one another other than their simultaneous layout on the page. Rather, variation ensures that echoes of words and phrases are carried through the reading process, and it establishes duration. In du Bouchet’s words, this is “une durée qui ignore la chronologie”.64 Prepositions are an important site of repetition and variation in du Bouchet’s texts. An image might remain unchanged in all ways except the barely noticeable variation in preposition. Alternatively, the repeated use of a single preposition in different images emphasises the 63

Lucy-Jean Lloyd compares his poetry to Reverdy’s on the basis that both depend on forgetfulness for progression to occur. See “Writing and Forgetting: Reading Reverdy through André du Bouchet”, Nottingham French Studies, 28, 2 (1989), 66-74. 64 André du Bouchet, Pourquoi si calmes (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1996). Bachelard, in his analysis of Gaston Roupnel’s work on time in L’Intuition de l’instant, insists that one cannot think of time as instants separated by empty intervals, because time does not exist if nothing happens in it. According to Bachelard, time is constructed from instants instead of being a duration that is divided up. See L’Intuition de l’instant: étude sur la Siloë de Gaston Roupnel (Paris: Stock, 1932), p. 57.

50 Provisionality and the Poem

particular positioning, movement or direction that it describes. For instance, “sur” occurs in Aujourd’hui c’est in the phrase “le bleu sur ses roues” (Aujourd’hui, p. 12), which is followed by “ira sur la relation perdue” (p. 12), and then “sur terre déjà” (p. 13); the first and third images that describe the placement of objects surround the movement evoked by the verb “ira”. In this volume, the most noticeable feature of the prepositions included is that their number is limited and the terms “dans” and “par”, run throughout the text. “Dans l’épaisseur du temps” (p. 8), “dans le temps” (p. 8), “dans la récidive” (p. 11), “dans les premiers froids” (p. 15), “dans l’instant” (p. 18), “serrées dans l’air” (p. 23), “dans l’épaisseur” (p. 24), “dans cet instant” (p. 27), “dans la matière humaine” (p. 28), “dans le plafond” (p. 32), and: comme à jamais dans la paume incrustant. (p. 35)

The capacity of “dans” to link space and time is clear, and “dans l’épaisseur” is echoed in both “dans l’épaisseur du temps” and “dans la matière humaine”. More than this, however, it acts in conjunction with “par”, situating the subject in time and space, only for any established positions to be undermined by the constant movement and cutting through and across suggested by the expressions that involve “par”: “pris | par le travers” (p. 9), “venu par le travers” (p. 9), “par le centre de la parole” (p. 10), “aller par ces terres-là” (p. 13), “rejoint par le | fond” (pp. 21-22), “portée par des branches” (p. 25), “par l’air où je ne suis pas” (p. 33). Instances of repetition and variation grant du Bouchet’s texts an existence in time, introducing hesitation and change if the texts threaten to become static. Jaccottet also uses the device of repetition, in prose as much as in poetry, to create echoes within one text and across whole series. In a poem quoted above from Et, néanmoins, the phrase: Rien qu’une touffe de violettes pâles une touffe de ces fleurs faibles et presque fades (p. 19)

Poetry in Time 51

is varied in the following pages: Fleurs parmi les plus insignifiantes et les plus cachées. Infimes. A la limite de la fadeur (p. 20), Je ne cueillerai pas les fleurs (p. 21), Violettes Flèches à la tendre pointe, incapables de poison (p. 22)

and lastly, Frayeuses de chemin, parfumées, mais trop frêles pour qu’il ne soit pas besoin de les relayer dans le noir et dans le froid (p. 23).

We are left with the impression of delicate and gentle flowers, but also of the attempt to capture the essence of something that will always remain just beyond the reach of language. Du Bouchet deliberately pares descriptive writing down to the minimum, until variation can be attained by altering an element as simple as a preposition, but Jaccottet either repeats terms in order to render their evocation more precise, or creates the impression of repetition through subtle variation in order to keep the image mobile. The nouns “fleurs”, “violettes” and “touffe” recur, but “fades” becomes “fadeur”, and is also suggested by “faibles”, “infimes”, “insignifiantes”, “tendre” and “frêles”. Temporal settings are important both for precision and for fluidity. The violets will only be as Jaccottet evokes them here at this particular point in the year and moment of the day, and this clump of violets is not the same as the one that will appear the following year, although that clump will grow and change in the same way. That is why his repetitions always involve variation. Change and nuance allow for more faithful accounts of the natural world than the certainty of exact repetition. He is particularly sensitive to the rhythms and cycles of death and rebirth in nature, which he understands through the figure of a spiral: “il s’agit d’un mouvement en spirale par rapport au nôtre, qui serait en ligne droite” (À travers, p. 15). Repetition and variation are techniques frequently employed by sound poets. Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994) creates a structure from repetition in poems such as “Quart d’heure de culture métaphysique” (a reference to culture physique, or PT, a form of physical exercise in

52 Provisionality and the Poem

which movements were repeated).65 Whole words are repeated in varying combinations and over seven pages, a limited number of verbs and the even smaller number of nouns upon which they act are combined in a variety of ways. The metaphysical term “angoisses”, for instance, is qualified by the physical “écartées” (p. 10), “tendues” (pp. 10-11), “jointes” (p. 14), “souples” (p. 14), “ramenées” (p. 15), “fléchies” (p. 15), “derrière” (p. 12) and “en avant” (p. 15), while most of these are applied to other substantives. “Tendu(e)(s)”, for example, is also used with the metaphysical terms “idées” (pp. 9 and 12), “mort” (p. 9) and “vide” (p. 13), while “idées” are described in different ways, and so on. Luca produces his effects as much through the form of the voice as the meaning of the words employed. Repetition and variation of words, and even syllables, lead to an aural effect of acceleration and a sense that the poem is coming into being during the course of the performance as words generate one another. Unfolding Luca insisted that an audience should experience the unfolding of a text rather than see it laid out before them. Even when it is not written with performance in mind, much contemporary poetry produces a sense of the text unfolding, or coming into being before the reader’s eyes. Jaccottet’s work is known primarily for its evocation of the present instant. The title series of prose poems in Et, néanmoins, for example, comprises texts in which the time of the observation is clearly stated; phrases include “ce jour-là, en ce février-là” (p. 19). In another text from the same volume, it is precisely because the narrator specifies the moment that is evoked fractionally before it is lost that the transition appears to take place during the time taken to read the text: Parce que c’est vu juste avant la nuit, qui tombe tôt, c’est un moment assez bref, à la limite du perceptible; juste avant que les couleurs ne s’éteignent, ne se fondent dans l’obscurité. Cela dure peu, mais surprend d’autant plus: comme quand une ombre passe vite et s’enfuit, sans qu’on puisse espérer la rattraper jamais. (p. 63)

65

Ghérasim Luca, Le Chant de la carpe, 2nd edn (Paris: Corti, 1986), pp. 7-15.

Poetry in Time 53

The narrator reduces and intensifies what is sensed by insisting that it is barely noticeable. The reader is drawn to the second before the light fades and allowed to glimpse the colours before they merge into darkness. The brevity of the impression reinforces its impact, as its fleeting nature renders it more desirable to the narrator and to the reader, who is involved in the implicit emotional response. In the following passage from Éléments d’un songe, the moment observed seems to unfold in the present from the opening “alors”: ce qu’elle voit alors, ce sont de brèves pluies sur les eaux, et des brumes rapides au-dessus de la terre qui dissimulent presque entièrement le port, les premières lumières aux fenêtres des maisons basses.66

Jaccottet often simply names the constitutive elements of a scene, but in this case, the addition of adjectives and adverbs serves to grant it a temporal existence beyond a list of nouns. The rain is brief and the mist rapidly moving. Moreover, the port and windows are glimpsed indistinctly, and these perceptions must frequently change as the mist is never still. The scene is set at dawn, a time of constantly changing light, and we have the sense of witnessing the visual image of an instant that hovers and then is lost to the process of change. Unfolding is a vital element of Noël’s poetry, but its speed and rhythm is very different from Jaccottet’s hovering instant. His long poems cannot be read slowly, as each short line appears to generate the next, creating a sense of acceleration and suggesting the outpouring or precipitation that Noël claims can be achieved within a poetic framework. The effect is exaggerated by his use of conjunctions and open-ended expressions that often prevent any unit of meaning from being completed. The end of the first “chant” of L’Été langue morte, for instance, includes lines that prolong phrases by opening with terms such as “et”, “mais”, “qui”, “et pourtant”, “comme” and “ce qui” (Chute, p. 85). Addition, contradiction and qualification force the reader to move through the text, while obstructing the retention of images and ideas. It is not only Noël’s long poems that appear to take shape in the present. Sur un pli du temps contains sections made up of very short texts alongside extensive ones. Among these are the poems in 66

Philippe Jaccottet, Éléments d’un songe (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 75-76.

54 Provisionality and the Poem

“Fenêtres fougère”, which all open with the simple evocation of one or two nouns, usually with their definite articles. The lack of conjugated verbs might be thought to make these texts static, offering only a frozen instant, but they tend rather to suggest a barely perceptible movement or emotion. Conjugated verbs would easily develop into the narrative form Noël wishes to avoid in these texts: du vent un peu de pluie d’âme. (p. 249)

One would have the sense of reading a haiku if it were not for the fact that these poems lack the essential elements of a setting in a precise time and place. There are no seasons or times of day, which are so important in Jaccottet’s work. When the vocabulary of time is employed, it is with the purpose of removing the poem from any fixed time scheme and insisting that we live in temporal chaos, in a “pli du temps”: on s’est vêtu de presque de encore. (p. 226)

In the early series of prose poems Extraits du corps, unfolding times are figured in the restlessness and growth that take place inside the body. For example, in the opening poem he writes: Le buste est un assemblage d’éléments mobiles et d’éléments immobiles. Les gestes se poursuivent à l’intérieur de la poitrine, comme les cercles sur l’eau. Et le cou se prolonge loin dans le corps. (Poèmes 1, p. 33)

The poet’s gaze enters into the body, which contains gestures equipped with their own impetus to move. Inside and outside are disrupted and contrasted, as internal movement is compared with ripples on the surface of water, while parts of the body extend into the body imaginatively, out of sight of an external observer. All this is enacted in the present of reading. At times, the body appears to be present in Noël’s poetry even when it is not evoked directly. His use of short syllables and repetition creates the sense that the words stem from breathing and from the body’s other rhythms. Sur un pli du temps contains the lines:

Poetry in Time 55 il y a du ho du ah du corps à peine du où du quand du pourquoi. (Chute, p. 259)

Words subvert grammatical rules, are rendered alien to our ear by substantivisation (“du où”, “du quand” and “du pourquoi”) and even consist of syllables and phonemes without agreed meanings: “du ho du ah”. Form begins to take over from content as generator of language, and, ultimately, as the significance of the text. In the longer poems, this takes place only occasionally, the best example being the “contre-chants” in La Chute des temps. The technique is developed furthest by Noël in his Bruits de langue, which display an anarchic attitude to language. In the following example, the onomatopœic use of words creates the impression that they are meaningless: “riant de la risée du branlaboum quoi couac”, even if, as is the case with “couac”, they do have a definition.67 This line is followed by one containing nonsense words that are close enough to words we know to imply meaning: “il affriol’ la résiduance et l’excroisse” (p. 159). “Résiduance”, for instance, suggests “résidu” and “résidance”, and “excroisse” appears to be an invented form from “excroissance”. The text is both excessive and insufficient. The reader’s apparent recognition of words is frustrated by their ultimate refusal to produce intelligibility. Luca often composes poems that move from apparently meaningful words and phrases to phonemes that offer only pure sound, or vice versa, in phrases such as “la jamjamjamjambe”.68 This is a form of stuttering, which shows words to be inherently unstable, but it is less a sign of uncertainty than of the power of language to transform itself of its own accord. Jean-Pierre Bobillot evokes Luca’s technique of “déterritorialisation de la langue” (Java, p. 19). Deleuze, for whom deterritorialisation is an important concept, cites Luca as “un des plus grands poètes français, et de tous les temps”. 69 This was due in particular to his ability to make language stammer, “bégayer”. He was able to: 67

Bernard Noël, Bruits de langue, repr. in Hervé Carn, Bernard Noël (Paris: Seghers, 1986), pp. 156-163 (p. 159). 68 Java, 15 (1996-97), p. 10. 69 Gilles Deleuze, “Un manifeste de moins”, in C. Bene and Gilles Deleuze, Superpositions (Paris: Minuit, 1979), pp. 85-131 (p. 108).

56 Provisionality and the Poem imposer à la langue, à tous les éléments intérieurs de la langue, phonologiques, syntaxiques, sémantiques, le travail de la variation continue. (p. 108)

Jacques Sivan writes that words have lost their “centre de gravité” (Java, p. 95). They no longer have a secure grip on the world, but this also grants them the capacity to make us laugh at language and our own use of it. Luca emphasises the power of language to produce meaning through sound, even if the sounds are not meaningful, in the sense that they do not allow for fixed semantic interpretations. The poems are events rather than examples of texts in which certain meanings or ideas are elaborated. For Prigent, signifying is also secondary to sound, which itself forms the meaning of the text. Frontier explains how he deliberately blocks any possible narrative or logical sense the audience might seek to find. His aim is to “empêcher l’image” and to “refuser l’illusion que la langue pourrait représenter le réel” (Frontier, p. 348). Language cannot represent reality, because it is energy that is itself reality: “une scansion, un rythme, une musicalité, une énergie” (p. 348). It is an event in itself. Conclusion: Poetry as Event Noël’s concept of poetry appears similar to Prigent’s; he says that the poem “est un événement verbal entier” (L’Espace, p. 53).70 While this might seem to imply performance or oral communication, it is, in fact, inseparable from his concept of written poetry. He considers poetry to be distinct from narrative prose primarily through its refusal of the representation that is so essential to narrative. Instead of referring to non-linguistic events, the poem and words “sont détachés de leurs références aux choses et ne relèvent plus que de la réalité seconde peu à peu produite par l’écrit” (L’Espace, p. 147). Poetry produces reality rather than imitating it, and this is a gradual, temporal process. It occurs: “peu à peu”. Jaccottet is also concerned to create an event rather than recounting it. For him, the event is the brief instant of perception. The 70

Much twentieth-century poetry has been influenced by Mallarmé’s famous insistence at the end of “Crise de vers” that poetry makes language new and complete: “un mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue”. “Crise de vers”, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols, ed. by Bertrand Marchal, II (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), pp. 204-213 (p. 213).

Poetry in Time 57

series “Éclats d’août”, from Cahier de verdure (pp. 47-52) announces this approach in its title. The poems are characteristically situated at a particular time of year, but they are also in themselves eruptions or “éclats”. Each page contains two short poems, one positioned near the centre of the page and one at the bottom. The sequence opens: Tard dans la nuit d’août, l’œil du Taureau devient rouge comme s’il allait ensemencer la terre. (p. 47)

These poems are more than attempts to evoke a scene precisely, because metaphors take the images beyond the moment of visual perception that inspired them. The image of the burning sun implied here has echoes throughout the series, as the noun “brasier” (p. 47) and the verbs “brûlent” (p. 47) and “flambent” (p. 48) go on to counteract the increasing darkness of the phrases “vont vers la nuit” (p. 48) and “se rapproche de l’obscur” (p. 49). The flashes of light and fecundity that are both evoked and produced on the page resist the encroaching dark and the death that will come with autumn. The short poems themselves act as instances of life and energy. Du Bouchet chooses to discuss what he describes as a “nonévénement” in his text Pourquoi si calmes (p. 24). He is referring to the interruption of a lecture given by Henri Maldiney by a siren that is sounded every month at that time in the town. Maldiney asked his audience why they ignored it, “pourquoi si calmes” (p. 24), when the siren was, in legend, the very call that could not be ignored and lured men to their deaths. Du Bouchet, however, focuses on the fact that while it was a routine occurrence, the siren still disrupted and slightly altered the course of Maldiney’s talk. He sees the event not in the siren’s sound, but in the silence that immediately preceded the speaker resuming his talk: ce qui a eu lieu – comme fendu alors – en un sifflement annonciateur de la parole imminente, résonne encore quand on a cessé de l’entendre. (p. 26)

The silence anticipates the words that will break it and is not forgotten once it has ended. Words and the intervals between them, in the form of pauses or blank spaces, have equal standing as events that constitute the text.

58 Provisionality and the Poem

For each poet, time is vital to the functioning of the text. As an event, the poem is not an isolated moment, but an instance of transition. The reader encounters the interaction of enunciation and silence that allows du Bouchet’s texts to progress, or Jaccottet’s capturing of a moment of change in the natural world, or, in Noël’s work, the energy that propels language forward and multiplies the meanings it can suggest. While their work is distinct from the recordings and performances of sound poets, they create poetry in which new rhythms are seen, read and felt.

l’important n’est pas d’avoir le pouce vert mais de faire venir à travers les branches cette floraison d’air qu’on appelle l’être71

CHAPTER 2 WORDS IN THE AIR72 Perhaps the most obvious similarity between the poetry of du Bouchet, Noël and Jaccottet is that it takes place outdoors, and is especially bound up in the elemental world. Their poems contain abundant images of air, earth, fire and water, both as singular instances and as manifestations of bare presence. The poetic subject takes shape in relation to the movements and changes of the elements. The earth is the main point of contact between the subject and the area through which s/he walks; rocks provide evidence of unchanging matter, while soil and sand allow the subject to enter into the earth. Noël indicates the extent to which the human being and its faculty of sight are inseparable from their surroundings, with lines such as “les yeux de mon amie sont dans la terre” (Chute, p. 84). Du Bouchet’s phrase “le sol fait sans cesse irruption vers nous” (Dans la chaleur, p. 45) grants the earth an active power to break into the walker’s path and consciousness. Fire is often treated as solid matter presenting an obstacle in du Bouchet’s texts, but he also associates it with light and, in particular, with bright heat or the colours of dawn and dusk: “à l’heure où le jour brûle encore sur les | bords, on y fait courir un cordon de feu” (Dans la chaleur, p. 99). For Jaccottet, fire is often present through the evidence of ash, which can be a means of evoking autumn scents or a more overt reference to human mortality. Of the dead, he writes: “leur corps est cendre, | cendre leur ombre et leur souvenir” (À la lumière, p. 117). The same text contains another manifestation of fire that is also important to Jaccottet, the image of a candle: “une bougie brûlante dans un miroir, une main | de femme proche, une embrasure” (p. 116).73 71

Bernard Noël, Le Reste du voyage (Paris: P.O.L., 1997), p. 79. The title is taken from Derek Mahon’s anthology, Words in the Air: A Selection of Poems by Philippe Jaccottet. This, in turn, translates Jaccottet’s phrase, “paroles dans l’air” (Poésie, p. 57). 73 An “embrasure” is a frequent image in Jacques Dupin’s poetry. See, for example, L’Embrasure, in Le Corps clairvoyant (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), pp. 99-202. As the 72

60 Provisionality and the Poem

It appears to be the constant movement of light that attracts Jaccottet to the candle flame, which he frequently links to a tear, perhaps owing to the shape they share. A tear moves down the face and changes its form, and it is the physical evidence of sorrow: elles [les larmes] sont de la brume sur des lacs un trouble du jour intérieur, une eau que la peine a salée. (À la lumière, p. 93)

Water is important to Jaccottet for its movement, particularly when this blurs its clarity, and, in the case of tears, for the emotion it conveys. This is very different from Noël’s evocation of the sea, in phrases such as “la mer est là | immobile” (Chute, pp. 83-84). And yet movement is also vital in his imagery; instead of providing an obvious image of a troubled sea or crashing waves, Noël chooses to make the sea a desiring, but passive subject that wishes to be moved. He continues: regarde l’immobilité appelle le vent l’état de détresse est lié à la goutte mouvante. (p. 84)

This is being moved in both senses; while Jaccottet values the image of the tear, Noël suggests this without naming it, reserving his nomination for the powerful emotion “détresse”. In this case the wind is the active force, and air in its various forms appears to be the most important element to all three writers. Bachelard’s work on the elements in poetry tends to classify writers according to one of the four elements. The fact that the work of Jaccottet, Noël and du Bouchet focuses on the elemental world as a whole renders this kind of distinction unhelpful, but an examination of air in their work is perhaps best suited to revealing connections and differences between them. In L’Air et les songes, Bachelard examines images of air in modern poetry by dividing them into the categories of blue sky,

opening provided by a window frame, it also suggests light and depth. It is a poetic convention, too, as the window seat implies a trysting place for lovers.

Words in the Air 61

clouds, mist and wind. 74 This immediately points to the fact that we tend not to notice air unless it is doing something such as moving rapidly or reacting with water to form clouds. Poets have rarely written about air as a substance in itself, although it is a frequent image of absolute purity. Mallarmé’s “Azur” is perhaps the best known example in modern French poetry, while the sky as lightness and pure unity is fundamental to Éluard’s poetry.75 Bachelard points out that Hölderlin sees the blue sky as pure, sacred air, from which the seasons and weather descend (L’Air, p. 199). The opposite movement usually dominates images of air in poetry. Mircea Éliade reminds us that air in mystical or religious experience implies expansion and ascension. 76 Bachelard cites Supervielle’s poetry as exemplifying the link between air and upward movement (p. 232): Terre lourde que se disputent les cadavres et les arcs-en-ciel, Des statues au nez brisé sous le soleil d’or incassable Et des vivants protestaires levant leurs bras jusqu’aux nues.77

This implies a wish to escape from the world; the poem concludes with the attainment of weightlessness on the part of the human subjects: “Et vos mains onduleront comme au vent les marguerites!” (Supervielle, p. 232). The sky frequently incites reveries of vagueness and distance. But whereas for some poets, such as Goethe, its distance separates it from human beings, for others, this creates yearning on the part of the subject.78 Laforgue writes in “Crépuscule de dimanche d’été”:

74

Gaston Bachelard, L’Air et les songes (Paris: Corti, 1943). Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 80-81. See in particular Paul Éluard, Donner à voir, in Œuvres, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), pp. 9171004. 76 Mircea Éliade, Images and Symbols (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969), p. 166. Daniel R. Morris, who cites Éliade’s and Bachelard’s work, discusses how air is essential to creation in the Christian story because God breathed life into Adam’s nostrils and Man became a living soul. See From Heaven to Hell: Imagery of Earth, Air, Water and Fire in the novels of Georges Bernanos (New York: Peter Lang, 1989). 77 Jules Supervielle, Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Michel Collot (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 230. 78 See Bachelard on Goethe, L’Air, p. 201. 75

62 Provisionality and the Poem Où donc es-tu, depuis tant d’astres, à présent… Ô fleuve chaotique, ô Nébuleuse mère.79

He presents the night sky through images of distant stars and the Milky Way, which is related to the earth by comparison with a river, and human concerns in the image of the mother. We can see that the relation of the subject to the air is central across this variety of images. It is particularly noticeable in conditions where we are physically affected by the air, such as windy weather or a storm. Moreover, agitated air appears to be animated, or given life, so it can seem to correspond to the subject’s mind or even incite movement. 80 If the poem is understood as a breath, it is made of the same stuff as the air: elemental matter, motion and the soul. These various manifestations of air in modern poetry are also to be found in the work of du Bouchet, Noël and Jaccottet. Breath is important to them all, but the differences between their images for air reveal the specificities of each writer’s poetic universe. For instance, air can be solid matter, as in du Bouchet’s work; it is used to blur outlines when it takes the form of mist for Jaccottet; in Noël’s texts it operates as a metaphor for internal space. Rather than simply elaborating the scope of air imagery in the poetry, the following sections examine how, for each poet, the presentation of air is integral to the imaginative universe of the work, and how its features are also those that characterise their imagery as a whole. Air links the poets, but also highlights the essential differences in approach between all three. It is, of course, impossible to separate form from content in discussion of poetry. The aim of focusing principally on formal devices in chapter 1 and imagery in this chapter is not to present these as working independently from one another, but quite the opposite: we shall see in analysis of extended extracts that structure and image combine to produce texts that enact what they evoke. These are taken from volumes that reveal the most obvious way in which air links the 79

Jules Laforgue, Poésies complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 356. The English Romantic poets used the wind as a vehicle for “drastic changes in the poet’s mind”, according to Hans H. Rudwick. See his essay “Concretizations of the Aeolian Metaphor” in Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, part 2: The Airy Elements in the Poetic Imagination: Breath, Breeze, Wind, Tempest, Thunder, Snow, Flame, Fire, Volcano…, ed. by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1988), pp. 145-155 (p. 151). 80

Words in the Air 63

writers; each title includes the word “air”. Du Bouchet’s 1951 Air is the earliest of the three, and also his first volume of poetry; Jaccottet published Airs in 1967 (Poésie, pp. 93-155), and Noël’s La Rumeur de l’air dates from 1986 (Chute, pp. 167-222). The translations that accompany the extracts are my own and are intended to adhere as closely as possible to the vocabulary and structures of the French in order to aid comprehension of the original texts.81

81

Translations of some of Jaccottet’s poems cited here can be found in Derek Mahon’s anthology.

64 Provisionality and the Poem

i. Du Bouchet: Entering Matter Air is not particularly airy in du Bouchet’s poetry. It asserts its materiality, refusing to be ignored as if it were empty space, and rarely occurring in gentle forms such as breezes. Michel Collot cites du Bouchet as an example of a poet who valorises the opacity of matter.82 Air can be as thick and heavy as earth. In a text from L’Emportement du muet du Bouchet insists on its three-dimensional form: volume d’air

volume, subitement.

révolu.83

le

“Le révolu” is an expression that recurs in his texts. It appears to have both a spatial and a temporal meaning, suggesting earth that has been turned over by a plough and time that has gone by. The noun is separated from its article, the turn of the line reinforcing the turning of the earth and time. The air is not endlessly present, but takes on its volume suddenly; the subject notes its existence in these fragmented emergences of language, which appear and are left behind like the ridges and troughs of ploughed land. They draw attention to the blank areas in between words, previously ignored or thought to be empty just as air is rarely noticed, but which here also suddenly emerge as matter. Landscape is the poetic world du Bouchet’s texts inhabit and create. It does not take the form of a view, seen objectively or in clear perspective. Rather, the reader encounters images of elemental matter and the shapes in which it occurs. Sensations are proffered alongside visual images, as we are taken through the landscape by a subject who experiences its immediacy, and does not attempt to represent it. The earth, ice and paths are usually named without comparison or qualification, with the result that they emerge as powerful forces rather than as aspects of the landscape a subject has attempted to master and use for his or her own poetic purposes. Du Bouchet’s work appears to be strongly motivated by the natural world, not merely to find in it useful inspiration. He writes: 82

Michel Collot, La Matière-émotion (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997), p. 76. 83 André du Bouchet, L’Emportement du muet (Paris: Mercure de France, 2000), p. 60.

Words in the Air 65 …ce que j’écris c’est l’air qui l’exige comme si chaque endroit vide me forçait d’écrire.84

Each motivating “endroit vide” could be space in the landscape, which is always far from empty for du Bouchet, since everything about the natural environment is matter. But it could also refer to the blank areas of the page. The landscape would not be sufficient inspiration without language, because the textual environment comes into being with the text. This is implied in the layout of the extract cited here, in which “l’air qui exige” and “chaque endroit vide” are encircled by the words “…ce que j’écris” and the closing infinitive “écrire”. Nevertheless, the subject’s encounters with the landscape are essential to much of du Bouchet’s poetry. While the human subject is always an undefined presence, its relationship to its surroundings determines the way in which the elements appear, often through sensations such as the brightness of light or the feel of heat, cold and wind. Roger Cardinal stresses the importance of sensation to modern poetry in Sensibility and Creation. He suggests that the poetic image can encapsulate both phenomenal experience and abstract ideas.85 In du Bouchet’s work, however, the focus is above all on the sensation for itself; he resists all interpretation that would link a phenomenal experience intellectually to a particular idea. Bachelard relates wind to the body, remarking that the forehead is usually the first part of the body where wind is felt, and that poets often attribute a face and a forehead to the wind itself (L’Air, p. 269). Du Bouchet does this in a poem from Où le soleil, comparing the sensation of wind on the face to the feeling that one is the object of a gaze: “ce regard en froid ardent sur notre face” (Dans la chaleur, p. 180). His choice of the term “face” rather than “visage” de-emphasises the subject as human, and focuses rather on the face as a part of the body that encounters the elemental world. The sense of being looked at by the wind suggests that the subject and the world are equally active and passive figures. Glenn W. Fetzer describes du 84

Carnets 1952-1956 (Paris: Plon, 1990), p. 43. Roger Cardinal, Sensibility and Creation: Studies in Twentieth-Century French Poetry (London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977), p. 14. 85

66 Provisionality and the Poem

Bouchet’s evocations of landscape as based on a “bi-directional sense of perception: the poet’s own perception of the world, and the world’s point of view as recorded by the poet”. 86 In this poem, “face” is subsequently applied to summer, “la face de l’été” (Dans la chaleur, p. 180), which implies heat rather than cold. Moreover, the cold wind was itself described as “ardent”, which means blazing or burning. The poem is shot through with paradoxical images. John E. Jackson examines instances of paradox in du Bouchet’s evocation of the elements: l’aridité qui subsiste en dépit de l’orage, la route qui demeure sèche malgré la pluie, le déversement sans perte de la terre, l’épaisseur du sol qui répond à la déchirure dans le ciel.87

By removing the elements from “la banalité de leur assertion traditionnelle” (Jackson, p. 18), du Bouchet emphasises their force and their independence from human control, whether of the observer, the poet or the reader. Bachelard suggests that wind is often an ambivalent phenomenon, because it can range from gentleness to violence, from a breeze to a storm, and poets exploit this characteristic (L’Air, p. 265). Du Bouchet’s poetry is most likely to evoke a storm. For example, he writes in Air: “De l’autre côté du seuil de bois, le vent recommence à tonner, | à tourner” (p. 35). The repetition with variation formed by the juxtaposition of two terms describing the storm, “à tonner” and “à tourner”, evokes the effect of wind turning rapidly, indirectly suggesting a “tourbillon”, while the slight change in vowel sound implies that the wind swirls in unexpected ways; it disconcerts as a stormy day would do. The poetic subject is rarely a passive recipient of the weather’s blows. The encounters with the elements that determine many of du Bouchet’s texts can be overtly confrontational; at times, the subject is drawn into the landscape or taken over by its forces, and at others it counters with a determined move to embrace its environment. The continued attempt to become part of the elemental world requires 86

Glenn W. Fetzer, “André du Bouchet: Imaging the Real, Seeing the Unseeable”, Nottingham French Studies, 35, 2 (1996), 76-83, p. 78. 87 John E. Jackson, “L’Étranger dans la langue”, in Michel Collot, Autour d’André du Bouchet, pp. 13-23 (p. 18).

Words in the Air 67

overcoming the boundary between subject and object, and this entails a certain loss of coherence for the self. For example, in the poem “Ce que la lampe a brûlé”, from Le Moteur blanc, the subject is not alone, but there is no indication of the identities of the people present, and they appear separated from their own sense of self:88 Nous nous reconnaissons à notre fatigue, le bois des membres, le bûcher tout à coup délaissé par le feu, et froid au fond du jour. Nous prenons froid. Puis j’ai tourné le dos à ceux qui s’embrassent. (Dans la chaleur, p. 78)

The reflexive pronoun in “nous nous reconnaissons” divides the subjects from themselves without separating them into individuals. They are forced to recognise themselves from the outside, through the tiredness they realise they must be experiencing. The elements of the scene: wood, fire and cold, are first evoked as objects, although the term “membres” suggests human limbs, but the cold ceases to be only “au fond du jour” and affects the subjects. The expression used, “nous prenons froid” implies that they are active in their acceptance of the cold. Then the singular pronoun “je” comes into play. There has been no indication earlier in the text of who “ceux qui s’embrassent” might be, but at this point they are notable as examples of a closeness between people that the “je” rejects through its appearance in the singular. Its subsequent engagement with the cold is more assertive again: Quand je ne vois rien, je vois l’air. Je tiens le froid par les manches. (p. 78)

It catches hold of the cold as if it were another person whose presence were vital. Air is once again important, even though it is transparent. As well as an element that can be traversed, air enters into the body through breath, and walking in the cold emphasises its invasiveness. By welcoming the cold air, even grabbing hold of it, the subject is seeking to break down the barriers between the inside and the outside

88

André du Bouchet, Le Moteur blanc, in Dans la chaleur vacante, pp. 57-83.

68 Provisionality and the Poem

of itself, an aim whose complexity is emphasised by the interweaving, but not conflation, of the pronouns “je” and “nous”. In a text from the prose collection L’Incohérence, du Bouchet’s image of breathing is broader than the taking in of air to the body. Breath is seen to animate the landscape: Dans l’indistinct, ce qui ressort, c’est la charnière de l’étendue que notre souffle anime – comme le souffle de la terre que j’imagine en respirant. (“Écart non déchirement”, L’Incohérence, n. pag.)

He lays before us space that gradually emerges into clarity; at first, it is “ce qui ressort”, but it is then revealed that the space is the passive party, brought to life by “notre souffle”. The poet’s own breath is compared to the breath of the earth as he imagines it. But his landscape is more than a term of comparison; the world that is emerging is also a verbal one being created in conjunction with the imagination of the reader: “notre souffle”. Du Bouchet deliberately connects the living rhythms of the earth with the breathing that is poetic invention, and the mediating image for these two is frequently the physical breathing, often laboured with effort or the cold, of the subject in the elements. In “Ce que la lampe a brûlé”, he writes: Un chemin, comme un torrent sans souffle. Je prête mon souffle aux pierres. J’avance, avec de l’ombre sur les épaules. (Dans la chaleur, p. 77)

Here the mountain path seems to rush torrentially downwards without pausing for breath, possibly because the subject is following it down a steep slope. He writes that, as poetic subject, he lends it breath, which is true on two levels. First, as a walker he anthropomorphises the path because it appears to be moving rapidly, and breaks down the distinction between an inanimate object and human life. In addition, as poet he brings the path to life through his imagery. The life-giving process is not simply one way, however. He suggests precisely that it is by breathing animation into the landscape that he is himself able to move forward, both on his walk and in his writing. Central to many of du Bouchet’s texts is the action of walking, although it often remains implicit. Even where he makes it clear that the subject is experiencing the landscape from within rather

Words in the Air 69

than observing it, he rarely states that he is walking through it. Du Bouchet avoids any hint of mapped terrain or plotted progress, just as he evokes fragmented images rather than describing the elements of a scene through their spatial relationships. However, images of movement forward, or advancement, are often what link the disparate parts of a text. For instance, in the poem “L’Air soudain”, movement into the landscape is inseparable from the breathing that animates the textual form it is given: L’horizon diffus, à la coupure du souffle. J’avance dans le jour retentissant. La maison s’anime. L’air se fend. (Dans la chaleur, p. 44)

Images of undefined space are contrasted with the impression of sharp precision suggested by “coupure”. Breath is cut off, or taken away, while the day resounds forcefully. But even if the poetic subject is momentarily deprived of speech and taken into the landscape, his or her advancement causes the air to divide and the house to become animated. Air parts here as if it were solid matter that could split into two, but du Bouchet has not produced a metaphor; rather, he consistently presents air in this way. It is an invisible thickness, integral to the material world, but it is privileged because it is capable of parting to let us move through it. His insistence on its solidity serves to emphasise the effort required to make progress through a landscape and a text. Du Bouchet links movement in the landscape to division by exploiting multiple meanings in “Ce que la lampe a brûlé”. He writes: Notre faux enjambe la campagne. Nous allons plus vite que les routes. Plus vite qu’une voiture. Aussi vite que le froid. (Dans la chaleur, p. 78)

The action of scything, of cutting through crops, also permits movement through the countryside. Walking, in the literal action of straddling, is suggested through the choice of “enjambe”, which includes the word “jambe”. “Faux” also suggests a fault that might be made in writing, an image immediately reinforced by the reference to enjambement.

70 Provisionality and the Poem

Not only is the “nous” figure endowed by movement, its speed goes beyond walking pace (as the path beneath the walker’s feet seems to move), beyond even that of man-made transport, to be as fast as the cold, a phenomenon not normally associated with speed at all. Rather than simply accelerating through the landscape, the moving subjects and, by extension, the text, mingle with the elemental world. The subject in du Bouchet’s poetry does not passively submit to the forces of nature, and the natural world does not remain unaffected by its actions. When human movement into the atmosphere causes air to part, and the surface of the earth is disturbed by walking and ploughing, the landscape appears to undertake an answering movement. In the following section of this text, du Bouchet writes: “Déjà le pays perce” (p. 78). Indeed, “déjà” implies that it anticipated the movement of the subject and was animated by it. Suggestions of anticipation and repetition serve to involve time in the images of penetration and parting. For example, a text from “Un jour de plus augmenté d’un jour” includes the lines: Sur une déchirure des airs qui transhument – comme, dehors, la porte rouverte aussitôt. Le souffle. Tant que j’ai souffle.89

The composition of air from multiple particles is noted in the use of the plural, and it is employed as the subject of a verb that usually has animals as its object: “transhumer”. The image of moving to summer pastures evokes the transition from cold to warmth as well as movement in space. The air is also torn, which grants it the characteristics of solid matter rather than particles, and it is compared to a door, which usually marks the boundary between inside and outside; in this case, it is attributed to the outside. The door is not only immediately open, “aussitôt”, a fraction after the air is torn, but opens again: “rouverte”. By beginning with the preposition “sur”, du Bouchet prevents us from situating the image visually in space, and insists rather on the importance of breath. Once again, the transformation effected by a tear and an opening lasts as long as the poet’s breath.

89

L’Ajour (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 19.

Words in the Air 71

Du Bouchet often describes air in terms of a wall that must be broken through, whether or not a door is present. Walls also occur as images in their own right, but he tends to focus on their existence as surfaces with no solid depth attached. In these cases, the surface is a boundary between inside and outside, which it may or may not be possible to cross, but it is also a façade, a surface that implies depth without providing it. In the following image from Où le soleil, he disturbs our understanding of space by comparing the light that comes into a room with a cloud moving above a façade: L’été, peut-être, qui entre en plein jour dans le foyer comme un nuage en marche au-dessus des façades blanchies. (Dans la chaleur, p. 180)

The comparison between summer light and cloud is unsettling, and summer appears to be standing in for the sun, when we might expect a reverse image in which the sun would represent summer and heat metonymically. White walls imply the brilliance of the hot sun rather than the shadow clouds would cast. The difference between inside and outside is deliberately blurred to reveal that walls which apparently circumscribe areas could turn out only to be façades. Images of rooms recur in the poetry of Reverdy, who makes the window emblematic of the boundary between inside and out, which protects the self looking out, but also provides a means of interaction between the spaces it divides. 90 Du Bouchet goes further, complicating three dimensional space by taking from surface and depth the very characteristics that define them as opposites. In the text “Cession”, for instance, he writes: Ici, dans le monde immobile et bleu, j’ai presque atteint ce mur. Le fond du jour est encore devant nous. Le fond embrasé de la terre. Le fond et la surface du front, aplani par le même souffle, ce froid. (Dans la chaleur, p. 107)

90

See Andrew Rothwell’s discussion of the “chambre” in Textual Spaces: The Poetry of Pierre Reverdy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), pp. 91-106.

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The subject is drawn forward by a wall and by the limits of the day seen ahead. Both daylight and earth have depth, which the subject encounters through the forehead, the surface of the body. But then the distinction between them is eroded, they are “aplani par le même souffle”. The action of the “souffle” implies that language effects this transition; indeed, it appears to have occurred as a result of the similarity of the words “fond” and “front”. In the following section, the poetic self is also transformed. It has come up against a façade and lost its coherence, but is able to reconstruct itself: Je me recompose au pied de la façade comme l’air bleu au pied des labours. Rien ne désaltère mon pas. (p. 107)

Just as air is parted and reconfigured when something moves through it, so is the subject reassembled in words after going beyond the surface the world presented to it. This process is what enables it to advance into the landscape and the text. Language undergoes an analogous transformation in du Bouchet’s hands. He frequently establishes a connection between the space in which we live and breathe, which is made up of air, and the page of writing or drawing, through his qualification of air as white, writing in the poem “Laisses”: “J’ai vu la blancheur de l’air dehors” (L’Ajour, p. 76). Among his texts on the visual arts, which will be the subject of chapter 3, are important writings on Alberto Giacometti. Du Bouchet appears most interested in Giacometti’s drawings, which are generally less well known than his distinctive sculptures. Du Bouchet does not attempt to describe individual works, but prefers to evoke the impression of movement he experiences when viewing the drawings. In Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous, for example, he conveys the paradoxical impression that a figure is approaching the viewer while also entering into the paper on which it is drawn: La part laissée à l’air grandit, comme la figure traversée rentre, en “nous” parvenant, dans le papier qui l’environne.91 91

André du Bouchet, Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), p. 40.

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Two effects of Giacometti’s drawings stand out for du Bouchet. First, he suggests that they appear to maintain a certain distance from the viewer, even when, as is the case here, they also give the impression of advancing. Secondly, du Bouchet insists as much on the white space around the figure as on the pencil marks themselves. Here he specifically relates the white paper to air, and suggests that as the figure appears to be in motion, the part that air occupies increases. It is notable that he does not describe the figure as shrinking, but rather makes the increasing air and paper the focus of the image. Air is included in du Bouchet’s poetry through the white spaces of the page, and remarks in his notebooks imply that this is less the result of assembling words and blanks than the hard-won product of the reduction, even destruction of poetry: …je n’ai pu travailler que pour détruire mon poème …Tant j’ai travaillé pour détruire ce qu’il y avait de trop – j’avais créé l’air – fait place. (Carnets, p. 42)

In order to remove superfluous elements from the text, the poet must destroy it, and allow room for the space around, the page and air. This is much more than a simple concern for concision; rather, it integrates the poem into the air of the page, and therefore into the material world that is its inspiration and subject, by the reverse process of giving the air room to penetrate the words. Later in Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous, he explicitly relates language to the drawn figures he is examining: La parole qui sur tel instant aura cessé d’être la nôtre seulement, apparaît elle aussi comme une figure dans l’air ( à flanc des montagnes de ce sol ) – en suspens elle aussi sur ses abîmes… Et qui se défait. (Qui, p. 71.)

Ensuring that language is dismantled and aerated means giving up ownership of it. Words are released from our control and become “comme une figure dans l’air”, close also to the earth, but suspended over emptiness. Du Bouchet never implies that words are lost to us, however. Instead, they grant us access to the world around and make us part of it in a way that would not be possible were they to remain

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separate tools to describe it and we were confined to the position of objective observer. In the poem “Cette surface”, the self embraces the earth: De la terre, je ne connais que la surface. Je l’ai embrassée. (Dans la chaleur, p. 184),

and eventually merges with it: Plus chaude que moi, la paille qui enveloppe notre pas venu de terre – notre pas comme cette clarté dans le corps de la terre. (p. 187)

The straw is enveloping, but this is not a simple image of the self being taken into the earth; the step taken by the walker has emerged from the earth, not sunk into it, while the earth is both described as a body and appears to possess the clarity we would associate more with the sky above. The poetic subject has overcome the role assigned to it of walker on the surface of the earth to find that its step emerges from the ground. Du Bouchet’s poetry is above all an intense, highly original evocation of the elemental landscape, but nowhere are the constituent features of this clearly outlined. Rather, he conveys the overwhelming presence and endurance of the earth, rocks, ice and fire. His insistence on the solidity of air and the effort required to move through it reminds us that there is no empty space in the landscape and that the subject can never stand outside it. In order to demonstrate that we do not exist beyond the world with an objective perspective on it, he ruptures and dismantles the boundaries between self and environment, interior and exterior space, earth and air, and, above all, language and what it evokes. Once descriptive, representational language has been deprived of its superior position on the world, it can begin to construct a poetic world and a poetic subject from the inside. He writes in Retours sur le vent, a text whose title emphasises repeated movement and its ambiguous relationship with the air:

Words in the Air 75 si, mêlé au vent qui chasse sur les maisons fendues, j’arrivais à être où je suis, je me verrais entier à nouveau – et dehors. (L’Ajour, p. 149)

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From Air suivi de Défets: “Agrandissement” (pp. 33-34); “Dictée” (pp. 39-45); “Grain” (p. 52) Du Bouchet’s collection Air was his first. The texts studied below cannot, therefore, be taken as representative of his poetry as a whole. They are generally less elliptical than some of his later poetic writing, and his incorporation of the space of the page into the text would develop more fully. On the other hand, there is an astonishing continuity throughout his work where vocabulary and setting are concerned. Many of the recurrent images by which we recognise his writing are already well established in this collection, and the poems reveal a keen interest in the mountainous landscape; it is rare to find a later publication that contain no references to this. Images of air occur in each of the three poems reproduced below, and together they explore a range of elements important in du Bouchet’s poetic world. “Agrandissement” and “Dictée” both consist of sections of text of reasonably even length, and cover two and seven pages respectively. “Grain” adopts a more recognisable poetic vertical form on a single page. Agrandissement Que la lumière l’éclaire jusqu’au fond, recule ses murs blancs et la couvre d’un plafond. La chambre. L’œil calme du papier. La porte sèche. Le revers du feu brûle dans la chambre. Air lisse, sans un nœud. Glacé à l’endroit. Lit calé dans le mur d’angle.

Jour équarri.

Fenêtre de la personne sur la fraîcheur sans qu’elle penche. Dans l’autre pièce, les volets deviennent blancs. PAGE BREAK Un bras tendu à deux étages de la terre, dans le souffle.

Words in the Air 77 Expansion Let the light illuminate it to the end, push back its white walls and cover it with a ceiling. The bedroom. The calm eye of the paper. The arid door. The fire’s reverse burns in the bedroom. Smooth air, without a glitch. Frozen on the right side. Bed wedged in the wall’s corner.

Hewn day.

The person’s window on freshness without needing to lean. In the other room, the shutters turn white. PAGE BREAK An arm stretched out two floors from the ground, in the breath.

The transitions that operate in this poem are barely perceptible, because it creates an atmosphere of stillness and calm. We seem to see a brightly lit room that is simply named: “ La chambre ”, the noun isolated by gaps on either side. The room’s whiteness is related to white paper, but there is no anguished writer’s block; the paper looks calmly back at us. The air in the room is not disturbed in any way: “Air lisse, sans un nœud”. There is a bed in the corner. This indicates a human presence, which recurs in the form of a possible figure at an upstairs window who does nothing more than stretch out an arm. On closer inspection, however, we realise that this is not a motionless, silent scene. Rather, it engages with absence to evoke and produce change. We are not looking at a brightly lit bedroom, but reading about the desire there this should be the case: “que la lumière l’éclaire jusqu’au fond, recule ses murs blancs et la couvre d’un plafond”. There is no interior space, and the subject is wishing that the light would create one. Of course, the poet has done so, producing a visual image of three-dimensional space from his calm, white paper. He then introduces a fire, but this, too, is an absence. “Le revers du feu” is what burns, and it does not fulfil its function. There is no heat, and the air, which is on the opposite side, remains frozen. In this hypothetical room, with a fire whose “other side” it is impossible to

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imagine, we can no longer label the right and wrong sides of things with any certainty. It would seem that the bed, at least, occupies space in a reasonable fashion, being wedged into the corner. But the terms “mur” and “angle” have been reversed, so we cannot attribute the corner securely to the wall. It is not solid walls that have been squared off, or hewn into geometrical form, but the day itself. This returns us to a more usual image of light entering a room and taking on its dimensions, but our understanding of the distinction between interior, circumscribed space and the formless outside has, by this stage, been thoroughly disrupted. At this point, halfway through the six sections of text, a person is introduced: “Fenêtre de la personne sur la fraîcheur sans qu’elle penche.” This disconcerting phrase is granted internal unity by the alternating alliteration of “f” and “p”. The window is linked to coolness, perhaps suggesting colder air coming in through an open window. The person relates to the action of not leaning, although “elle” could equally well refer to the window or the cool temperature, both of which are indicated by feminine nouns, because the sentence is so far removed from standard grammatical rules. The lack of leaning is as present as movement would have been. Most importantly, this person is also no one, “personne”. Like the fire, the person and the action of leaning are both present and absent at the same time. The final two lines, which end the first page and make up the only text on the second, do not evoke absences. We are told, simply, that in the other room, the shutters turn white. The other room, not mentioned before, is presented as existing and not as the product of wishful thinking. The shutters’ action of becoming white is not one that the subject would like to happen and creates from an absence by writing it down; rather, the use of the present tense means that it is always in the process of happening, as we read. But we cannot help but wonder about their previous colour, because there is no colour in this text other than white; it is in the walls of the room, the page and the frozen air. The image of the shutters turning white reminds us that the scene is not one of unchanging calm. If it is white, it is because it is being created on the page. Shutters have an even more liminal status than windows, because they can be open, letting in light and providing a point of

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access between inside and outside, or they can, in their closed state, shut out all light and create a wall with only the potential for an opening. The final line of the poem suggests that this opening in the wall has been breached, because an arm is held out. We are not told that it is stretched out of the window, but our viewpoint appears to be located outside the building, looking up to the second floor. It is only at this stage, the very end of the text, that movement is suggested: “dans le souffle”. The shadowy human figure would be able to sense the movement of the air on his or her outstretched arm. The breath is performative, and has brought the scene into existence. Dictée Il faut peut-être s’astreindre à cette dictée. Mais rien ne m’astreint. Dehors indifférent. Le vent le permet.

1 Une bouche fraîche piétine l’air. La nuit roule encore une fois. Ma route reprend dans la neige. Tu apparais, quand je tourne la tête, comme une chose sauvage. 2 Feu ou fenêtre au flanc de la neige. 3 Marcher – comme nous parlons – sans cesse. Sans avancer d’un pas. 4 Le nuage couvre la route d’un nuage noir, souffle noir à la porte de l’hiver. Je maintiens ma tête hors de la terre remplie de morceaux d’animaux et de pierres.

80 Provisionality and the Poem 5 Le harnais qui glisse sur l’épaule de la terre. Deux fléaux aux chaînons froids. La terre apparaît partout où je sèche. Ce n’est pas un être achevé, mais quelque chose qui souffle. On entend son souffle. On voit tous ses métiers. Les cailloux nus comme les arbres. Comme la terre. 6 Je passe la nuit sur terre avec ces mots qui restent froids en attendant, peut-être, la première heure du souffle. 7 Comme je sors, je suis lu. Plusieurs fois, j’ai été terre, plusieurs fois comme un mot. 8 L’anse rouge. Le tranchant de l’air. Ce que je suis, est encore plus froid. 9 La terre basse, qui parle à voix basse, me change en terre.

10 Adossé à l’air avec la vaisselle partout où l’air a fini.

Words in the Air 81 11 Le jour dont la main me serre je respire à sa place dévidant cette route froide dehors jusqu’à terre ce n’est pas mon feu c’est une autre chaleur son ciel où nous sommes enfermés. 12 Le froid est le froid de la pièce autour de l’or quand j’ai allumé. L’encre qui se décolore aussi, je la réchauffe, comme elle sèche, entre mes mains rougies.

Dictation Perhaps this dictation is compelling. But nothing compels me. Indifferent outside. The wind allows it.

1 A cold mouth tramples the air. The night rolls once more. I set off again in the snow. You appear, when I turn my head, like a wild thing.

82 Provisionality and the Poem 2 Fire or window on the snow’s flank. 3 Walking – as we talk – without stopping. one step forward.

Without taking

4 Cloud covers the road with a black cloud, black breath at the gate of winter. I hold my head up out of the earth filled with fragments of animal and with stones. 5 The harness sliding onto earth’s shoulders. cold chains.

Two flails with

The earth appears wherever I dry up. It’s not a finished being, but something that breathes. You can hear it breathing. You can see all its workings. Pebbles bare like the trees. Like the earth. 6 I spend the night on earth with these words that stay cold while waiting, perhaps, for the first hour of breathing. 7 As I come out, I am read. Many times, I have been earth, many times like a word.

Words in the Air 83 8 The red arch. The air’s cutting edge. colder.

What I am is even

9 The low earth, which speaks in a low voice, changes me into earth. 10 Joined to the air with crockery wherever the air has ended. 11 The day whose hand grips me I breathe in its place unwinding this cold road outside until the earth it is not my fire it’s another heat its sky where we are confined. 12 The cold is the room’s cold around the gold when I’ve turned on the lamp.

84 Provisionality and the Poem I warm the ink, which also loses its colour, as it dries, between my reddened hands.

The poem consists of twelve numbered sections of varying length, preceded by four lines positioned as an epigraph would be. Many of the themes that characterise du Bouchet’s later work are in evidence here: the cold, snow, walking and also the experience of writing. The text occupies a relatively small part of each page, so the impression of white dominates. Its title implies that the poet will not be in control of the content of the text, but the introductory statement claims the opposite, “mais rien ne m’astreint”. The reflexive verb “s’astreindre” transforms the writer from the object “me” into an active subject who can choose what to include: “il faut peut-être s’astreindre à cette dictée”. The natural world is both personified, “le vent le permet” and entirely impersonal: “dehors indifférent”. The first section sets the scene, albeit elliptically, by presenting the wildness of a walk in the snow. An unspecified “tu” figure looms up when the subject turns around: “comme une chose sauvage”, barely human. It has been rendered unfamiliar by the hostile conditions. The first element of the text is the disturbing image “une bouche fraîche piétine l’air”. The mouth is detached from the body and prefigures metonymically the experience of walking that will be evoked. It is cold and tramples on the air as the walker moves through the snow. Perhaps the walker is noticing his own rasping breath as if from the outside; he is estranged from his own body.92 The harshness of the situation is emphasised, rather than diminished, by the suggestion that the activity is habitual: “La nuit roule encore une fois. Ma route reprend dans la neige”. The journey seems endless. The following section appears unconnected, and it introduces an unexpected element into the scene of extreme cold and snow, “feu”, and immediately layers it with the suggestion that it might, in fact, be a window: “ou fenêtre”.93 The fire or light that would shine through a window at night provides a link to a warm interior that contrasts with the cold scene outside. The last section of the poem refers back to this and confirms it, as the poet describes the cold of a 92

Du Bouchet’s Le Surcroît also contains a fragment that links the air, rawness and the figure of the other: “l’autre est la crudité de l’air” (L’Ajour, p. 133). 93 While du Bouchet does not employ the term “embrasure”, which is a motif in Jacques Dupin’s poetry, he does evoke its dual meaning of fire and a window.

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room around the golden light of a lamp: “Le froid est le froid de la pièce autour de l’or quand j’ai allumé”. The walking subject is now in the artificial light of an interior, but, despite the lamp, the cold has been carried over from the exterior scene to the room. The lamp does not produce heat; it is golden rather than fiery and remains surrounded by the cold. In the second section the window is positioned laterally on the snow, with no suggestion that its warmth will cause melting. The use of the word “flanc” for the hillside introduces animal imagery, implying that the snow might have internal warmth. A reference to animals occurs on the following page: “Je maintiens ma tête hors de la terre remplie de morceaux d’animaux et de pierres”. While stones and rocks are frequently evoked by du Bouchet, and the walker is constantly aware of the earth through which s/he has contact with the world, it is extremely unusual to find an image of the subject being drawn into the earth almost against his or her will. Nor does du Bouchet tend to imagine the soil in terms of animal remains; his later poetry is almost completely devoid of natural creatures. The earth is made into a beast of burden by “le harnais qui glisse sur l’épaule de la terre. Deux fléaux aux chaînons froids”. The flail with its cold chains might refer to the weight of the dark cloud covering the road that is evoked at the beginning of the preceding section. The resulting sense of oppression, emphasised by the other meaning of “fléau”, “curse”, is all the more effective for being separated from the sight that prompted the metaphor. The cloud is weightier owing to the repetition of the words “nuage” and “noir”, while the “souffle”, which might have introduced some movement, suggests rather a threatening wind. The word “souffle” recurs on the following page, first as evidence of a creature that might be the walker or the walker’s companion, but which appears even wilder and more unfamiliar than the “chose sauvage” of the first section: “Ce n’est pas un être achevé, mais quelque chose qui souffle. On | entend son souffle”. This being is completely foreign to the writer, and barely qualifies as a living creature; it is “quelque chose”. The poetic subject is distinct from what is breathing, and therefore from the communication provided by speech and poetry. In the following section, however, breath is associated with the ending of the night; words lie dormant until the first breath of day grants them freedom:

86 Provisionality and the Poem Je passe la nuit sur terre avec ces mots qui restent froids en attendant, peut-être, la première heure du souffle.

Here the subject is on the earth, rather than in it, and the cold stands in for frozen potential expression, which will come to life with breath and daylight. It appears, therefore, that writing is associated with warming up and thawing out. When walking in the snow, constant movement achieves no progress. The third section reads: “Marcher – comme nous parlons – sans cesse. Sans avancer | d’un pas”. By the fifth section the earth is beginning to show through the snow: “La terre apparaît partout où je sèche”. “Sécher” also means to dry up, or find one cannot continue speaking, which contrasts with the ink that will dry out in the last phrase of the poem. The earth, it seems, emerges better when the subject is silent. Stones, trees and earth are now visible; the nouns are not simply listed, but are compared to one another: “Les cailloux nus comme les arbres. Comme la terre”. These are similes where it is impossible to tell which term is the original referent and which the point of comparison. The reappearance of the earth and the new day seems to allow expression to come to life, but this also involves exposure; the poetic subject is said to be read by others, in a use of the passive that is unusual in French: “Comme je sors | je suis lu”. The process of being buried and then revealed is repeated, both for the subject and his or her language: “Plusieurs fois, j’ai été terre, plusieurs fois comme un | mot”. As the act of writing transforms an experience into words, the “je” is not separated from the earth, but becomes more like its surroundings: “La terre basse, qui parle à voix basse, me change en terre”. This circular phrase, of which the earth is the beginning and the end, reveals the nature of the earth’s dictation; its voice is low and subtle so that the subject must become part of it in order to hear. The air, by contrast, is full of paradox. It has a cutting edge, “le tranchant de l’air”, but the subject still adheres to it: “Adossé à l’air”. It is even said to have limits, “partout | où l’air a fini”. By the eleventh section, which is unusual in that it consists of short lines arranged vertically, and is therefore more reminiscent of verse, the subject appears interchangeable with its surroundings. Du Bouchet reverses the habitual functions of man and landscape; the

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subject has taken over from the air: “je respire à sa place”, and upset standard grammar: Le jour dont la main me serre.

Through incorporation in the earth, the self seems to have gone beyond its own boundaries and become foreign to itself: “ce n’est pas mon feu | c’est une autre chaleur”. The last line of the section introduces a “nous” that may refer to the walking companion, but appears rather to be an identification of the self and its surroundings, both of which are trapped by the sky: son ciel où nous sommes enfermés.

The final double page, consisting of two sentences, takes the subject away from the cold frozen landscape into a lighted interior. It is only by the last unnumbered section, perhaps after the end of the dictation, that the process of writing is allowed to begin. It is seen as a thawing-out and warming of ink that had threatened to become colourless. The poet is able to effect this through the warmth of his reddened hands, which appear to have been returned to him after being taken into the bitter earth and air: “L’encre qui se décolore aussi, je | la réchauffe, comme elle sèche, entre mes mains rougies”. The text comes into being once the process of identification between the subject and the environment is complete. Grain

Grain

Sauf avec l’air par-dessus que je fends il faut plusieurs routes pour avancer vivant je retourne les terres faiblement comme le grain

Except with the air up above that I part many roads are needed to move forward alive I turn over the land feebly like the grain

88 Provisionality and the Poem sans voir le guidon mais aveugle et de loin

without seeing the marker but blind and from afar

le jour rayonnant

the shining day

ce n’est pas dehors qui avance c’est le moteur moi.

outside isn’t advancing the engine is myself.

Although du Bouchet does not disturb the left-hand margin in this poem, it is typical of his later work in many ways. As in “Dictée”, it includes images of air, the land, roads and daylight, and involves movement into the landscape by a depersonalised subject who parts the air and turns over the earth. It does not evoke the environment by description, but nor does it connect the subject to its surroundings through sensation. There is no mention of sound, touch, taste or smell, and although roads, earth and light are present, the subject appears unable to see them: “sans voir”, “aveugle”. What might be left of the scene and the self is the question posed by this short text. Its only punctuation is an opening capital letter and a full stop at the end. These two marks suggest that the poem should be read as a single utterance; it avoids the impression of unrelated fragments that might result from the total suppression of punctuation that is so common to twentieth-century French verse. It cannot be read as a prose sentence, however, because it is divided into brief lines, and in three instances these consist of only one word. It has a measured pace, and frustrates the reader’s search for sense by refusing to indicate when units of meaning are completed. For example, line five, “il faut plusieurs routes”, could be an isolated statement, but it could be a condition: “il faut plusieurs routes / pour avancer”. The next line might also be included in the phrase: “il faut plusieurs routes / pour avancer / vivant”. On the other hand, “vivant” could relate adverbially to the following line: “vivant / je retourne”. The dual meaning of “je retourne” as the intransitive “I come back” and the transitive “I turn over” serves to link it either with the line that precedes it or with the subsequent one: “je retourne / les terres”. It seems clear that “faiblement” should describe the manner in which the subject turns over the land, but the point of comparison is surprising: a seed or grain

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is sown in earth turned by a plough, but it is not sufficient to turn over the soil itself, however feebly. This is where the multiple meanings of the title term come into play. As well as being used for various kinds of grains, seeds and pips, and evoking a small amount of something, as in English, the use of “le grain” has further implications. It means a squall, which brings violent gusts of wind and rain that would be powerful enough to disturb the earth. It suggests tools because it can mean a metal pivot. In the art of engraving, whose vocabulary du Bouchet would have known through his work with artists, it refers to the effect created by marks engraved over one another in different directions. The image of grooves and ridges could be linked visually to the texture of ploughed earth. Texture is also important to the sense of “le grain” as the texture of skin or paper. Du Bouchet often includes oblique references to writing and paper in his texts about the landscape. Although the only human figure clearly present in this poem is the “je”, which is impersonal, human tasks hover behind the imagery of agriculture, craftsmanship and writing. One might even see in the turning of the earth “comme le grain” a hint of the turning of rosary beads, although religious imagery is not a feature of du Bouchet’s texts. As the figure advances into the landscape, an echo of the expression “être dans le grain”, or being at ease, could also come to mind. The multiple approaches this text invites are suggested by the phrase “plusieurs routes”, although these appear to be a necessity, not simply opportunities, for the subject’s survival. Perhaps the poem is implying that the subject must exist in various potential forms if it is to become a textual reality at all. One stable marker does stand out in the centre of the text, “le guidon”, but it remains unseen. Among various meanings suggesting markers or guides, “le guidon” refers to a small pennant in a field (or battlefield), and a marker indicating a vein in the landscape. The latter sense would integrate a further rent or weakness into a poem where these have already been evoked directly in the lines “l’air | par-dessus | que je fends” and “faiblement”. In addition, “le guidon” also means the handlebars on a bicycle, an unlikely intrusion at first, but a possible one since the subject appears to be moving through the landscape on roads.

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Blindness is combined with a visual image in that the subject appears sightless, but states that the day is shining; “et de loin” could refer both to the position of the marker and to the bright light in the far distance. The insistence on blindness means that we do not necessarily visualise sunlight; the placing of the phrase “le jour rayonnant” in an isolated position after fifteen uninterrupted lines of text allows it to be considered as an unqualified presence, not presented, described or affected by any external force. However, the final three lines of the text form a confident conclusion that positions the subject as active, neither objective observer of a scene nor passive recipient of its actions. The decreasing line length insists on the final image, which is “moi”, the self as motivating force. In its positioning alone at the end of the poem, it mirrors the opening word, “sauf”, which, isolated as the first line, created an absence from the start of the text; it suggests that an unnamed object is all there is. “Sauf” is followed by the parting of the air, which reminds us of the existence of air as matter, but immediately introduces a gap; there can only be emptiness when air, which usually fills a vacuum, is pulled apart. No road, or route, is favoured because many are necessary, so we are not given any indication of direction. Even the earth, which appears to be a stable presence, is disturbed and then rendered invisible by blindness. The scene has been reduced to a minimum, which serves to highlight the motivating presence of the shining day in the distance. It does not matter if the horizon is inaccessible, because it appears to invite the self to forward movement. What is left at the end of the text, as is so often the case in du Bouchet’s poetry, is not a picture of a scene, but a confident subject that has taken shape through its ability to advance into the landscape.

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ii. Jaccottet: Floating Images Jaccottet lives in the same area of the South of France that inspired du Bouchet, but his texts do not present a sparse elemental mountainscape. Rather, his landscape is teeming with plants, home to birds and brought alive by rivers and sunlight. The titles of many of his publications indicate that the natural world is a central figure: Airs, Paysages avec figures absentes, À la lumière d’hiver, Pensées sous les nuages, La Semaison, À travers un verger, Les Cormorans, Cahier de verdure, La Promenade sous les arbres.94 The human presence is veiled in the titles, implied through the actions of walking, thinking, or notemaking. These volumes are also representative of Jaccottet’s work in that they cover verse and prose; in some cases, such as Cahier de verdure, they contain both forms. This chapter will focus principally on Jaccottet’s verse, with some reference to his prose poetry. A feature of the prose is that it tends to mingle poetry with meditations or discussions of the image-making process. Jaccottet’s poetic world is one of gentleness and change, and he creates a sense of the ephemeral. These are all qualities associated with air. The very form of Jaccottet’s images is fleeting and hesitant. At times they appear to hover briefly before moving on, suggesting the real through glimpsed instants rather than extended descriptions. Correspondingly, images of air in many forms traverse all of his poetry; in particular, air is present as soft breezes, wispy clouds and mist that hovers over the landscape. Unlike du Bouchet, he rarely presents it in terms of a storm or strong wind. The epigraph he chose for his collection Airs, taken from Joubert, is indicative: “Notre vie est du vent tissé” (Poésie, p. 94). The image emphasises that human life is textured, but also fragile, layered and in transition. Joubert’s phrase is likely to appeal to Jaccottet’s sense that our life is inseparable from the natural world. The airy forms of mist and smoke are especially prevalent in Jaccottet’s work. Their multiple particles are constantly moving and dispersing; more and more air is gradually introduced. They link the elements by their transformations from one state into another. Fire, 94

La Promenade sous les arbres (Lausanne: Mermod, 1957); Les Cormorans (Marseille: Éditions Idumée, 1980); La Semaison: Carnets 1954-1979 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

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which needs air, creates smoke, and mist hovers between water and air. Mist and smoke are light and have blurred outlines. Anything seen through them will appear hazy and shimmering, taking on their qualities. Mist often occurs at dawn, probably the most significant time of transition in Jaccottet’s poetry. As the landscape becomes visible with the increasing light, any mist that forms contributes to the impression that the solid features are in flux, and that the world is literally changing with the new day. Of course, he is not alone in favouring such images. Bachelard explains that mist is diffuse and constantly being reformed. It therefore corresponds to and incites reverie in the poet (L’Air, pp. 225-226). Jaccottet’s early prose work La Promenade sous les arbres elaborates the aspects of the natural world that most fascinate him, both in imaginative prose and through discussion of why they are so important. For example, he realises that the mountains are most attractive when only their summits are visible, writing: “c’est leur légèreté de buée qui m’obsède” (p. 64). He insists that this state must be momentary; if it were permanent, it would not be so valuable. Such brief glimpses are necessarily unique. Even if the same process were to occur every day, the precise conditions would vary and, crucially, they would not be viewed in an identical way. Although the observer in Jaccottet’s poetry is reticent, it is through his or her particular connection with a scene that this is perceived. One of the major similarities between Jaccottet’s work and that of du Bouchet and Noël is that the subject is impersonal, but also inseparable from its environment. In this text, Jaccottet explicitly states that such moments of being in a landscape are what render its description true; a subjective evocation is more truthful than a distanced one would be. He cannot claim to show what always happens to the landscape in the mist, because he is so attentive to minor variations and change. His work is made up of multiple instances, because that is how the world exists in time: Ce qui me reste en effet de tous ces instants où j’ai regardé les montagnes, où elles m’ont ému et rendu plus étonné d’être au monde, cela peut tenir en ces mots qui me sont venus plus haut sous la plume: ‘montagnes légères’, ‘rocs changés en buées’, en ces images qui, tour à tour, essayaient de dire la vérité, non pas sur le monde ni sur moi, mais peut-être sur nos rapports. (Promenade, p. 66)

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Mist often hovers on the surface of lakes in Jaccottet’s poetry. A lake does not flow as a river does, so any movement is gentler. He rarely presents an entirely still surface of water, however, because that would provide a clear reflection. Mist either obscures the surface entirely, covering the boundary between water and air, or creates blurred reflections that correspond to his evocations of shimmering outlines. The image of mist on an otherwise mirrored surface also suggests breath on glass. The human presence is often hazily implied by Jaccottet through references to images in mirrors. In some texts, it is more explicit, and the face appears through a mist of tears. In the following poem from “À la lumière d’hiver”, for example, eyes are clouded by tears as lakes are by mist: Les larmes quelquefois montent aux yeux comme d’une source, elles sont de la brume sur des lacs, un trouble du jour intérieur, une eau que la peine a salée. (À la lumière, p. 93)

Here Jaccottet weaves together a number of images of water: tears, springs, mist, lakes and the sea. Tears well up as if from a spring, because they are evidence of hidden disturbance. This invites us to look beyond the surface of lakes as well as beyond the faces we encounter. Inside and outside are linked as the troubled interior is described as “jour”; the crying human figure and the earth from which the spring emerges are not described as dark or unknown, but visible through what is revealed on the surface. Pain is said to have added salt to the water. The salt water of tears also recalls the sea, to which the term “trouble” is more likely to be applied than to lakes. This is typical of Jaccottet’s ability to connect aspects of the natural world with human emotion so that neither can be clearly defined as referent or term of comparison. Rather, each illuminates the other and the human being is bound ever closer to his or her environment. While the two realms are intimately related, Jaccottet refuses to see nature only in terms of human concerns. He insists always on its absolute reality, and aims at evoking it with as little embellishment as possible. The extent to which it is possible to write transparently, without imaginative imagery, is of course always debatable, not least in Jaccottet’s own work. He states his wish to reduce poetry to its

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simplest form, while remaining aware that much of his poetic writing is dependent on chains of images. This continual paradox will be discussed in chapter 5. In Après beaucoup d’années, he can say without reservation, however, that the world around him remains vividly alive and real to him regardless of his personal concerns: Celui qui douterait que le monde soit, qui douterait, lui-même, d’être, se guérit, ici, de ce qui n’est plus que maladie, ou faiblesse, ou lâcheté. Cette terrasse aux dalles disjointes, envahies par l’herbe couleur de paille, est aussi réelle, sous cette lumière-ci, que la plus vive douleur. (Après, p. 24)

Jaccottet shows how the linear trajectory of our own lives, awareness of which causes so much anxiety and sorrow, can be understood in terms of renewal and progress as much as inevitable decline. He favours the image of the tree, because it persists through the seasons to grow taller each year. In the poem “Arbres I” from Airs, trees emerge from the confusion and opacity of the world and introduce more light and air among their leaves as they expand: Du monde confus, opaque des ossements et des graines ils s’arrachent avec patience afin d’être chaque année plus criblés d’air (Poésie, p. 138).

Trees are granted the active power to tear their growth from the world, which is a mixture of bones and seed, or death and rebirth. Their progress is slow and steady. The airiness that they gradually introduce into their shape, as branches multiply and produce leaves, serves to counter the dense matter from which they stemmed. But it also mirrors it, because their form refuses defined outlines and draws attention to the air that can break through; movement is still favoured over distinct shapes. Bachelard discusses the movement our imagination attributes to trees: l’arbre, être statique par excellence, reçoit de notre imagination une vie dynamique merveilleuse. Sourde, lente, invincible poussée! Conquête de légèrté, fabrication de choses volantes, de feuilles aériennes et frémissantes. (L’Air, p. 235)

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As well as drawing comfort from observation of the natural world, the subject appeals to it for guidance. In the following poem from À la lumière d’hiver, air is invoked, this time in its cold clarity: Aide-moi maintenant, air noir et frais, cristal noir. Les légères feuilles bougent à peine, comme pensées d’enfants endormis. Je traverse la distance transparente, et c’est le temps même qui marche dans ce jardin, comme il marche plus haut de toit en toit, d’étoile en étoile, c’est la nuit même qui passe. (À la lumière, p. 85)

There is not much of a breeze in this text, and definitely no hazy mist or smoke. The air is black and clear, and the leaves are hardly moving. The simile introduced suggests not only night, but also a dreamlike atmosphere and a contrast between childlike innocence and the adult realisation that time passes. The subject crosses distance and moves through time. This is produced in the text by enjambement, which creates forward movement: “cristal / noir”, “traverse / la distance”, “le temps / même”, “d’étoile / en étoile”. Jaccottet frequently relates movement in space to temporal progression. Time itself is spatialised, as it steps from roof to sleeping roof, and from star to star; the far dimensions of the universe are included in this scene. There is nothing to obstruct the movement, or the view of it, because distance is transparent. This crystalline clarity is as much a feature of Jaccottet’s work as hazy forms, which shows that he does not only consider temporality in terms of potential transformation. At times, it can have an alarming directness. Transparency is an ambiguous image in Jaccottet’s poetry, because it relates both to his insistence on an evocation of the real that is as straightforward as possible, and to the very different concentration on shimmering, changing forms. Paradoxically, it seems that it is only by paying attention to variations in detail that the subject can come close to achieving an apparently transparent presentation of his or her surroundings. Not only does Jaccottet value moments of change in nature, he also writes in La Promenade sous les arbres that the potential for transformation can become visible in apparently immobile things: Sous un certain éclairage, les choses n’apparaissent plus dans leurs correspondances secrètes, mais dans leur possibilité de métamorphose; nous

96 Provisionality and the Poem ne voyons plus simplement un monde immobile dont les structures et l’éventuelle unité sont devenues visibles par la puissance enivrée de nos yeux, mais un monde prêt à changer, qui se meut, qui tend à une autre forme ou paraît au moins en contenir la possibilité. (pp. 116-117)

He echoes Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances” and possibly his injunction to his readers to “enivrez-vous”, “de vin, de poésie ou de vertu”. But Jaccottet rejects the idea that the gaze can uncover underlying connections between things. Rather, he proposes that the world is inherently unstable. 95 Jaccottet always celebrates the provisionality of things, and the metamorphosis that they promise. That is why the liminal moments of the day and of the year are so central to his work, and explains his attempts to capture the instant of transformation in his poetry. Throughout his work, beginning with the earliest collections, he has set poems at moments of change. For instance, “Les Distances”, from his second major collection, L’Ignorant, takes place at dusk: Tournent les martinets dans les hauteurs de l’air : plus haut encore tournent les astres invisibles. Que le jour se retire aux extrémités de la terre, apparaîtront ces feux sur l’étendue de sombre sable… Ainsi nous habitons un domaine de mouvements et de distances; ainsi le cœur va de l’arbre à l’oiseau, de l’oiseau aux astres lointains, de l’astre à son amour. Ainsi l’amour dans la maison fermée s’accroît, tourne et travaille, serviteur des soucieux portant une lampe à la main. (Poésie, p. 84)

The poem is in two halves, the first evoking the swirling flight of swifts at sunset, when the sky turns fiery and the stars are about to become visible. Circular planetary movement corresponds to that of the birds, linking natural life, which necessarily ages and dies, and the cosmos, which appears to be in eternal movement. The distance between our immediate surroundings and the universe is remarked upon (and emphasised in the title), but it is also reduced by the harmony created. 95

Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondances”, in Œuvres complètes, I, ed. by Claude Pichois (Paris: Geneva, 1975), p. 11; “Enivrez-vous”, in Œuvres complètes, I, p. 337.

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In the longer second section, human life is brought into the same domain by comparison between the domestic and the external. The heart is connected through contiguity and ascending movement to trees, which are outside the house, but have fixed roots and grow upwards, then to birds, the stars, and finally to love. Love is seen to begin in the heart and live in the home, but it also encompasses all the elements evoked. Love is made the necessary subject of the final sentence, which opens: “ainsi l’amour”, and it is shown to develop and work within the confines of the home. The last image directs our attention to human care that persists and changes over time, but is also related to the moment of transition in the outside world; the lamps are lit as the sun sets and the stars prepare to emerge. In Jaccottet’s work the poetic voice, or breath, is intimately connected to the rhythms of nature, which combine the forward movement of birth to death with the cycle of renewal in the seasons. The collection Airs, with its title that also suggests music, is exemplary. The short texts appear as light as air; they hover fleetingly then are gone. They are, above all, responses to moments of transformation, and function as sequences of poems, each with distinct characteristics; it seems, for example, that the first three sections evoke early spring, summer and autumn respectively. They share with haiku poetry the pinpointing of the scene at a particular moment of the day or year. It is pointed out by Yasuaki Kawanabe, however, that Jaccottet did not adapt the haiku form in his own poetry, but rather found his preferences and style confirmed by it. 96 In the following poem, Jaccottet evokes the change from summer to autumn by encouraging nature to act: Pommes éparses sur l’aire du pommier Vite! Que la peau s’empourpre avant l’hiver! (Poésie, p. 133)

Just as the trees were considered actively to push upwards and introduce more air between their branches, here the apples are exhorted to ripen before winter arrives, as if their ripening were not 96

“Philippe Jaccottet et le haïku: sur la poétique du on”, Revue des lettres modernes: Écritures contemporaines, 4 (2001), 117-128 (p. 118).

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the automatic result of time passing. If moments of transition such as the turn of the seasons or dawn and dusk are to be captured, then it is necessary, according to Jaccottet, for images to replicate their temporal quality. This poem takes the form of a fragment, a glimpsed image that evokes not a visual perception, but a wish, a projection forward to the transitional time when the apples will change colour. It must necessarily be brief, because otherwise it would retain the image and suggest the fixed impression of a colour rather than an action. Jaccottet’s attention to change comes from a perception of the world as comprising multiple fragments. He insists that when one truly looks, one can see “des milliers de petites choses, ou présences, ou taches, ou ailes, légères – en suspens, de nouveau, comme à chaque printemps” (À travers un verger, p. 11). The word “choses”, which implies solid, but undefined, reality, gives way to the more metaphysical “présences”; the individual identity of things is less important than their reality. By moving on to “taches”, Jaccottet introduces the vocabulary of painting, and in particular Impressionist works, which suggest the movement of things, or their presence, by a dot of colour rather than outlined definition. The word “ailes”, instead of explaining that these objects are birds, implies that they are defined by their lightness and movement, whatever they may be. They are light, repeatedly hovering emergences, like the new life of spring. Jaccottet has created an image of what we might see in the world without allowing us to picture any particular thing. The purpose of poetry, one might conclude, is to produce these fleeting presences rather than to represent them. In the prose poem “Comme le martin-pêcheur prend feu…”, he evokes the colourful bird in a series of varying images, but these gradually give way to two fragments of text that begin “choses qui”, which takes us away from the picture of the bird. These lead on to the brief section: Fragments brillants du monde, allumés ici ou là. Mi-parti d’orange et de bleu, de soleil et de nuit. (Et, néanmoins, p. 35)

The referent has been left behind so that the text can evoke the impression it leaves rather than its features; it presents fragments, glimpsed as the bird in flight would be, and these catch the light. The colours cease to be so distinct from one another, and are compared to

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the sun and the night, which would normally be considered opposites. Once again, Jaccottet is suggesting a moment of transition. Shards that glisten with light traverse his poetry. They show us multiplicity, movement, and lightness, in the sense of sunlight as well as weightlessness. They also connect the elements that recur throughout his texts, because they can be glass, drops of water, or even dust. In this way, they resemble du Bouchet’s images of “poussière sculptée”, glistening particles that draw attention to the air and white space that are integrated among them. 97 The fragment also characterises some of Jaccottet’s own work, as it does du Bouchet’s. In a text from the sequence of poems “Le Mot joie”, the subject claims: “Je ne peux plus parler qu’à travers ces fragments pareils” (À la lumière, p. 127). Rather than an admission of failure, this statement indicates that he is required to write in a way that is most appropriate to the world, which appears in fragmented form because it is in constant motion. A poem from this series that takes the form of a fragment draws attention to an instant that might otherwise have gone unnoticed: Dans la montagne, dans l’après-midi sans vent et dans le lait de la lumière luisant aux branches encore nues des noyers, dans le long silence : le murmure de l’eau qui accompagne un instant le chemin, l’eau décelable à ces fétus brillants, à ces éclats de verre dans la poussière, sa claire et faible voix de mésange apeurée. (À la lumière, p. 131)

Jaccottet sets the scene in a manner reminiscent of the haiku form, insisting through repetition of “dans” on a moment in time and space. He develops images around the figure of light; it is described as both milky and shining, “luisant”, in the leafless branches of chestnut trees. This technique helps to delay the naming of the subject of the poem until a colon halfway through acts as a caesura for the whole text; the subject is simply “le murmure de l’eau”. Gentle movement, the characteristic of air images in Jaccottet’s poetry, also qualifies water here. It introduces sound into the scene, but this is barely audible. 97

André du Bouchet, “Poussière sculptée”, in L’Ajour, pp. 37-67.

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The sound of the water is immediately caught up in a chain of further description that mimics its brief coincidence with the path and suggests that its rapid movement makes it splash up and catch the light, compared to shining wisps of straw and shards of glass or dust. It emerges as the “claire et faible voix” of a small and fragile bird. The water’s passage from “murmure” to “voix” is a transformation that implies the creation of speech from the barely discernible sounds of nature. The change that takes place between the two halves of the poem is suggested by the recurrent sounds Jaccottet employs. The letter “l” is an insistent presence throughout, but in the first half of the poem, the sounds are muted: “montagne”, “lumière | luisant”, “nues des noyers”, “murmure”. But once the term “un instant” has intervened to remind us of the brevity of each image, both through its meaning and its short syllables, the phonemes become lighter and clearer: “décelable”, “fétus brillants”, “éclats”, “claire et faible voix”. The bird’s song might be extremely quiet, but it has clarity. The two-part structure of this poem creates an atmosphere of harmony, and it is also granted coherence through the rhyming of “lumière” / “poussière”, the less orthodox “noyers” / “apeurée”, and the echo between “vent” and “brillants”. The whole text is made up of one sentence with reduced punctuation, which emphasises the colon and places the murmur of the water at the centre of attention, in spite of the thread of imagery it inspires. Repetition and variation of an image are employed in the following poem from Cahier de verdure in order to pinpoint the precise instant being evoked, and also to turn the poem into an instant in itself by bringing its end close to its beginning: En cette nuit, en cet instant de cette nuit, je crois même si les dieux incendiaient le monde, il en resterait toujours une braise pour refleurir en rose dans l’inconnu. Ce n’est pas moi qui l’ai pensé ni qui l’ai dit, mais cette nuit d’hiver, mais un instant passé déjà, de cette nuit d’hiver. (p. 62)

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“This night” is qualified to become “this moment of this night”, which emphatically insists on the present existence of the image. At the end of the poem, that moment has now passed, because it could not be retained if it were still to count as an instant, but the present of the night is reinforced: “cette nuit d’hiver”. The text is a good example of Jaccottet’s concentration on the existence of the present within defined limits; an image lasts as long as the act of making it present continues, and he aims in this kind of writing, be it in short verses or prose, to produce moments of presence. In this performativity, his work is representative of writing by post-war poets who aim at creating instances of the real in language. It also exemplifies the Stoic notion of time as an interval of movement, in which the present is the time of action, and the past is when the act is completed. “Is” is not an eternal term, but the length of an act.98 This poem does not describe an act in the present, however. In fact, its content refers to a hypothetical future and we are not told any of the actual elements of the scene. Instead, we read that if the gods were to set the world on fire, they would not burn off all living things, because a spark would rekindle new life. Jaccottet often uses the image of rekindling to connect the burning of autumn, the apparent death of nature in winter and its rebirth in spring. His image of a rose flowering is a botanical one chosen in preference to that of a fire relighting, which would have corresponded better to the previous evocation of burning. He insists that this image is not real, but only suggests a possible future, with the line “dans l’inconnu”. We are given no indication of what the present instant comprises, and yet it exists very securely in the brief actuality of the poem. The subject excuses him- or herself from the responsibility for inventing this rather fanciful image by stating that it was this particular moment of the winter night that suggested it. The return to an emphasis on the instant relates the end of the poem to the beginning, but it also introduces the element of winter. It appears that just as the dying down of autumn leads, through winter, to regrowth, so does a brief impression produce the poem. The subject’s inspiration and creativity is deemed to be secondary to potential contained in a moment that is not even described here. 98

See Émile Bréhier, La Théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme (Paris: Vrin, 1970), p. 58, and Victor Goldschmidt, Le Système stoïcien et l’idée du temps (Paris: Vrin, 1969), p. 43.

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Jaccottet is perhaps best known for his insistence that the subject should be self-effacing and allow the world evoked to take precedence. It is not speaking, but listening that should be the poet’s role. This is clear in the primary place he accords to the movement and actions of the natural world that have been examined here. In “Le Mot joie”, it is made explicit. He conjures up a moving river, but then addresses the reader and himself: Tais-toi: ce que tu allais dire en couvrirait le bruit. Écoute seulement: l’huis s’est ouvert. (À la lumière, p. 144)

He is rejecting noisy writing, which would develop images on the basis of impressions rather than allowing phenomena to speak for themselves. His poetry is rightly considered to be highly visual, and the gentleness of many of his landscape texts creates an impression of quietness, or even silence. But silence is not required in order to strengthen the visual image. Rather, it is a refusal to speak over the image, an insistence on listening, in the sense of paying careful attention. In this sense, he can be compared to Francis Ponge, who expressed the wish to give a voice to “le monde muet”. 99 In his poems that explore objects, Ponge is far from self-effacing; his verbal inventiveness, often based on the name of the object, motivates the creation of the text. But he is also trying to tease out the qualities he senses are intrinsic to the object, yet often overlooked. 100 Where Jaccottet differs from Ponge is in his insistence on the ephemeral and on transition. While he can often be accused of letting images take the lead rather than simply describing a scene, Jaccottet nevertheless does give natural phenomena the active voice, and leaves us with their actions that create an image as a present instant. In the text cited above, the line “l’huis s’est ouvert” suggests an opening through to another realm. It is not clear what this might be; indeed, a sense of transcendence in Jaccottet’s poetry never proposes a clear definition, preferring to qualify it in terms such as “l’inconnu”, above. What is 99

Francis Ponge, Œuvres complètes, I, ed. by Bernard Beugnot (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), p. 629. 100 See, for example, the texts “Le cageot” (p. 18) and “L’orange” (pp. 19-20) in Œuvres complètes, I.

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important is that listening to the active changes in the world opens our perception of the instant out beyond what we habitually see. In a later text, the subject rejects the added dimension of potential transcendence as being too complex. The aim must always be the simplest possible evocation of an instant that avoids imposing significance on what is perceived. In the following lines from the poem “Notes nocturnes”, the subject singles out air as an image to counter the labyrinths into which the observer and writer are frequently tempted: Je ne veux plus des labyrinthes, même pas d’une porte: juste un poteau d’angle et une brassée d’air. (Après, p. 31)

Journeys around and through space are rejected and the subject wishes only to be in space and connected to it through an armful of air. The bodily image is not one of mastery or possession, but rather a reduction of desires to the simplest form, or, as Derek Mahon puts it, a refinement of poetry “to almost nothing” (Words in the Air, p. 14). The subject has called up into textual existence the simplest elements, and through the use of a colon and a space, has allowed them the last word.

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“Fin d’hiver”, Airs, pp. 95-105 Jaccottet wrote in his first published notebook, La Semaison, that winter is not only the most beautiful season in Grignan, where he lives, but is also the season “qui va plus droit qu’aucune autre” (p. 73). According to Jean-Michel Maulpoix, its sparseness allows the poet to concentrate on clear contrasts, such as those between light and dark, or between beauty and death. 101 Jean-Marc Sourdillon argues that if winter has a kind of truthfulness, then it is February, the month that usually marks the end of the winter, “où le vrai se fait voir”.102 As Sourdillon’s remark suggests, Jaccottet’s poetry gives the truth of the natural world an active voice. Airs exemplifies his texts that capture moments of transition in nature. The sequence “Fin d’hiver”, or “Winter’s End” to be discussed here, opens the collection Airs. It consists of eleven poems, only three of which have titles. In each case, the title names the subject of the text, which does not include any further mention of the name. Therefore the subject appears twice, first as a noun, and then through its gradual evocation. A sense of emergence is also created in the untitled texts, as in many cases the subject is qualified before being named. The poems are based primarily on the 7-syllable line, with some lines of 8 syllables, and each contains six to nine lines. Their square form suggests a completeness that is borne out more in some of the poems than in others.

101

Peu de chose, rien qui chasse l’effroi de perdre l’espace est laissé à l’âme errante

Very little, nothing to dispel the horror of losing space is left to the wandering soul

Mais peut-être, plus légère, incertaine qu’elle dure, est-elle celle qui chante avec la voix la plus pure les distances de la terre

But perhaps, lighter again, uncertain of enduring, is the one who sings in the purest of voices of the earth’s far distances

See Maulpoix, “Éléments d’un cours sur l’œuvre poétique de Philippe Jaccottet”, Jean-Michel Maulpoix & Cie… (2004) <www.maulpoix.net/Jaccottetcours.htm> [accessed 21 September 2004]. Jaccottet chose the title À la lumière d’hiver, which exemplifies this directness, for what is probably his best known collection. 102 Jean-Marc Sourdillon, “L’Événement de février”, in Patrick Née and Jérôme Thélot (eds), Philippe Jaccottet (= Le Temps qu’il fait, 14) pp. 97-108 (p. 99).

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Jaccottet begins the suite with the phrase: “Peu de chose”. This is characteristic of his tendency to reduce expression to its simplest form and shows the value he attaches to the usually unnoticed detail. He then uses enjambement and an absence of punctuation to link groups of words in various combinations, as Noël often does. The first two lines can be read alone: “Peu de chose, rien qui chasse | l’effroi de perdre l’espace”, but a conjugated verb opens line three: “est laissé”. We are then forced to consider the possibility of dividing the stanza into two: “Peu de chose, rien qui chasse | l’effroi de perdre” followed by “l’espace | est laissé à l’âme errante”. Already we are a little disorientated and seem to be wandering, “errante”, around the space of the poem. The second stanza introduces the element that might save us from fear of this space; it is not a certain point of view or solid support, but rather something that in itself appears fragile: “plus légère”, temporary: “incertaine qu’elle dure” and ethereal in its clarity: “la voix la plus pure”. It is this voice, immediately introducing a musical element, that might be able to express “les distances de la terre”. If singing can replace wandering, provided the voice is reduced to its purest form, then perhaps space can be managed and fright mitigated. The voice required has all the qualities that are most important in Jaccottet’s poetry: it is light, fleeting and pure, and its subject is the landscape. Jaccottet suggests a combination of uncertainty and reassurance through rhyme and echo. All the endings are feminine, and the second stanza is enclosed by a symmetrical rhymescheme, with its central line connected to the first stanza by the rhyme “errante” / “chante”. But the rhyming of “légère” with “terre” is unorthodox, as is “chasse” / “espace”, and in each rhyming pair, the terms come from different parts of speech: a verb is paired with a noun (ll. 1-2), with an adjective (l. 5, l. 7) and with an adverb (l. 6, l. 3), and the remaining pair combines an adjective and a noun (l. 4, l. 8). The next poem contains only one rhyme, which links the masculine singular with the feminine plural: Une semaison de larmes sur le visage changé la scintillante saison des rivières dérangées chagrin qui creuse la terre

A scattering of tears on the altered face, the shimmering season of churned up rivers sadness that furrows the earth

106 Provisionality and the Poem l’âge regarde la neige s’éloigner sur les montagnes

Age watches as the snow retreats on the mountainside

Sorrow forms the tone of the text, and it is related to the end of winter, which shows that Jaccottet does not simply employ the commonplace that connects autumn with death and spring to rebirth. He intertwines human emotion and the linear passage of life with images from nature. Tears are sown like seed, and sorrow furrows the earth as age engraves lines on the face. The tears accumulate into an image of rivers swelling with melted snow, so their paths, on the face and cutting into the earth, are inseparable. Their wildness is conveyed by a term, “derangées”, that is more usually applied to human experience. The repetition of the seasons is observed by an ageing subject who cannot follow the same trajectory even though he or she is thoroughly imbricated in nature by the metaphors employed. The alliterative repetition of “s” might seem to correspond to fluid movement, as water runs down a face and through the land and the snow disappears, but smooth movement is countered by the motion of the rivers, which both cut grooves in the earth and are themselves disturbed; similarly, the subject does not accept the smooth passage of time without lamenting that life is passing. A symmetrical text, such as the third one in the sequence, might be thought to offer a welcome circularity to contrast with the linear movement of time, but this self-containment can become claustrophobic: Dans l’herbe à l’hiver survivant ces ombres moins pesantes qu’elle des timides bois patients sont la discrète, la fidèle

In the grass that survived the winter these shadows, lighter again, of the shy patient woods are the discreet, faithful,

l’encore imperceptible mort

yet imperceptible death

Toujours dans le jour tournant ce vol autour de nos corps Toujours dans le champ du jour ces tombes d’ardoise bleue

Eternally turning in the daylight this flight about our bodies Eternally in the daylight field these tombs of blue slate

The lines of the first quatrain and the single central line contain eight syllables, and the second quatrain consists of seven-syllable lines. At the same time as this shift, the abab, alternating masculine and

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feminine “rimes croisées” of the first four lines, which build up to the name of the central subject in line 5, are replaced by an obsessive repetition of the syllable “our” and the word “toujours”. It implies that there is no escape from the inevitability of death, which circles us continuously. The image of flight is paradoxical, because here it is associated with oppressiveness rather than airy movement, and with approaching death rather than freedom and potentiality. We might expect flight to be the opposite of “ombres” and “tombes”, shadow and death, but in fact these terms are associated, and run counter to the prevailing mood of the text. The shadows are described as less weighty than “elle”, a pronoun that could refer to the grass or to death, while the tombstones belong to the line that finally breaks free of the eternal turning sound “our” to end with the word “bleue” that rhymes with nothing else in the poem. Death is also central to the next poem, which again associates it with lightness, but this time the image is of smoke from a fire: Vérité, non vérité se résorbent en fumée

Truth, untruth become absorbed in smoke

Monde pas mieux abrité que la beauté trop aimée passer en toi, c’est fêter

World sheltered no better than beauty too well loved passing into you means rejoicing

de la poussière allumée

in specks of lighted dust

Vérité, non-vérité brillent, cendre parfumée

Truth, untruth shine, scented ash

The most striking feature of this text is that every line ends with the same masculine sound, which relates it to the laisses of the chansons de geste. The sounds are only identical to the ear, however; the reader notices slight variations. The insistent rhyme accomplishes what is stated in the opening couplet: the blurring of distinctions. Where truth and untruth are turned to smoke, it is not simply nuance that disappears; opposite terms are eliminated, the contrast between the real and the unreal is removed, and the truth, which is valued very highly in Jaccottet’s poetry, cannot be discerned. But this is not necessarily to be lamented. Perhaps, in poetry, uncertainty is preferable to any overt attempt to reach the truth, for it is through the blurring of distinctions that multiple fragments emerge,

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in the form of dust and ash: “fêter | de la poussière allumée”; “vérité, non-vérité | brillent, cendre parfumée”. The world and beauty are not protected from change, and it is celebrated. Burning creates smoke and ash (incense is also suggested through scent), but these are far from dead. The smoke is in motion, as always in Jaccottet’s poetry, and the dust and ash are shining; they are sparks rather than cold remains, and they might well catch alight again. Fire, burning, flames and sparks recur in this sequence of texts and are always associated with the death and rebirth of the seasons and the day. In “Lune à l’aube d’été”, the moon is compared to a flame behind glass, while the dawn is an ember about to catch alight: Lune à l’aube d’été

Moon at summer dawn

Dans l’air de plus en plus clair scintille encore cette larme ou faible flamme dans du verre quand du sommeil des montagnes monte une vapeur dorée

In the brightening air shines this tear still or a feeble flame in glass when from the mountains’ sleep a golden vapour rises

Demeure ainsi suspendue sur la balance de l’aube entre la braise promise et cette perle perdue

Remain just poised on the scales of dawn between the promised ember and this abandoned pearl

The moon is not named in the text, but is evoked through images of fire, water and a pearl; a tear is the same shape, inverted, as a candle flame, but both of these are distorted versions of the clear crescent, oval or circle we associate with the moon. It is the moment of transition that blurs its outlines. The sky lightens as dawn approaches, and the warmth of the new day is linked to the gradual change in temperature as winter comes to an end; it causes a mist to rise up from the mountains. The sun that colours the mist is not named, but is suggested by the image of the mountains waking from sleep and, in the second stanza, by the imminent fire of dawn. Fire and water are linked through the image of the tear / flame and the mist evaporating in the warmth. Mist comprises multiple droplets of water, so the evocation of a tear offers us a close-up view of the mist as well as the moon. A tear can be momentarily suspended, and mist will hover before dispersing, so each concretises the moment between night and day when both moon and sun are present. More importantly, they

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represent the poem: it offers the image of an instant and its potential to change, but must itself be lost if it is to be true to that transition. But Jaccottet’s choice of “Demeure” to open the second stanza, capitalised, conjugated in the present tense, either in the third person or as a command, and without a single clear referent, in fact serves to retain the moment and the poem outside the passage of time. The title of this text forms a pair with the next, “Lune d’hiver”, which also remains unnamed in the body of the poem: Lune d’hiver

Winter Moon

Pour entrer dans l’obscurité prends ce miroir où s’éteint un glacial incendie:

To enter into the darkness take this mirror where an icy fire goes out:

atteint le centre de la nuit, tu n’y verras plus reflété qu’un baptême de brebis

at the centre of the night, you’ll only see reflected there a baptism of sheep

This text contrasts with “Lune à l’aube d’été” because it is situated in the night, in winter, with no promise of spring or daylight. The surface of a mirror is cold and reflects the replacement of fire with ice, and the cool white of the moon. However, the poem combines stasis with movement. The surprising image “un baptême de brebis” describes immersion. Jean-Pierre Richard writes that in Jaccottet’s poetry, the moon is both frozen and liquid. 103 The possible Christian reference to lambs and baptism would suggest mercy in contrast to the unforgiving cold of a mirror and ice. Although the phrase “atteint le centre de la nuit”, positioned after a colon, implies no further movement, the opening verb “entrer” does offer some possibility of progress. The whole situation is hypothetical; it proposes a course of action, but does not describe one, and the only image is reflected in a mirror. Perhaps it is not advisable for the addressee to move into the darkness just yet. If it is a poem about death, its theme is more veiled than in the following text, which returns to fear and time passing: Jeunesse, je te consume avec ce bois qui fut vert dans la plus claire fumée 103

Youth, I consume you with this wood that was green in the brightest smoke

Jean-Pierre Richard, “Philippe Jaccottet”, in Onze études sur la poésie moderne (Paris: Seuil, 1964), pp. 257-276 (p. 275).

110 Provisionality and the Poem qu’ait jamais l’air emportée

ever carried by the air

Âme qui de peu t’effraies, la terre de fin d’hiver n’est qu’une tombe d’abeilles

You, easily frightened soul, the earth at winter’s end is only a tomb for bees

This poem includes the only naming of the subject as “je” in the series, although it is present elsewhere as an invisible observer and as a speaker addressing the reader or a “tu” figure. Here the subject speaks to youth; it is not specified that this is his or her own past, and the “âme” addressed in the second stanza appears to be another person, rather than the subject itself or youth. It is the most square in form of all the poems, consisting of seven lines of seven syllables each, and is rhymed in a more regular scheme than are some of the texts in the series. But it is unusual in that the two stanzas are imaginatively distinct. While the first develops familiar imagery of smoke created by burning young wood, which represents “jeunesse”, and then carried away on the air, the second introduces a figure who is easily startled or frightened, and a strange image of the earth as “une tombe d’abeilles”. It seems to be suggesting that the addressee has no need to be afraid, but the overriding impression left by the poem is of timidity, ageing and death. The sequence so far has been marked by images of sorrow, fright, time passing and death. This is unexpected because the brevity of the texts and their evocations of instants in the natural world would appear to correspond to the airiness implied by the collection’s name. The title of the sequence, “fin d’hiver” might also be interpreted as promising an emergence from the cold, barren winter into the new life of spring. But since it refers to a threshold between seasons, this title indicates a move away from the directness of winter into a transition period in which boundaries will be blurred and the passing of time will be most apparent; the sombre tone is therefore not so surprising. The final four texts, however, appear to instigate a shift towards the hopefulness of spring, which is also insistently associated with the dawn. In the following poem, as well as the final one, light is linked with love: Au dernier quart de la nuit Hors de la chambre de la belle rose de braise, de baisers

The last watch of the night From the chamber of the beauty glowing with an ember, with kisses

Words in the Air 111 le fuyard du doigt désignait Orion, l’Ourse, l’Ombelle à l’ombre qui l’accompagnait

the fugitive pointed out Orion, Ursa, Umbel to his companion shadow

Puis de nouveau dans la lumière, par la lumière même usé, à travers le jour vers la terre cette course de tourterelles

Then, in the light again, consumed by that very light, through the day towards the earth this passage of turtle doves

The fugitive figure is either leaving a room at dawn or pointing out of its window. The suggestion of a man leaving his lover connects human emotion: love, passion, the experience of beauty, and loss, to the fire and pink glow of sunrise. As in the poem “Lune à l’aube d’été”, the night and the day are both suggested, here through the stars and the light. The movement implied by the terms “fuyard” and “course” is as swift and weightless as the dawn. Turtle doves introduce the image of flight and living creatures as well as love. Plants are suggested by the word “rose”, which is both noun and adjective, as well as being a trope in love poetry for a beautiful woman and her body.104 Orion and Ursa Major or Minor are constellations (Jaccottet does not employ either “grande” or “petite”, which usually accompany “l’Ourse”, probably for the sake of alliteration and brevity). But “l’Ombelle” is a type of plant whose flowers grow from the same point and meet at the same level in a parasol shape. It is also a typographical mark that takes the form of an asterisk with eight or ten spokes. As far as I am aware, it is not a constellation, but it includes both the image of a plant and the shape of a star. It is more common in French than “umbel” is in English, and has been employed by poets, among them Victor Hugo.105 A parasol, of course, also casts a shadow, which occurs in the following line. As the light grows in strength, it wears down the figure of movement, both the human and the birds’ flight. “User” also means to consume by fire, which refers to the embers of the first stanza. Once again, time is passing inexorably, and it unfolds in space: earth and sky are brought together by the finger of the fugitive, by light and the 104

Derek Mahon quotes Jaccottet as saying that Airs “raconte de façon cachée une histoire d’amour” (p. 14). 105 For instance, Hugo writes: “Les pins sur les étangs dressent leur verte ombelle”, Les Contemplations, I, IV, in Œuvres poétiques, II, ed. by Pierre Albouy (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 490.

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shadow on the ground, and by the flight through the day towards the earth. Such transitions can encompass space as well as passing through it, and create an impression of circularity that counters the ephemeral. Harmony also results from the use of alliteration (“b” in lines 1-2, “o” in lines 4-5, “t” in lines 8-9) and rhyme: the poem almost has the scheme abbab cbca, with only the difference in sound between “ait” and “er” or “é” preventing absolute regularity, which is typical for Jaccottet. Even though the movement is said to have been worn away, or consumed, we are nevertheless left with the passage of the turtle doves as an enduring image. In the subsequent poem, another limit-point is evoked, but here it is a spatial one that is rendered metaphysical: Là où la terre s’achève, levée au plus près de l’air (dans la lumière où le rêve invisible de Dieu erre)

There where the earth ends, lifted up close to the air (in the light where the invisible dream of God wanders)

entre pierre et songerie

between stone and reverie

cette neige: hermine enfuie

this snow: ermine escaped

The blurred horizon is the site of mystery, which Jaccottet associates with dream and even specifically with God. The assonance “s’achève” / “rêve” links the edge of the earth with dreaming, while “air” / “erre” implies unfinished wandering in the air that hovers just above the ground. The next line states that he hesitates between the solidity of the world he sees around and the mysterious presence that might exist within or just beyond this: “entre pierre et songerie”. The final line of the poem, also separate from the rest of the text, introduces the strange image of a stoat (ermine), as the snow in furrows seems to flee as it melts. The impression of an anagram suggested by the last two words and, more generally, by the proliferation of the vowels “e” and “i”, grants the poem a sense of completeness apparently belied by the movement of the snow that indicates the end of winter. But the final line of the poem could have either seven syllables, as do the other five lines, or an eighth if the “e” before the colon is included. This extra element, and the clear pause introduced by the colon, is perhaps what allows the final two words, and the fleeing snow and ermine, to be glimpsed just briefly and then disappear.

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A moving stream in the following poem echoes this flight of melting snow: Ô compagne du ténébreux entends ce qu’écoute sa cendre afin de mieux céder au feu:

O companion of darkness hear what its ash perceives so as better to cede to the fire:

les eaux abondantes descendre aux degrés d’herbes et de roche et les premiers oiseaux louer la toujours plus longue journée la lumière toujours plus proche

descend the swollen waters on the steps of grass and rock and praise the very first birds the day that’s ever longer the ever closer light

The poem is an instruction to listen attentively to nature, an approach that has been implicit, but not explicitly stated, throughout this series. Once again poised on the brink between night and day, it advocates an active attention to the night, but suggests that this will lead to a passive relationship with the day. The subject will give in to the fire of dawn, and follow water down a hill towards the lengthening days of spring. The final image of approaching light hints once again at death, but the natural world is presented as full of life: ash turning to fire, streams full of water, grass, birds and daylight. An impression of variety is also subtly provided by rhymes that combine different parts of speech. “Cendre” leads on to the verb “descendre”, the solid “roche” is paired with the mobile “proche”, while praise forms a couplet with the day; “louer” / “journée”. Only darkness and fire are opposing nouns, and it is the pivot between them that allows the poem to be set in motion. The final poem in the series places light at its centre, and echoes many of the elements that run through the series as a whole: dark woods, death, fire, a suspended flame, growing plants and love: Dans l’enceinte du bois d’hiver sans entrer tu peux t’emparer de l’unique lumière due: elle n’est pas ardent bûcher ni lampe aux branches suspendue

In the heart of the winter wood without entering you can seize the only light owed: not a burning pyre nor a lamp hung from the branches

Elle est le jour sur l’écorce l’amour qui se dissémine peut-être la clarté divine à qui la hache donne force

It is the daylight on the bark the love that is scattered round perhaps the divine clarity to which the axe gives power

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It could be argued that the series ends in a hopeful way, that this text leaves an image of natural daylight in the centre of the darkness. The light does not come from burning or death, and it is not artificial. It might even stem from divine clarity; God, as a possible presence, is more certain here than in the earlier poem, in which he was the invisible element of a dream. The final line introduces a new image, which jars in a series characterised by repeated motifs; an axe, metallic and powerful, is an unlikely addition to images of light, fire and air. It suggests that human effort can cut through the darkness and allow light in, and makes possible the dissemination of love. The figure or reader addressed is not required to enter into the darkness, “sans entrer tu peux t’emparer”, in order to take on this light. Jean-Pierre Richard interprets the text very differently. He writes that no sooner has the axe cut into the tree and allowed us to grasp the divine light than it disperses, along with love: Le bonheur poétique dure peu. Essentiellement instable, volatile, il nous fait participer de manière à la fois exquise et déchirante à la rapidité d’un temps. (p. 266)

He continues by arguing that nothing escapes the passing of time and that “un profound pessimisme du temps colore ainsi l’œuvre de Jaccottet” (p. 267). I would argue that while the passing of time toward death is a vital aspect of Jaccottet’s poetry, and that, in this way, the series “Fin d’hiver” is representative, the poems studied above also reveal an increasing insistence on renewal and hope. Images of burning lead to fiery dawns, the days grow longer and brighter, and through growth new life emerges. Dispersal occurs in mist, smoke, blurred horizons and the disseminated light and love of the last poem, do indeed provide visual instances of time passing. They link time and space, moving through space over the course of a certain duration. But this movement is more than a trajectory towards death, because it is necessary for rebirth. This provisionality is what allows language to capture the instant. We shall see in chapters 4 and 5 that it is also essential for any poetic creativity to occur.

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iii. Noël: Exchanging Places Air has less autonomy in Noël’s poetry than it does in the work of du Bouchet or Jaccottet. Noël never evokes storms or gentle breezes as primarily elemental phenomena. Rather, they always affect the poetic subject or are affected by it. For instance, wind is noticed when it is felt on the skin, and the action of breathing is often evoked. The body is integrated into its surroundings through its contact with air, and air is made a component of internal bodily space. Noël’s work is absolutely distinctive in that he also presents mental space in terms of air-filled volume. The mind, as well as the body, therefore becomes connected to external space. Indeed, the boundaries between inside and out are overcome so successfully in Noël’s imaginative world that that the two realms become, if not identical, then interchangeable in a range of complex ways that contribute to the originality of the texts. Air is temporal in Noël’s poetry in a different manner from du Bouchet’s movement through matter or Jaccottet’s fleeting instants. As it enters into the body it is seen to contribute to the ageing process by ravaging internal organs and systems. In addition, Noël makes explicit the link between breathing, speech and poetry through the dual meaning of “langue” as tongue and language. His examination of the relationship between identity and language takes him into the body and back in time, albeit a hypothetical time of meaning and understanding rather than one of historical change. As Jaccottet has done, Noël has combined the writing of verse with poetic prose and meditative prose, and his poetics as mediated by his own reflections will be discussed in chapters 3 and 5. This chapter will concentrate on his verse and prose poetry. Air is invoked by Noël as a metonym for the elemental world. To an extent, this links his work to du Bouchet’s presentation of the sparse elemental landscape. But unlike du Bouchet, Noël makes explicit language’s failure to convey the subject’s experience of the elements. For example, the sensation of air on the hand is deemed more powerful than writing in the following extract from “La Moitié du geste”: comment écrire: c’est ça voici le mot vent il ne souffle rien

116 Provisionality and the Poem que souffle le vent la main touche l’air et s’envole. (Chute, p. 149)

The word “wind” does not blow, but bodily sensation can produce movement. An aspect of Noël’s poetic endeavour could be summarised by the line “comment écrire: c’est ça”. His texts aim at communicating the rawness of existence in the present, and the impersonal subject in his poetry is, in part, a device for creating immediacy. By writing “la main”, he could be referring to “my”, “your”, “his” or “her” hand, but deliberately refuses to specify. The abrupt emergence of the hand into the text, independent of any body, isolates the action of touching the air, almost as if it were seen in close up. His poetry is highly sensuous, with particular concentration on touch and vision. Some images are visual even when they have a surreal quality and seem impossible to visualise. In a later text from the same section of “La Moitié du geste”, he sums up the interrelation of sight, touch and the surreal: la peau des choses est dans nos yeux voir écorche. (Chute, p. 153)

The expression “la peau des yeux” recurs in Noël’s poetry, but here the image has been divided and skin is attributed to the things we see. Of course, objects have a surface that could be compared to human skin, but in this case Noël employs the image to bring what we see close up to our eyes. The skin of objects is described as “dans nos yeux”; it is no wonder that “voir écorche”. The text conveys the sense of being overwhelmed by what one sees; things seem so very present that sight is almost unbearable. By using the first person plural pronoun, Noël involves the reader in this experience. Both the extracts above use paradox to make the image more arresting. Skin is transferred from the eye to the world, and, in the line “la main touche l’air”, the usual feeling of wind on the skin is reversed, and the hand is the active agent. Noël frequently upsets assumptions regarding passive and active positions, either attributing agency to something other than the poetic subject, or showing a subject actively seeking sensations that we are generally considered to

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undergo. His images of air often suggest that it is affected by the subject, even when he ascribes to it the name “wind”. In La Rumeur de l’air, for instance, he complicates its stirrings with the lines: “comme une main | qui remuerait le vent” (Chute, p. 211). The body and its movements are central to Noël’s work, but the body is never seen as a whole. Rather, fragmented parts are presented in close-up. Meryl Tyers, who has investigated Noël’s work from the point of view of cinema theory, writes that his poetry gives a sense “of an uncompromisingly close focusing on the bodies that fade in and out, so that they can only be imagined as a number of fragments”.106 A sequence of poems from the collection L’Ombre du double, for example, does not describe the body as a whole, but calls up a nail, fist, finger, eyes, tongue, saliva, skin, voice, mouth, heart, face, bone, genitals, head and teeth.107 In addition, many basic physical actions are evoked: walking, tasting, breathing, looking, eating and being hungry. They operate in decontextualised situations, and Noël obliges us to examine them in detail. The consonant “r” is dominant, and is used to suggest discomfort: “rien qu’un souffle rêche | une rumeur un râle ruant” (p. 49) or pain: “l’ongle grattant les images | le coup de poing dans le reflet” (p. 47). Noël undercuts any assumptions we might bring to our reading about the position the subject occupies in relation to his or her environment. This leaves the way open for constructing new modes of being, which involve the subject much more closely with the world around. The “je” frequently expresses the desire to experience the intensity of the present through integration in, and a heightened awareness of, the natural world. In some instances, this appears to have been achieved. In the following extract from “À vif enfin la nuit”, for example, an implied encounter between two people, quite possibly a sexual one, is resolved into an image of the self in relation to nature: Elle pensa que c’était comme s’ils avaient dansé ensemble 106

Meryl Tyers, “Identity and Poetry in Fragments: Bernard Noël in Close-Up”, in Powerful Bodies: Performance in French Cultural Studies, ed. by Victoria Best and Peter Collier, Modern French Identities, 1 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), p. 167. 107 Bernard Noël, “Séquence 4”, L’Ombre du double I (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), pp. 4755.

118 Provisionality and the Poem dans la solitude blanche… Elle se sentait pénétrée de blancheur au point de faire corps avec la nature entière, avec la plaine infiniment immaculée… Tellement éparpillée dans tout cela qu’elle n’était plus du tout certaine d’exister distinctement. (Poèmes 1, p. 164)

Enjambement is used to introduce a moment of suspense in several instances. The term of comparison is delayed across lines 1-2, and the break between lines 4 and 5 lets the suggestion of sexual penetration hover before diverting the image into the abstract “de blancheur”. The expression “faire | corps” is interrupted, allowing the alternative actions that could have followed the verb a brief potential existence. In lines 8-9 the word that describes scattering also produces it because it is distributed over two lines, and the increasingly uncertain subject is evoked through the hesitations introduced by “qu’elle | n’était” and “certaine | d’exister”. The subject’s sense of losing a distinct identity is described, but also enacted by this text, as boundaries are gradually eroded. The suspension marks contribute to the blurring of difference between the conscious subject and natural world. Even though the subject usually accepts that his or her wish, which is to merge with what is beyond the confines of the body, will remain only a wish in the real world, Noël uses poetry to carry it out in words. Again, this exemplifies performative writing. He describes changes that take place in the body which bring the outside world inside it and make visible, or even extract, its internal organs. Although this process recurs througout Noël’s poetic writing, the collection Extraits du corps is exemplary. The “extraits” are both nominal, what has been displaced from its usual position in the body and imposes itself on our attention, and adjectival, where the action of extraction is emphasised. The term is also a literary one, and refers to the fragmented prose pieces that make up the volume. Air is often the basis for these complex bodily transformations, because the act of breathing draws the elemental world into the body and then expels what the body has transformed for its own purposes. Extraits du corps never allows this exchange to go unnoticed:

Words in the Air 119 Le péritoine se crevasse. Je me peuple de trous d’air. Chaque effort de l’œil crispe comiquement ma gorge… Un autre émerge dans mon ventre sans être venu de l’extérieur. (Poèmes 1, p. 35)

The collection is characterised by Noël’s use of proper biological terms for parts of the body, but the processes that it undergoes are rarely medically recognisable. In this poem the subject is literally punctured by air, which forces its way through the barrier that the body presents to the outside world. The term “effort” seems to imply difficulty breathing, but in fact that action is not mentioned, and looking is what makes the throat constrict. “Autre” is italicised to show its foreign status; something that does not belong to the subject has been created inside him or her. It refers back to the reflexive verb “je me peuple”, which suggests an invasion, but one that is activated by the subject. Just as active and passive forces are confused and often reversed in Noël’s poetry, so are the roles of internal and external realms. Noël extends the notion of exchange from the body to the mind. He suggests that mental space and perceived space are linked by “ressemblance”. This does not mean that the mind acts as a camera, capturing visual images and storing them in identical form. Rather, Noël’s term “ressemblance” refers to a transformation, because the mind immediately begins converting a perception into a mental image. Where the two realms do resemble one another, in the conventional sense of “resemblance”, is that Noël understands them both in terms of three-dimensional space. He emphasises this by insisting that the mind is made up of air, just as the world we perceive has air as its volume. 108 Chapter 3 will discuss the relation Noël sets up between perception, the mental image and the visual image as produced by artists. His insistence on the importance of the artist’s body in creating works of art reveals how closely he considers mind and body to be connected. He writes in Journal du regard that: “La vue est immédiate, mais ce qu’elle saisit, il faut qu’elle le réfléchisse, ainsi devient-elle pensive…” (Journal, p. 70). Vision is an active process and therefore

108

For further discussion, see Andrew Rothwell, “Bernard Noël: Espace, Regard, Sens”, in Text and Visuality, ed. by M. Heusser and others, Word and Image Interactions, 3 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 57-64 (pp. 59-60).

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a temporal one. Reflection is not the instant image produced by a mirror, but rather the transition from sight to thought: le véritable miroir n’est pas celui qui seulement reflète le visage il est la réflexion de vos yeux. (Poèmes 1, p. 297)

Noël attributes central importance to the eyes because they are the part of the face where this process begins. The poetic image, whose purpose and development Noël is always trying to define, in poetry as well as in his meditative prose, cannot therefore be an instantaneous act of mimesis; it has to convey (or reflect) the “réflexion” that takes place as the result of “ressemblance”. Ideally, it should act as the eyes do; where they begin to change vision into mental images, poetry should set in motion the transition from verbal image to thought. Air is vital to his work because it links written and oral poetry; writing is dependent on vision, which Noël examines in association with volume and therefore with air, while oral poetry depends on speech and therefore on breathing. He makes this explicit in L’Espace du poème: ce qui m’intrigue dans l’espace du poème, c’est que l’oral est remplacé par du visuel, mais que le visuel et l’oral se révèlent faits du même élément, un élément qui, pour reprendre un mot qui m’est cher, un élément qui est de l’air. Alors le centre se balade en l’air et on n’est pas prêt de l’attraper… (p. 40)

The “centre” is another term to which Noël gives a particular meaning. It appears to refer to language coming into being; while this can hardly be understood in terms of any definable space, Noël does seem to conceive of it in volumetric form. As can be seen from this quotation, its salient feature is movement, which is why it stems from the image of air with which Noël characterises vision, thought and writing. Most frequently, it emerges in the space between two people, and represents their interaction : “dans le rapport d’une communication à la fois fragile et toujours palpitante” (L’Espace, p. 28). His image of communication suggests dialogue rather than confrontation, and the physical presence of people in the same place and time. It resembles Levinas’s model of the face-to-face encounter. Levinas’s essay on Martin Buber examines Buber’s concept of the

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“Je-Tu” relation, rendered in English as “I-Thou”, “thou” being the more intimate form of address now lost in English. He sets Buber in the context of recent thought through his view of the self not as a subject in contradistinction to an object, but formed through connections. The “Moi […] n’est pas une substance, mais une relation”.109 The “Je-Tu” relation involves placing oneself “en face de” an exterior being that is radically other, and then addressing this being as “Tu” (p. 28). The workings of Being take place in the interval between the two, and it is always constituted as novelty. In Noël’s work, however, the “tu” is generally a strong feminine presence, and always carries the meaning of “the silent” that is absent from the “Je-Tu” relation sketched here. Noël’s evocation of a face-to-face encounter that leads to the creation of a “centre” could be considered to fall prey to the ideal of presence in speech criticised by Derrida.110 But Noël refuses to privilege speech over writing; indeed, writing is his medium and his work examines the creative potential of the written word, as will be examined in chapter 5. Rather, he suggests that the space of the poem can produce the movement that communicates with the reader. In the prose text Le Tu et le silence, he presents written communication as presence taking shape: De toute page réellement écrite comme de toute peau réellement caressée monte la même fumée à figures, et c’est de la présence qui prend forme. (p. 51)

Noël makes it clear through simile that writing on a page can be compared to caressing skin, so the act of writing becomes an erotic one. He attributes the same quality of meaning, which suggests that it is not the pen as tool touching the paper (or phallic symbol) that is most important, but a more complex notion that relates seeing to touch and to taste, so that the texture of the paper is as tangible to the eye as skin would be to the tongue: Mon regard caresse, et il jouit de la qualité du grain. La langue participerait volontiers à ce plaisir qu’elle sent passer dans son espace et qui la met en bouche – je veux dire que, prise par son appétit de participer au toucher, elle 109 Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Buber et la théorie de la connaissance”, in Noms propres ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1976), pp. 23-43 (p. 27). 110 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972).

122 Provisionality and the Poem en oublie sa fonction d’élocutrice pour n’être plus qu’un organe enfermé derrière les dents et désireux de s’étirer vers la surface attirante. (Tu, pp. 4748)

The tongue strains to emerge in order to touch and taste, and therefore represents desire, which for Noël is a way of imagining verbal creativity. He uses the two meanings of “langue” to link taste, desire, speech and written language. The effect, as this double signification echoes through all instances of the word “langue” in his poetry, is to ground language absolutely in the body. While writing is paramount, it is never freed from the physical existence of the subject or reader. In “Le livre de Coline”, for example, he suggests the emergence of language by actually describing the reverse process: “la langue se retourne | les mots rongent leurs lettres” (Carn, p. 131). Words are given the masticatory powers of the mouth. The floating “centre” of communication between two people is not to be understood as a distance that cannot be traversed; it is a link between them rather than a barrier. In much of Noël’s poetry, touch is vital because it brings two people into a kind of silent dialogue. Contact between the surface of their bodies begins to dissolve their separateness, as the focus on the inside of the body disperses the idea of a coherent subject. In L’Été langue morte, the subject writes: c’est toi me dis-je toi et contre toi je suis l’autre que tu fais de moi. (Chute, p. 92)

The bald statement “c’est toi” appears to be an expression of wonder at the presence of the other. But the following line reveals that the self is addressing itself. Through close contact the self is transformed into the other, and the final line gives the active agency to the other, the “tu”, to make of the “je” an other. These five lines manage with admirable concision to destabilise the secure position from which an “I” views a “you” (or “thou”, as Buber would put it). The role accorded to touch does not mean that it is favoured over vision, which is, after all, of prime importance for Noël’s interest in visual art. But it does serve to nuance our understanding of vision, and particularly to question the concept of a fixed position from which

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the world is viewed. Noël considers vision to involve precisely the process suggested in the extract above; a reciprocal action affects the subject and makes him or her the foreign element, the “other”, in the connection between viewer and viewed. He writes in Onze romans d’œil: Le regard n’est un regard qu’à partir du moment où il s’aperçoit sur l’objet qu’il regarde. […] Tout sujet est un miroir actif et qui réagit, car c’est l’altérité qu’il renvoie.111

This image of vision, touch and communication recurs in modern poetry, and is applied particularly to lovers. The reciprocal gaze is a feature of Éluard’s poetry, and one of a pair of lovers often appears to take its form from the other: “Avec tes yeux je change comme avec les lunes”.112 Apollinaire’s famous “Le pont Mirabeau”, meanwhile, evokes sadness at loss despite the couple’s apparent linking through touch: Les mains dans les mains restons face à face Tandis que sous Le pont de nos bras passe Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse. (Œuvres poétiques, p. 45)

The originality of Noël’s poetry is that when the other is instrumental in the development of the subject’s identity, and the subject becomes other to itself, it does not merely express a sense of disorientation at its own fragmentation. Rather, it addresses itself as “tu” and engages itself in dialogue. This conversation then becomes interwoven with the exchange between the subject and another person, also addressed as “tu”. The “other” is both the self and another person, just as the self is both itself and other to itself. This is illustrated in the following extract from “La Chute des temps”: qu’est-ce qu’un nom quand il ne reste plus aucun visage tu regardes cette chose sans toi qui est toi de quoi parlions-nous dis-tu 111 112

Onze romans d’œil (Paris: P. O. L., 1988), p. 90.

Éluard, Œuvres, I, ed. by Marcelle Dumas and Lucien Scheler (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 151.

124 Provisionality and the Poem ta main même est muette est-ce moi que vous avez tué il n’y a plus moyen de faire la différence peut-être suis-je quelqu’un qui n’est plus là. (Chute, p. 62)

The subject asks what determines identity, questioning whether a name means anything without a face. In written poetry, and in texts with a depersonalised persona in particular, this is a pertinent remark, because the “je” is all the subject has by which to identify itself. “Toi”, here, appears to be both an interlocutor and the self addressed by itself. The use of “nous” implies some communication between people, but the introduction of “vous” complicates the situation further. Identities shift until “il n’y a plus moyen de faire la différence”. The “je” wonders whether it is still there, an apparently meaningless question because “je” is still present in the text, but if its identity has changed and it has passed into the figure of the “tu”, then it is in the apparently inconceivable position of speaking in the voice of a subject who no longer exists. La Chute des temps explores identity, precipitating confusion by its constant interweaving of the first and second person pronouns in passages where the “je” is trying to understand its position in relation to what is other, both in the world outside and within itself. It is also a motivating feature of the prose poem collection Souvenirs du pâle; most notably, the face, or more accurately the sight of one’s face in the mirror, is once again the site of a crisis of identity: - Qui parle quand je parle? a-t-elle dit. Le temps s’est fêlé quelque part, et tu t’es souvenu d’un visage qui a cessé d’être le tien, quoiqu’on te reconnaisse encore derrière lui.113

This collection considers the role of memory in identity, because the subject must repeatedly readjust to the changes time brings to the face, which is the part of the body we associate most with a person’s identity. Noël puts it succinctly in L’Ombre du double: “celui que tu n’es pas encore | te fixe avec les yeux que tu as” (p. 52). But this is not always a source of anxiety. The “je” replies that we must stop wondering who speaks when “je parle” and write in language divorced from the particular “je”: 113

Souvenirs du pâle ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1971), p. 12.

Words in the Air 125 Tu as répondu: – La parole qui compte est impersonnelle. (Souvenirs, p. 12)

The wish to see inside the body, to understand one’s position in the world and exchanges with it, and also to find a way in language of relating to one’s own past selves, are all means of searching for the source of identity and of language. The “je” of La Chute des temps admits that no one can ever know him- or herself, either on the inside, because internal space remains inaccessible, or on the surface, because the mirror image is always reversed: miroir miroir nul ne sait fouiller dans la chair pas plus que dans l’image où chacun se connaît à l’envers mais tu rêves d’ouvrir le chantier de l’origine. (Chute, p. 66)

But what cannot be achieved in reality can, perhaps, be approached in poetry. Although the “je” in Noël’s work laments its inability to see inside itself, his texts do at times achieve exactly that. The problem is that this process, which might allow some access to an understanding of the origins of the self, also makes visible the passing of time. The image of air is important once again. As the element from the outside world best able and most likely to penetrate inside the body, and in the role Noël ascribes to it of making up the volume of physical and mental space, it is often in evidence when the poetic eye roves around the workings of the body. In the poem “Le Bât de la bouche”, from La Rumeur de l’air, he writes: partout un dessous en travail le souffle comme le vent – que cherches-tu? – l’issue du désir – que vois-tu? – je vois la scie du temps dans l’haleine des os. (Chute, p. 194)

The act of breathing is vital to life, and it takes place in time; in this case, however, the movement that maintains life also implies the passing of time. Air has penetrated even the bones, and the image of

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breath coursing through bones suggests to Noël death at work in the body. Ageing is not always mourned as loss in Noël’s work. As we saw in the first chapter, his long, undivided and unpunctuated poems depend on change and the passing of time, in the same way that the instant is valued in Jaccottet’s poetry because it is fleeting. While Noël’s evocations of “la vite vie” can seem sorrowful, it is life’s passing that allows the subject to exist intensely in the present. In La Moitié du geste, he writes: la joie de vivre est dans l’air qui touche les yeux nulle rétine pour garder cela le passant est la trace d’une aile toujours le vide vent la vite vie (Chute, p. 156)

In poetry that relies on vision, an invisible substance is nevertheless given presence. This text shows once again that the eyes are acted upon not by a visual impression but by moving air. The sensation cannot be captured, but it is a trace of the movement and change that constitue living.

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“L’aile sous l’écrit”, from La Rumeur de l’air (Chute, pp. 185-189) This poem, cited in its entirety here, first appeared as Laile sous lécrit in a limited edition in 1977, then as part of La Rumeur de l’air, which contains several series of short poems alongside long vertical texts such as this one. 114 It resembles La Chute des temps and L’Été langue morte in its form, which is a mixture of long and short unpunctuated lines. There is a preponderance of lines with the even number of syllables 4, 6 or 8. “L’aile sous l’écrit” exemplifies Noël’s original exploration of the passing of time and death, identity and language. L’aile sous l’écrit un jour la bouche est devenue obscure la langue re muait maintenant la vie n’est plus chaude je cherche mes mains et dans mes mains le pouce originel le temps est de la terre autour des os du monde notre mort épaissit cette chair on creuse pour se souvenir l’air noircit puis c’est du vent le vent est la langue qui remue la langue elle a racine en l’air pourquoi pourquoi l’air qui n’est pas visible ressemble-t-il au visible pourquoi nos yeux s’y boivent-ils eux-mêmes il y a la nuit il y a la main sur la bouche tout ce qui couvre couvre le même deuil les lèvres lâchent nos paroles une pierre tombe de moins haut 114

Below writing on the wing one day the mouth went dark the tongue stirr ed life isn’t warm any more I look for my hands and in my hands their original thumb time is earth around the bones of the world our death thickens this flesh we dig to remember the air blackens then it’s the wind the wind is the tongue that stirs the tongue it is rooted in the air why why does air that isn’t visible resemble the visible why are our eyes drunk themselves there is night there is the hand on the mouth all that covers covers the same mourning lips let slip our words a stone falls from a lesser height

Laile sous lécrit (Paris: Orange Export Ltd., 1977).

128 Provisionality and the Poem on oublie et quand on ne sait plus ce que l’on sait la vie est à l’aise un peu d’est-ce moi rend la tempe douce les os ont tout leur temps le nom aussi on dit que ce qui est écrit cache la chose qui voulait l’être c’est faire du mystère à peu de frais il n’y a de mystérieux que le venir et qu’il batte de l’aile sous l’écrit et non pas au-dessus les dieux d’autrefois se sont trompés s’ils avaient aimé l’en-dessous ils vivraient on peut tout imaginer sauf un premier jour pourtant l’eau fraîche vient d’en bas regarde les yeux de ta mère le corps pense avec ses mains il fabrique de la tête peu à peu et la mort ouvre sa porte dans la bouche même je ne tiens pas tellement à moi mais qui peut faire l’autre on dit que les jours s’en vont alors qu’ils viennent nous sommes l’avenir du temps comment disperser le cercle la moelle de l’homme s’enferme devient centrale le centre attire la mort le silence n’a pas de centre il est le plein et le vide l’écoute du commencement sans fin alors tous les siècles forment un seul aujourd’hui la vieille blessure écarte

we forget and when we no longer know what we know life is comfortable a little is it me warms the forehead bones have plenty of time the name as well they say that what is written hides the thing that wanted to be it that mystery is too easy there’s nothing mysterious [except what’s coming and let it be rough on the wing below writing and not above the gods of earlier times were [wrong if they had favoured what was [below they’d be alive now we can imagine anything except a first day yet fresh water comes from below look your mother’s eyes the body thinks with its hands it fashions its head gradually and death opens its door in the mouth itself I’m not especially attached to [myself but who can act as another they say the days go by but really they come we are the future of time how do we break up the circle man’s marrow hardens becomes central the centre attracts death silence has no centre it is fullness and emptiness hearing endless beginning so every century makes up a single today the old wound opens

Words in the Air 129 ses lèvres pour rire dis-moi est-ce en nous l’inconnu qui cherche un nom ou bien le nom qui cherche l’inconnu pour que le ciel cache la terre un peu d’eau suffit c’est en nous-mêmes que l’autre nous attend il faut éplucher le visage à coups de qui le nom est le labyrinthe l’oubli sa bête parfois mon crâne a un fond la réalité y jette quelques sous le souviens-toi qui tinte est un bris de vitre mais dans quels yeux je voudrais citer tous les livres la citation est un plat froid et moi voyant tout à coup ma table mon papier ma main je vois une chose mais les trois qui composent la chose ne la sont pas ce qui existe ressemble à ce qui le fait exister un peu de non-pensée suffit à réfléter le ciel d’en bas ma main mon papier ma table qu’ai-je pensé qui déjà enlevait la peau

its lips to laugh tell me is it the unknown in us that [seeks a name or is it the name that [seeks the unknown for the sky to hide the earth a little water is enough it’s in ourselves that the other is waiting we have to peel back the face with whose blows the name is the labyrinth forgetting its beast sometimes my skull isn’t [bottomless reality throws down a few [pennies the remember that clinks is broken glass but in which eyes I’d like to quote every book quotation is a dish best served cold and I seeing my table all of a sudden my paper my hand I see a thing but the three that make up the [thing are not it what exists resembles what makes it exist a little non-thought is enough to reflect the sky from below my hand my paper my table what have I thought who already lifted off the skin

130 Provisionality and the Poem de mon visage parfois tout se tient sauf moi et ce défaut suffit à donner lieu

from my face sometimes everything contains [itself except me and that lack is enough to bring [about

The text opens with the words “un jour”, implying that a conventional narrative might follow, but the subsequent line: “la bouche est devenue obscure”, soon undermines any such expectations. Noël is evoking the beginnings of language and the movement of a tongue: “la langue re | muait”. The splitting of “remuait” over two lines mirrors the sense of disorientation that would occur on hearing the very first speech, were this possible. It also introduces the concept of repetition through the emphasis on the prefix “re”, which denies the plausibility of any such original moment, while the use of the imperfect tense suggests that despite the utterance “un jour”, no single instant can be isolated. Warmth, which characterises the living body, has now gone from life; this prompts the subject’s search for his or her body, but in fragmented form: s/he looks for his or her hands, and within them, “le pouce | originel”. In pointing to an original source, this expression suggests also the homonym “pousse”, implying force and growth. Its immediate impact is a homing in on parts of the body, and the French convention of describing one’s hands and thumb as “les mains” and “le pouce” reinforces the detached, impersonal quality they take on. The line “le temps est de la terre” contrasts earthly temporality with eternity, but also suggests that time only exists in the real, that is, in the things that it transforms. Enjambement is employed across the subsequent lines not only to set a pace that moves one line rapidly onto the next, thereby creating the effect of time passing, but also to introduce ambiguity in phrasing. For instance, the running of “on creuse | pour se souvenir” and “notre mort | épaissit” over line endings pushes the text forward, and “épaissit cette chair” is an unexpected qualification for death, because it introduces threedimensional space and makes the earth into a bodily element. The earth has already been rendered complex because we can read both “le temps est de la terre | autour des os”, and “des os | du monde”. Bones buried in the earth produce both its temporality and its space, because they remind us of the dead and contribute to the make-up of the

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earth’s matter. Similarly, flesh is thickened through the build-up of time, and also dug into in search of memories: “on creuse | pour se souvenir”. The fact that everything in nature changes as it moves towards death means that an origin can be sought within its increasing matter. Change then takes place as the air blackens, providing an echo of “la bouche est devenue obscure”, and turns into wind. Noël produces circularity by rhyming “langue” with itself, and connects the mouth, language and air without mentioning speech directly. We cannot attribute a definitive meaning to either instance of “langue”, so cannot establish what is the active agent. Both language and the tongue are rooted in the air, which produces another possible understanding of origins. This is immediately questioned by “pourquoi”, which, although it appears to introduce a subsequent question, is also linked by its repetition to the statement that preceded it. When the subject asks why the invisible resembles the visible, Noël is not simply reminding us that we look through transparent air when we see the world. Rather, he is relating the visible realm, whose volume is made up of air, to the invisible interior of the mind, which he also understands in the form of volume. He separates the word “visible” from the “pas” that qualifies it in order to open two consecutive lines with “visible”. Moreover, the text is laid out in such a way that the second instance occurs at the top of a new page. By insisting on a repeated word in the strong first position in a line, he creates an echo across a page break that keeps the momentum going and prevents the double-page spread from being seen as a spatial entity separate from previous pages. This is the opposite of du Bouchet’s exploitation of layout and the initial visual impression. The relentless questioning continues, although it is not made clear who is speaking or who is addressed. The notion of resemblance is extended with an image of eyes immersing themselves in the visible. Reflexivity is emphasised by the use of a reflexive verb “s’y boivent-ils”, “they are drunk” (by someone or something), rather than “they drink”, and its overlaying with “eux-mêmes”. Eyes are not the vehicle by which something is seen, but rather participants in a process of vision that suggests an endless interchange of passive and active positions. The potential for mise-en-abîme is countered by the insistent “il y a”, which designates a state of being there, or presence.

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Repetition is again used for reinforcement, and the hand reappears, its definite article detaching it from the body and putting it on an equal footing with the night: “il y a | la nuit il y a la main”. But this time two parts of the body are connected, as the hand covers the mouth. Noël repeats the action of covering: “tout ce qui couvre couvre | le même deuil”. Here a new dimension is introduced. We have already been presented with the thickness of the earth and the embedding of vision in the transparent volume of air. Now a surface is shown to cover and even hide a depth, be it the opening to the inside of the body, mourning, or, later on this page, all things, when the subject considers whether writing hides what it names: “on dit | que ce qui est écrit cache | la chose”. In spite of the hand, the lips let out words, or speech. An echo of the stone falling will occur further in the poem with the image of coins being thrown into a well. Noël introduces an oxymoron with the lines “quand on ne sait plus | ce que l’on sait”. This apparently impossible state is one that is posited throughout Noël’s work; it would result from achieving the aim that is often wished for by his subjects, namely, to forget their mortality. Life would be less painful were one able to forget the knowledge that comes with being human. Moreover, the questioning of our identity renders “la tempe douce”. If “doux” is understood to mean “soft”, the boundaries of the body are weakened, while its sense as “warm” implies anxiety. The suggestion of softness is followed by the naming of bones, which are the hardest part of the body, while “la tempe” calls to mind “le temps”; time is a prominent theme throughout the text, and sure enough it occurs immediately afterwards to qualify bones. On the following line, “aussi” could be part of two phrases: “le nom | aussi” or “aussi on dit”, so it serves to propel the poem onwards. Names are compared to bones in their mutual mastery of time; the names of things endure even after those things have gone, owing to language’s tendency to fit things into categories. It therefore runs the risk of hiding them behind words; here Noël is entering into the wider debate over the coincidence, or lack of it, between a word and what it designates. He implies that reality is suppressed by attempts to convey it in language. In addition, it is not just the thing designated that is hidden, but “la chose qui voulait | l’être”. It is hard to see what the definite article can refer to here other than “l’écrit”, so the lines would read: what is written hides the thing that wanted to be written. The

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essence of the thing is not what is covered up, but its tendency to become writing. Noël then undercuts this complex development by suggesting that it is a mystification too easily suggested and believed, which reminds us that the discussion was initiated by “on dit | que”. Instead, he proposes that there is nothing mysterious except the future. He does not write “l’avenir”, but “le venir”, thereby underlining its movement towards the subject. Later he will write: “on dit que les jours s’en vont | alors qu’ils viennent”. Noël does not allow time to leave on an independent course, but always presents it as coming inexorably towards us. Perhaps the strangest lines of the text are the following; they are also among the most important in that words have been taken from them to form the title of the poem: il n’y a de mystérieux que le venir et qu’il batte de l’aile sous l’écrit et non pas au-dessus les dieux d’autrefois se sont trompés

The vital role of enjambement for Noël can be seen from his decision to choose his title from across two lines, and, in the process, to disrupt the expression “battre de l’aile” by using only its second half. It means “to be in a bad way” as well as ‘to beat its wings’. “L’aile” introduces the image of flight into the title; Noël conceives of ideas in mental space as being borne on the wing. Most surprising of all is Noël’s use of the subjunctive. He is not suggesting that future time is in a bad way, but expresses the wish that it should be. The prepositions “sous” and “au-dessus” seem plausible because the beating of wings could be thought to take place at a certain level in the air, although the image becomes abstract when writing is the thing in relation to which the action is positioned. “Above” and “below” might refer to earlier images of a surface covering hidden depths. They also introduce the contrast between the gods above and the earth below in the following lines. The subject appears to blame the gods for our loss of faith in them; if they had loved “l’en-dessous”, Noël writes, they would still be alive. This invites us to interpret “l’en-dessous” as earth, in contrast to heaven. But Noël’s decision to focus on relative positioning rather

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than naming earth, or the world, suggests that the distinction between earthly and heavenly realms is less important than the relationship between the visible surfaces of life and all that they conceal. Belief in “les dieux d’autrefois” has declined, and we find ourselves unable to imagine our origins. The line is split over a page break, “sauf un premier | jour”, which causes us to hesitate over the word “premier”, and thereby emphasises it. Without pausing for breath, the poem continues with another caveat. Although a source for human life is unimaginable, we can see how it might well up. The word “source”, which in French means both origin and a spring of water, is not employed, but it is latent in the text as it describes water coming up from below and evokes the mother as the source of new life. The image is immediately diverted into one of tears, linking sources to sadness. This technique is a hallmark of Noël’s long poetic texts. Images succeed one another, neither at random, nor according to argument or logic. Rather, each appears to generate the next, suggesting meaning in various directions and referring backwards and forwards in the text to create a web of movement in different directions. Pronouns create another kind of network, as they set up dialogues between the self, another and itself. It is never clear who is addressing whom and from which position. The introduction of “nous” appears to fuse “je” and “tu”, but the process is rarely smooth, and it is sometimes employed to describe the human race as a whole. For example, in twelve lines the subject invokes “tu”, “je”, “on” and “nous”, as well as numerous definite articles, including those that designate parts of the body and detach them from the subject. Thought is said to begin in the body, and we are presented with the visual image of a body using its hands to create its head, only for death to begin operating within the body, through the medium of the mouth. Any sense of a person understood as defined by a consciousness has been eradicated from this model; we can take our thoughts and identity only from our physical nature and its temporality. This potentially appalling image is followed by the line: “je ne tiens pas tellement à moi”. If a sense of coherence is not particularly important, then perhaps the definition of the self that is proposed is bearable. The subject insists, as is so often the case in Noël’s work, that we must realise that death is at work within us. He is repeatedly drawn to this image of soft marrow in the backbone, which is

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commonly taken to symbolise strength. Here the attainment of solidity does nothing to allay the frailty of mortal man, but instead makes it more inevitable. Once mortality has been recognised, the subject does not despair, but instead adopts an almost celebratory tone: “nous sommes l’avenir du temps”. If time is in us, then we are in time, and therefore can be truly active in the present. The sequence from “le silence n’a pas de centre” to “un seul aujourd’hui”, abolishes linearity in a manner reminiscent of Eliot’s lines: “Time present and time past | Are both perhaps present in time future, | And time future contained in time past”.115 Noël does not name the present, preferring to designate it through deixis as “aujourd’hui”, which is always present. The pace of the passage increases with a disembodied laugh that is also an old wound; the mouth appears to be defying the death it was said to harbour, and to be refusing speech. This is immediately contradicted by a question that appears to be spoken and to invite speech: “dis-moi”.116 Noël brings together two important themes of the poem, language and identity, when the subject asks whether language, or the act of naming, prompted our search to imagine the unknown in us, or whether language arose from this search. Not only does language have a complex relationship with the things it designates, but our naming of ourselves is vital to our identity. The never-ending nature of this questioning is reinforced by the rhyming of “qui cherche” with “qui cherche”. Again the surface hides depths, this time by reflection; the sea shows us the sky above, not the earth beneath. Similarly, our name is used by others and reflects our dialogue with them, and not what is inside the self. The last two lines of the page, “c’est en nous-même | que l’autre nous attend”, prevent the reader from seeing a straightforward conflictual relationship between self and other, in which the self does not recognise him- or herself in the name s/he is called, by insisting that self and other cannot be clearly distinguished, because strangeness is found within the self. Noël employs another bodily image, one of surface and depth, when the subject insists that the face must be peeled away to reveal what’s underneath, “à coups de 115

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 13. It is reminiscent of Cendrars’s repeated “Dis, Blaise”, in “La Prose du transsibérien et de la Petite Jeanne de France”, in Poésies complètes (Paris: Denoël, 1944), pp. 6380 (pp. 71-72). 116

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qui”. This peculiar grammatical formulation recalls La Chute des temps, in which the pronoun “qui” is repeatedly invoked to build up an impression of persistent questioning and anxiety over identity. Here it has the added dimension of violence. The following images are visual representations of interiority and depth, but not ones that can be clearly mapped: the labyrinth and the well. The latter is unnamed, and the image of it calls to mind the source of water evoked, but also left unnamed, earlier in the poem. Naming is no longer just hard to position in relation to identity, it becomes a labyrinth in which forgetting is trapped. Meanwhile, the injunction to remember, “le souviens-toi”, is apparently an incursion made by reality into the mind. But the image of throwing pennies into a well, which leads to the sound of breaking glass, suggests both vain wishful thinking and the destruction of transparent or reflective surfaces. We are not given hope that either forgetting or remembering will be successful. The subsequent line, “mais dans quels yeux”, appears to revive the possibility of reflection, but the source and identity of the participating vision is unknown. “Je voudrais citer tous les livres | la citation est un plat froid” seals the sense of sterility that has developed over the course of the poem, as avenues of potential meaning are suggested through inventive metaphors, but then closed off, as neither dialogue nor selfexploration seems to bring the subject any closer to finding the origins that are so important. Linguistic and textual experimentation appear to have failed. Yet we also gain a sense of the poet’s fierce attachment to words as his only, and still privileged, means of expression. Language can, perhaps, be put to effective use provided that it does not merely cite other examples of its usage. Noël rhymes “froid” with “moi”, but then gradually infuses warmth into the following lines that simply express perception of, and give names to, the ordinary things he sees around him. Crucially, possessive pronouns begin to multiply: “ma table | mon papier | ma main”. Possession is most striking when applied to his hand, because body parts have been designated with definite articles in all but the very early lines of the text. The longer lines “voyant tout à coup ma table” and “mais les trois qui composent la chose” suggest coherence through the internal rhymes “tout” | “coup” and “composent” | “chose”. Meanwhile, the other lines become gradually shorter, until Noël has pared the poetry

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of perception down to its most basic form: “je vois | une | chose”. The image is not allowed to stand, however; he explains that the three things that make it up, presumably the three lines, are not identical to it.117 While words and things are not the same, words nevertheless resemble what they designate, and they also bring this into being as a named thing: “ce qui existe | ressemble à ce qui le fait | exister”. Noël manages to emphasise both the irreducible materiality of things and the inseparability of words and what they name. The phrase “un peu de” occurs for the third time, and it combines the questioning of identity with the image of water from the two previous instances of its use. If we succeed in overcoming our consciousness of the human state, we might be able to reflect the sky within mental space, that is, participate in the elemental world through mental space. Noël reminds us of the difference between two meanings of reflection: the act of thinking, which distances the subject from what it considers, and the production of a copy. Of course, Noël does not consider human involvement in the natural world to take the form of mimetic reflection; as we have seen, the interrelationship between self and other is a complex process of resemblance. Indeed, by specifying that we reflect “d’en bas”, he reintroduces the opposition and connection between above and below, surface and depth, that have dominated the poem. The end of the text returns to designating “ma main | mon papier | ma table”, as if the subject were making a final effort to think a little less. It even asks: “qu’ai-je pensé”. Eventually, surfaces are stripped away in one more return of the bodily image, as someone unknown lifts off the skin from “mon visage”. We might expect to see revealed at last the depth that appeared so inaccessible. Instead, the self underneath is a lack. The notion of a coherent persona, separate from its surroundings, is precisely what the subject has been overcoming throughout the poem. Now that it has gone, there is room for presence, for the events of being and writing to take place: “et ce 117

The concept of the Trinity is obliquely suggested, with its paradoxical insistence that three are all one, but simultaneously different from one another.

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défaut suffit à donner lieu”. The expression seems unfinished; generally one would read: “donner lieu à” an event or a thing. 118 It is an entirely typical ending to a poem by Noël, however, because it enacts the openness between self and world that the text has worked to achieve.

118

This allusion to Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés” (“rien […] n’aura eu lieu […] que le lieu”), Œuvres complètes, I, pp. 384-385, implies that citation is unavoidable and welcomed in spite of Noël’s apparent rejection of used language.

Maintenant, j’ecris: je vois le ciel. Ce que je vois là m’est déplaisant. Le bleu lui manque. Et le “du”. Le “du” surtout. Pas le temps de m’en demander la raison qu’elle éclate: “je vois le bleu du ciel” voulait dire: je vois la substance du ciel. Et dans cette substance étaient mes yeux. À elle mes yeux joints. (Noël, Journal du regard, p. 108)

CHAPTER 3 ART AND THE BOOK: DU BOUCHET, NOËL AND THE VISUAL ARTS The collaboration between André du Bouchet and the artist Pierre Tal Coat has been described as “osmosis”, a term that evokes the equality between word and image in the three books they produced together: Sur le pas, in 1959, Laisses, in 1975 and, in 1978, Sous le linteau en forme de joug.119 Tal Coat added his aquatints to du Bouchet’s text, but they are no more illustrations of his words than these are descriptions of the images. Neither medium refers to the other; rather, they are engaged in a mutual quest for the real. Noël’s work with Olivier Debré is inventive in a different manner. He seems to suggest interpretations of the engravings, while never referring directly to them: they were subsequent to the text. He has prefaced catalogues for Debré’s exhibitions, and they completed Espace du sourire together shortly before the artist’s death in 1999; the following year Noël wrote one of his lettres verticales for Debré. Le Livre de l’oubli, which will be discussed here, appeared in 1985.120 These collaborations have been singled out from a range of illustrated books produced by Noël and du Bouchet. In addition, Noël has written catalogue prefaces for many contemporary artists, as well 119

François Chapon describes the pairing as osmosis in “Cheminement d’André du Bouchet et de Pierre Tal Coat”, L’Ire des vents, 6-8 (1983), 151-158. André du Bouchet and Pierre Tal Coat, Sur le pas (Paris: Maeght, 1959), Laisses (Lausanne: Simecek, 1975), Sous le linteau en forme de joug (Lausanne: Simecek, 1978). 120 Bernard Noël, À propos de l’exposition des œuvres d’Olivier Debré, juin 1976, Galerie Ariel (Paris : Galerie Ariel, 1976); Debré (Paris: Flammarion, 1984); Olivier Debré (Paris: Aréa, 1988); Olivier Debré, le rideau de scène de l’Opéra de HongKong ([Paris]: Librairie Séguier, 1989); Debré: dessins 1945-1960 (Paris: Biro; SaintDenis: Musée d’art et d’histoire, 1990); Lettre verticale XXXI pour Olivier Debré (Rouen: L’Instant perpétuel, 2000). Bernard Noël and Olivier Debré, Le Livre de l’oubli (Marseille: Ryoân-ji, 1985); Espace du sourire (Sainte Croix Vallée Française: l’Attentive, 1998).

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as prefaces and full-length studies of some of the major figures in modern art. While livres d’artistes are, in general, expensive to produce and therefore appear in limited editions, Noël has published, jointly with some of his contemporaries, books in low- and mid-price editions that include a large number of reproductions alongside the text. They have brought the work of artists such as Vieira da Silva and Zao Wou-Ki to the attention of a wider audience; readers benefit from Noël’s commentary, in which he both illuminates the images and offers the poetic reflection on vision and creativity that is central to all his work. In his volume Journal du regard, which assembles extracts from his catalogue texts, and Onze romans d’œil, in which he studies eleven artists at work, the full range of these ideas is explored. 121 Noël is typical of his generation of poets in that he works with artists who are also his friends. Indeed, friendship is vital to the intimate collaborations that have resulted in the modern livre d’artiste. This is particularly true of du Bouchet, who said in a 1991 interview that “tous ces livres sont issus d’un rapport d’amitié, de moments passés ensemble, de discussions”. He worked closely with artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Antoni Tàpies and Geneviève Asse, although none of the books produced suggest a rapport such as emerges from the collaborations with Tal Coat.122 Du Bouchet writes about Tal Coat and Giacometti, and, to a lesser extent, Miklos Bokor, in texts that are not illustrated. 123 They cannot be classified as art criticism, because individual works of art are not interpreted, described, or even named. In some cases, du Bouchet even omits the name of the artist. He employs visual imagery, which might include colour nouns or references to figurative images, 121

See, for instance, Vieira da Silva (Creil: Dumerchez, 1994) and Zao Wou-Ki ([Mont-de-Marsan]: L’Atelier des brisants, 2001). 122 Interview with Alain Veinstein, 28 October 1991, France Culture, repr. in André du Bouchet: Espace du poème, espace de la peinture: exposition à l’Hôtel des Arts – Centre Méditerranéan d’Art, ed. by Jean-Pascal Léger (Toulon: Conseil général du Var, 2003), p. 17. See André du Bouchet and Alberto Giacometti, L’Inhabité (Paris: Hugues, 1967), André du Bouchet and Antoni Tàpies, Air (Paris: Maeght, 1971), André du Bouchet and Geneviève Asse, Ici en deux (Geneva: Quentin, 1982). 123 These are not always easy to identify if the artist is not named. Among the texts on Tal Coat are two published together in L’Emportement du muet: “Cendre tirant sur le bleu”, pp. 37-53, and “Essor”, pp. 55-73. Du Bouchet’s early writings on Giacometti are reproduced in Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous, and he devoted to Miklos Bokor the volume De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture (Le Muy: Unes, 1990), n. pag.

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but is more likely to create, obliquely, the presence of the real that also emerges in the artist’s canvases. The texts resemble du Bouchet’s poetic prose as a whole far more closely than they do conventional art criticism. They have this in common with Noël’s poetic meditations on vision. Why should writers respond to art in this way, and why has visual art been of overwhelming importance to modern poets? Throughout the history of poetic responses to art, and artistic depictions of narrative, the debate has raged over which art form has primacy. But modern practitioners do not aim at transposition; poetry does not seek to represent the visual, and images are not required to portray scenes, stories or emotions. Carine Trévison argues that twentieth-century poets and painters search for a “common place”.124 This would be both philosophical and social. Unattached to poetic schools, many artists felt a sense of community in their friendships with artists (p. 197). The Maeght and Louise Leiris galleries were influential in bringing contemporary art to the attention of writers, who then published reviews in the journals Cahiers d’art and Derrière le miroir (p. 195). The livre d’artiste has been an increasingly exciting development since the latter part of the nineteenth century, with books by figures such as Mallarmé and Manet, but it was from Apollinaire onwards that it began to take on the modern form of collaboration. As well as working with artists including André Derain, Apollinaire published his influential essay on Les Peintres cubistes. Similarly, Reverdy published Note éternelle du présent, in which he discusses the importance of the visual arts, as well as producing books such as Le Chant des morts, with Picasso. In his calligraphic images, Picasso began to blur the boundaries between word and image. 125 Perhaps the most impressive livre d’artiste of the early part of the century is Sonia Delaunay’s and Blaise Cendrars’s La Prose du 124

Carine Trévison, “Les poètes et la peinture: une ‘fête de l’apparition’”, in MarieClaire Bancquart (ed.), Poésie de langue française 1945-60 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995), pp. 193-210 (p. 194). 125 Stéphane Mallarmé and Édouard Manet, L’Après-midi d’un faune (Paris: Derenne, 1876); Guillaume Apollinaire, Méditations esthétiques: Les Peintres cubistes, ed. by L. C. Breunig and J.-Cl. Chevalier (Paris: Hermann, 1965); Guillaume Apollinaire and André Derain, L’Enchanteur pourrissant (Paris: Kahnweiler, 1909); Pierre Reverdy, Note éternelle du présent: Écrits sur l’art (1923-60) (Paris: Flammarion, 1973); Pierre Reverdy and Pablo Picasso, Le Chant des morts (Paris: Tériade, 1948).

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transsibérien ou la petite Jehanne de France, of 1913.126 Made in concertina form, it unfolds vertically so that the whole book is visible simultaneously on one sheet of paper, which could equally well be described as a canvas. Vibrant colours are used for the images and the text; although they advance parallel with one another, they merge together at the boundary. The livre d’artiste was an important form for the surrealists, a group that included both artists and writers, and some who worked in both media. Bataille, Fautrier and Dubuffet are among those who produced influential books that appear to enter into and produce the matter of the world, the body and the imagination. Dubuffet published books on his own, providing both word and image. This rare ability is shared with the poet and painter Henri Michaux.127 The versatility of the form is revealed in its adoption by those writers and painters who reject surrealism. Poets who explore the real can find in visual images emanations of what they seek in words: light and dark, space, movement, and a sense of presence in the world. For writers such as Bonnefoy, the page and the canvas are privileged places for the emergence of sensible reality. Bonnefoy, along with contemporaries such as Dupin, is an important art critic as well as a writer who responds poetically to the work of friends. Bonnefoy has written most famously on Italian Baroque art, while Dupin is a major authority on Miró. They are among a great many post-war writers who were friends with and wrote about Giacometti’s sculptures and drawings. Dupin has insisted on the importance of watching artists at work; evocations of Giacometti’s obsessive reworking of his sculptures recur in all the texts devoted to him. 128 They are representative of those who have gone towards artists, not content to describe and discuss art from a critical distance. As Emmanuel Pernoud puts it:

126

Paris: Editions des hommes nouveaux. See, for example, Georges Bataille and Jean Fautrier, Madame Edwarda (Paris: Librairie Auguste Blaiziot, 1942), Jean Dubuffet, Ler dla campagne (Paris: L’Art brut, 1948) and Henri Michaux, Meidosems (Paris: Editions du Point du jour, 1948). 128 Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: Biographie d’une œuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1991); Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti (Tours: Farrago, 1999).

127

Art and the Book 143 Parmi tous ceux qui écrivent sur les peintres, les poètes furent les premiers à aller vers les peintres, à aller aux peintres.129

The transitions that operate between collaborators on livres d’artistes are not transpositions between the verbal and the visual. Rather, they involve the deliberate movement of one form of imagery towards the other, in a common search for expression. Du Bouchet and Tal Coat The book is a site where word and image gain proximity, for the simple reason that text and illustration can occupy the same space: side-by-side on facing pages, interspersed within each other, or even overlapping on the page. This is the form chosen by du Bouchet and Tal Coat, and it reaches the height of its potential in their last collaboration, Sous le linteau en forme de joug. The book measures 28cm by 19cm, and consists of ten sheets of paper folded twice to form 19 double-page spreads. The paper is of high quality, but has a rough grain. The edges appear torn, and the pages vary slightly in size. Fifty copies only were produced; the book is presented in a box engraved with a black non-figurative illustration on a brown background. Tal Coat’s aquatints are not obviously representative, although he insisted that his work was always figurative. For instance, an apparently formless sweeping area of colour might evoke the rapid dash of a hare across an open field; he chose to portray the movement because he said that is what would catch the eye, whereas a hare motionless in a field is rarely visible. 130 Tal Coat aims at presenting the real, rather than representing it, which is why his work appeals to a poet such as du Bouchet. The illustrations in Sous le linteau are monochrome shapes in red, yellow, blue and black. They first appear separately from the text and then in spaces between the words on some pages. Finally, deep black or grey colour sweeps over the text, which includes: Des mots, attardés encore, affirment rouge auprès de blanc, se surimposant à l’obscurité comme à 129

Emmanuel Pernoud, “L’Œil des poètes: Critique d’art et poésie”, in Où va l’histoire d’art contemporain?, ed. by Laurence Bertrand Dorléac and others (Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1997), pp. 462-469 (p. 464). 130 Cited by Emmanuel Pernoud: “L’Instant animal”, in Portrait(s) de Pierre Tal Coat, ed. by Emmanuel Pernoud (Paris: BNF, 1999), pp. 56-64 (p. 60).

144 Provisionality and the Poem une face…131

The heavy presence of black obscures the words for red and white, which will later be transformed into pink (red illustrations appeared earlier in the book, but the colour was not mentioned in words). The purpose of the black is not to obscure in the sense of negating the lighter colours and the text, but to create night, into which all the other colours have entered: épaisseur dont, cette nuit même – embrasure rentrée – je peux dire qu’elle est sauge PAGE BREAK ou glaise, air, colza, bleu…

The colours are drawn in by the blaze of sunset, and black is the darkness and depth of the night. The final illustration, placed immediately after the end of the text, is a small, angular yellow shape. Its brightness counters the increasing opacity brought on by the merging of colours into black and the superimposition of words and images as the book progressed. The yellow’s brightness evokes sunlight, and it balances the blue image that opened the work, before the first page of text. Tal Coat’s magnificent bright blue aquatint haunts the whole book, even though the colour does not recur. It appears to be made up of layers, and, at its thickest point, the reader can discern a pale wash overlaid with lavishly applied ink, into which grooves have been cut. Ridges form a further layer on top. The other aquatints in this book suggest depth, but none to such an extent. Why should Tal Coat have chosen to emphasise thickness more in a colour that is thought to be light and airy than in the heavy black images? It is likely that he is responding to the forceful presence of the colour blue as named by du Bouchet in his text. The blue of Sous le linteau is fascinating because it is given the paradoxical qualities of weight and movement. Du Bouchet refers to “bleu ciel”, but only in combination with “bleu-charette”, which brings us back down to earth. We have the blue image in mind as the text opens:

131

See Plate 1.

Art and the Book 145 Une étendue de peinture – une nouvelle étendue de peinture… une étendue de sommeil…

Painting is immediately present as matter, and just as quickly related to human experience. Layers are introduced from the start, creating the effect of gradual descent into the oblivion of sleep. Du Bouchet associates the colour blue with forgetting through an echo with the opening phrase: Un jour de plus, une nouvelle épaisseur d’oubli, ravive… La répétition ravive, sur les pentes de la peinture…

Variation is also subtly introduced; in the opening sentence, layering brought on sleep, but here repetition has a wakening effect. It is clear that the interaction of movement and depth in this text is a complex one. It provides a marked contrast to its companion piece, Laisses, produced by du Bouchet and Tal Coat three years earlier. The atmosphere of Laisses evokes floating; the text is sparse in layout, and the images do not overlay the words. In Sous le linteau, depth and varying levels are central: … une épaisseur de plus – un jour de plus… Et le bleu, immédiatement – sol encore, d’où je discerne le bleu, empâtement bleu – comme un bouchon d’air, un bouchon dans l’air

… sur l’oubli revient, mot lavé

Blue is both earth and air. In turn, air is both the constituent of space in which blockages might build up, “un bouchon dans l’air”, and is also itself rendered solid: “un bouchon d’air”. The term “de plus” implies time unfolding, but the image is of the immediate present: “immédiatement”. Du Bouchet opens up the text to interruptions and gaps that disturb any conclusions we might form. It is like the blue; both layered solidity and articulated movement. Here, for instance, a sense of increasing thickness is created by his insistence on the terms “épaisseur”, “empâtement”, “bouchon” “solidité”. But there are also indications of movement: “de plus”, “articuler”, “s’engager”, “soulevée”. Development is created by his decision to use variation rather than straightforward repetition. The words build up, but also reveal an overlap that produces change. The

146 Provisionality and the Poem

marginal note again relates this process to forgetting: by leaving behind unthinking assumptions of meaning, we allow words to return refreshed. Enacting this process in his text, du Bouchet shows us that what is left behind remains in layers, and that these influence our forward movement through the book. The positioning of the text is a visual example of layering. On ten of its pages, a central body of text is divided into sections and is accompanied by marginal notes in smaller font. These resemble du Bouchet’s poetry, in that the shorter line-length emphasises the role of enjambement, and the margins internal to the notes are sometimes mobile. The marginal notes frame the main body of the text, suggesting the image of a door or window through which a scene is viewed, a shape implied by the title, Sous le linteau en forme de joug. Far from creating perspective and a secure position from which to view an image, however, they complicate the reading of the text. Our inclination to read horizontally, incorporating them into the whole, is thwarted, as they run in parallel to the main text, without always referring to what it says. They continue across gaps on the page, or between pages, which means that we have to move back and forth in the text in order to read everything. They take up ideas in the central text, modifying them, preempting what is to come and introducing new images. For example, a brief marginal reference to “la montagne acide”, is unclear until the main text at the bottom of the page presents a comparison between the green of a meadow and the effect of acid eating into the metal of the plate used to produce the aquatints. The text reads: ( L’ancien, et le frais. Vert qui se nomme, ailleurs que dans la morsure par l’acide, d’une plaque, prairie. Parole et inarticulé: le vert accompagne, jusqu’à se fonder, une prairie, il en sort aussi vite – comme de la parole l’inarticulé. Il peut se voir également sur une pierre éclatée, feutre ajusté aux ruptures.

… trait qui scinde, comme libre, une fraction de temps, de la figure qu’il lui échoit d’envelopper aussitôt qu’il départage…

The colour green appears to be the subject of this passage. It is both novel, as fresh grass or the action of acid, and ancient, in the form of lichen that forms in cracked rocks. But du Bouchet is also discussing language, and, in particular, how colours are named. The word “vert” can be used to evoke various images, but it must always

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engage with what is not linguistic, the “inarticulé” of the natural world or the artist’s materials. It might pursue an image, but necessarily moves away from it. Language can emerge in a new way once it has first been ruptured, which is what du Bouchet aims to do in his writing. The text in the centre of the page ends with an image from the elemental world, a broken rock, but when rupture is taken up in the marginal note, it has left behind its solid context. The “trait qui scinde” divides both time and image; it is writing that takes the ancient “parole” and sets to work in its cracks. Sous le linteau does not pile words upon words, examining language through an endless elaboration of its possibilities. Du Bouchet does not create gaps and ruptures in the text in order to linger in them as moss does on a stone. Rather, he obliges the reader to reconsider meanings in order that the “inarticulé” should have the space to emerge. The text cited above continues on the following page: … revenant sur ce que j’ai vu – pour recouvrir ou éclairer, pour taire.

… bleu pur… l’épaisseur bleue… en perte pure… y subsistant…

Silence is required if the paradoxical elements in the pairing of thickness and purity, or of layers and movement, are to operate in conjunction with one another. Blue has returned to replace the green imagined on the previous page. Whereas the word for the colour green demanded to be discussed in the light of the images it evoked, the term “bleu” appears able to suggest the substance of the text without referring to any single nameable example of matter. It is “en perte pure”, a persistent presence throughout the text that nevertheless allows for the loss that is needed for it to progress. We might conclude that the book will enact a gradual dissolution of reference until the words and images have been reduced to nothing but blue; this is far from being the case. Towards the end of the text, du Bouchet writes: ( ce sont vestiges du dedans, nœuds attardés de l’obscur qui se fait jour, noyaux obscures de la couleur, nœuds de la peinture… remontant au jour, quand tout a disparu…)

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Silence is not absence, linguistic purity that has succeeded in abandoning noisy, cumbersome reference. Rather, it allows the nonlinguistic to reassert itself, almost in the manner of a plant growing up towards the light in Spring. Knots of paint, of colour, push up into view. They are vestiges of what is beneath, but do not have the abstract quality of traces that have been left behind by an absent thing. They are their own tough matter, emerging from the dark. When asked the reason for his technique of etching grooves into images, Tal Coat replied: cela correspond presque toujours à une opération qui vise à faire resurgir ce qui était enfoui, l’histoire ancienne en quelque sorte ou la préhistoire. C’est ainsi qu’une ossature enfouie devient glyphe.132

The scratches he makes are signs of what is behind the image, just as excavated bones can be interpreted. He nuances his description of the trace as revealing ancient history by clarifying it as prehistory, which is prior to stories and to written language. An uncovered bone tells us something of the time in which it was buried, but also has a real existence in the present of its uncovering. The traces in his work are not signs that need to be deciphered. They are visual images made in real matter, and they also testify to the gestures that produced them. Erupting Realities “Vestiges” and “traces” are words that recur in du Bouchet’s writing on painting. They emerge in the present of writing, but do not always point clearly to an origin. They resemble du Bouchet’s similes that lack a term of comparison; lines of his poetry often begin “…comme”. The technique emphasises that language is not required to be mimetic; it surprises the reader who expects one thing to be compared to another in poetry. At the same time, du Bouchet obliges the reader to participate in the creation of the text, to supply possible terms of comparison. In du Bouchet’s work, traces always have complex relations to their origins. The following passage from “Essor”, which considers Tal Coat’s work without explicit reference to any of his paintings,

132

9.

Pierre Tal Coat, Conversation avec Eddy Devolder (Gerpinnes: Tandem, 1991), p.

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both explains and demonstrates that the trace of an object engages it in a continuous process of emergence and disappearance: Je vois est-ce à dire – l’objet pense-t-on, saisissable, ayant disparu – tout objet sur son retour ici comme évanoui dans l’instant, presque, où il réapparaît, et le trait qui le désignera ne constituant pas une trace – que je ne vois rien? (L’Emportement, p. 67)

The opening statement, “je vois”, seems to suggest that the subject is about to evoke perception. The rest of the paragraph works to undo any certainty about what is presented to the subject and the reader. As is often the case in du Bouchet’s writing, clauses add to, but also subtract from, one another, extending the sentence through qualification until the original referent is unclear. In this case, he nevertheless encloses all his reflections in a central question: “est-ce à dire […] que je ne vois rien?”, a question that contradicts the certainty of the opening phrase. The structure “est-ce” signals that a question is being asked, and forces the reader to search for what that question will be, retaining each subsequent clause in the hope of later clarification. The next idea is also interrupted, “l’objet […] ayant disparu”, by our vain expectation that it can be grasped; “pense-t-on, saisissable”. The idea is broadened to include all objects, which are brought back just as the original has disappeared: “tout objet sur son retour ici”. Immediately, these generic objects themselves vanish and return in the same moment: “comme évanoui dans l’instant […] où il réapparaît”. The “presque” that intrudes here prevents exact coincidence between the actions of emergence and disappearance. In any case, the subject refuses to grant that the image left by this process is a clear representation of what has occurred: “et le trait qui le désignera ne constituant pas une trace”. He distinguishes between a “trace”, which marks the passage of a now absent object, and a “trait”, which is the painter’s mark that cannot be said for certain to represent anything other than itself. Perhaps he sees nothing because there was nothing there. But du Bouchet has not written “est-ce que je ne vois rien?” Rather, “est-ce à dire que?”, “does it mean that?” is an attempt to interpret the previous utterance, to put it in other words. In order to express “je vois” another way, he chooses the expression “je ne vois rien”. It is not that the subject does not see, but rather that truly seeing the marks in the painting means seeing that they are

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nothing. Nothing has two meanings here: it emphasises that the marks exist only in themselves, without pointing to something else; at the same time, it makes the subject see the absence of the original referent. It keeps open the transition back and forth between the trace as an object in itself and as the vestige of something different. This is put succinctly in another text from the same volume, “Deux traces vertes”. Du Bouchet writes: “Trace non vestige, trace toujours à tracer” (L’Emportement, p. 80). A vestige can be the permanent mark of an earlier presence, whereas the trace is defined as a continuous process.133 He suggests that the marks made by artists are never definitive recordings of perception; rather, they incite the observer to continue looking at the painting and at the world. This is not to say that vestiges have no place in art, as he understands it. They recur even in Une tache, a book that would seem, by its title, to be dedicated to traces without referents. He writes: vestiges, sur le moment, de provenance une fois encore inconnue – ça et là, une tache – jusqu’au seuil du support.134

Here marks of paint, “taches” are not described in terms of what they represent, but simply as vestiges with unknown origin. They emerge momentarily, here and there on the canvas, so they are far from permanent elements of deliberately organised space. One has the impression of the artist’s hand skimming over the surface of the canvas, leaving traces of paint almost randomly as s/he passes through, but this is far from du Bouchet’s vision of how art functions. While the trace might well have emerged suddenly, it does have a history, albeit unknown. Its “provenance” prevents it from being an instantly forgettable apparition. Similarly, while the traces are positioned “ça et là”, they are, in fact, anchored on the threshold of the “support”: the paper or canvas. It forms the literal, spatial background of the work, just as the gesture of the painter, and his or her inspiration, is its background in time. Du Bouchet insists on the term “support” in all his writing on art. The importance he attaches to it

133

Language is seen as a play of traces without referent by deconstructionist thinkers. They refute directly writers from Aristotle on who have conceived of the trace as an imprint on the memory. 134 Une tache ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1988), n. pag.

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takes his work on art from consideration of surface images to a complex investigation of depth in space and time. For du Bouchet, the background to a work of art is more than a flat surface convenient for the application of paint or ink. It has a solid presence; he uses the term “support” more frequently than “fond”. A “support” does not recede, allowing images to emerge in the foreground. Rather, it bears the weight and depth of their presence. The term is particularly evocative in du Bouchet’s text on the work of Miklos Bokor, an artist who had been imprisoned in Auschwitz: support dont – antérieur à la parole ou à la peinture, et, étant advenu, à plus d’une reprise, qu’il les survit – on présume qu’il reste susceptible d’en emporter plus loin – au plus loin – avec soi quelques traces. (De plusieurs déchirements)

The title of the volume, De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture, reflects the emphasis on rupture and uncertainty in the text, but this is always seen against the unflinching solidity of the “support” provided by the canvas, which precedes and outlasts language or painting. It can carry with it the traces that have been left, even when representative meaning in words or images is not possible. It is something to lean on when expression is inadequate. The image of backgrounds as a mute presence recurs in du Bouchet’s writing on art. In Une tache, for instance, he writes: le plan muet parle à travers de ce qui est dit, comme accent ou lumière.

The paradoxical statement that the background is mute, but speaks through what is said, is again exploring how the non-representative can be significant. It suggests that what is behind an image emerges and adds to the viewer’s understanding of that image. The three-way comparison with light and accent is surprising, but these link the visual and the linguistic. The accent we hear in speech contributes to our interpretation of an utterance without offering specific meanings in the way that words must do. Light incorporated into an image can appear to shine through and alter its whole aspect even if its source is not in the frame of the picture. Du Bouchet often draws attention to the light that penetrates an image. This might not take the form of bright natural light, but

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could be the whiteness of the background that emerges between drawn lines or painted shapes and seems to bring the image to life. It upsets our notions of perspective, as the background is shown to have advanced up to and through the image that we would expect to see in the foreground. The canvas or page appears to be made of constantly shifting layers, rather than to be a flat surface on which the artist’s skill would cause the background to recede. He is particularly sensitive to luminous backgrounds in the drawings by Alberto Giacometti, writing in a text on the artist: éclat de la lumière dans laquelle une figure tracée, sur son annulation pressentie, à elle-même reviendra, et qu’elle paraît réfléchir, alors qu’elle a été, de part en part déjà, traversée.135

The “figure” appears in a flash of light, but as soon as it has arrived, it is about to disappear again. Then it returns for a moment. It seems to reflect, but the object reflected is unclear. It could be the sitter for the portrait, or the light that has heralded its arrival. The figure is crossed through, “traversée”, just as the background paper was able to speak “à travers” the image in the previous quotation. Giacometti endows the paper in his drawings with the strength to engender the figure and cause it to disappear repeatedly. Du Bouchet sees the blank canvas not as a tool, but as real matter that is active in the creation of an image. It has the elemental qualities of light and the layered depth of the earth. Indeed, at times he sees the paper as using the images or words imprinted on it to create a present of seeing or reading: Papier – antérieur à ce qu’on aura pu y inscrire, de nouveau seul à figurer, dans un agencement de mots, le présent. (Une tache)

Du Bouchet’s discussions of painting nearly always relate the image to the word. He clearly links the artist’s canvas to the writer’s page, as has been clear from his use of space in all his own texts. The page provides the support for his words to emerge and disappear, just as the drawings of Giacometti appear in constant flux.

135

D’un trait qui figure et défigure ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1997), p. 10.

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Repetition and interruption characterise du Bouchet’s texts, and they are fundamental to the art with which he engages in writing. His view of the image could be summarised by this statement in Une tache: ce qui sur l’instant se découvre retiré au temps, fera – pour éclairer, dans la durée du temps, irruption de nouveau.

The instant and duration are not mutually exclusive for du Bouchet. Indeed, they always operate in tandem, as repeated instances of emergence and disappearance take place in time. This sentence also exemplifies his technique of enacting what he describes, as the interruption that allows an image to come into view time after time is created by the insertion of the phrase “pour éclairer, dans la durée du temps” into the assertion “fera […] irruption de nouveau”. His frequent use of the expression “de nouveau” emphasises that repetition should not be seen as the stultifying recurrence of identical images, but rather as the creation of novelty through the disruption that obliges us to look at an image in a different fashion. He employs “de nouveau” to evoke the emergence of reality incited by Tal Coat’s painting: présent au surgissement de la réalité qui de nouveau sera ce qu’on oublie, la destination de la peinture n’étant pas bornée à un tableau produit, mais elle-même – pas grand chose – rien qu’un instant, mais l’instant même marquant l’accueil de ce qui, oublié, n’en est pas moins là, comme à la source l’eau. (L’Emportement, p. 53)

According to du Bouchet, Tal Coat’s works offer the viewer a sense of being present at the creation of the present (the opening “présent” encompasses both noun and adjective). He does not attribute this directly to the artist’s skill; his skill is such that we see not his creativity, but the actual coming into being of the real. But reality is also the inspiration for the work, one that we forget as soon as we see the image in constant motion. Du Bouchet explains that movement is vital to Tal Coat’s art, because it is not limited to the frame of any single canvas. He is quoting Tal Coat’s own comment on painting when he says that it is “pas grand chose”; the artist always valued the natural world that

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inspired him over his own work. Du Bouchet transforms Tal Coat’s humble statement, rendering the smallness of painting its greatest strength; the transience of each individual piece means that Tal Coat produces the movement and change of reality across his work as a whole. The paintings remind the viewer of the everyday reality that is often ignored by bringing to life its energy. But this same movement means that images must be forgotten again so they can be left behind. The real emerges in an instant, and immediately disappears again, but it is not obliterated. Rather, the viewer is left with the memory of its presence behind the images on the canvas, compared to water emerging from a spring. Du Bouchet thus endows Tal Coat’s paintings with another layer, this time the invisible presence of the real that reveals itself repeatedly and briefly, only to fade away and leave the visual traces that make up the work. In a discussion of the first collaboration between Tal Coat and du Bouchet, Sur le pas, François Chapon also focuses on this quality in Tal Coat’s work. He describes the artist’s engraving tool as: non pas comme l’instrument d’une empreinte définitive, mais propulsion d’une libre trajectoire en suspens dans ce milieu lui-même animé. Les barbes du trait, ses variations d’épaisseur ajoutent à cette modulation spatiale qui semble promise à un “ rebond de présences jaillissantes.136

The traces made by the tool are mobile, but so is the space in which they are made. Chapon writes that the variations in thickness contribute to the continual movement of the space of the image that allows presence to well up. The real is always the central subject in du Bouchet’s texts and he emphasises its importance in the work of artists he admires. In this, he is representative of many poets and artists of his generation who have contributed to livres d’artistes. Chapon points out that he shared with the artists with whom he worked, including Tàpies and Ubac as well as Tal Coat, the wish to abandon the position in which man is the centre of the world. He cites Tal Coat, who asserted that “la vraie perspective est circulaire” (Le Peintre et le livre, p. 184). This does not mean that he attempted to show scenes in 360º; that would 136

Le Peintre et le livre: L’Âge d’or du livre illustré en France, 1870-1970 (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), p. 188.

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imply that they were viewed from a central position. Rather, the space of the book is its own reality, without an objective viewpoint. It does not capture the perceptions of an individual, but the engagement of an artist with the world around. Noël and Debré The space of the book is exploited and explored by Noël in his partnership with Olivier Debré. Le Livre de l’oubli was published in 1985 by André Dimanche. 137 It measures 39 by 32 centimetres and contains eight engravings in black and white by Debré, based on original watercolours. Its monochromatic appearance is vital to the impression it creates of duality and reversal, as white lines and spaces shine through the predominantly black abstract shapes, implying that the words printed in black ink emerge through into the white of the page. Although colour is not layered in the obvious manner of Tal Coat’s ridged illustrations, black lines on white areas in black images on white paper create the sense of depth extending back into the page. The engravings were added to Noël’s text, which takes a variety of forms, from the short statement that resembles an aphorism to longer meditations, via short poems or reported dialogue that is given no context. He considers the nature of forgetting, proposing that it is an insistent presence and not simply the lack of memory. Similarly, the white sections of Debré’s engravings do not appear as an absence of black ink on white paper, but as the active presence of white shining through black (Plate 2). Noël writes: L’oubli dont je parle n’est pas oublier. Il n’est pas un manque de la mémoire Ni du présent Il n’est pas derrière moi seulement L’oubli est mon oubli. (Livre, p. 49)

Rather than a lack of memories or a failure of the faculty of memory, forgetting is, Noël contends, the presence of forgotten experiences. When he writes “il n’est pas derrière moi seulement | l’oubli est mon oubli”, he is saying that the subject does not leave 137

I am indebted to Andrew Rothwell’s presentation of this book in “Dorny, Noël, Debré: Two Creative Dialogues”, in The Dialogue Between Painting and Poetry: Livres d’artistes 1874-1999, ed. by Jean Khalfa (Cambridge: Black Apollo), pp. 127151.

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behind what it has forgotten; rather, the self still contains its forgetting. Noël takes this further by emphasising that the human being is by its very nature forgetting, as we forget our bodily nature: Que savons-nous de notre corps? Et des nerfs? Et de la pensée? L’inconnu est, en nous, lié au plus vif: il est la vie même. Le corps a oublié sa formation. Le lecteur oublie devant le texte la main qui l’a tracé. (Livre, p. 20)

In this example of reflective prose typical of Noël, he explains that it is not that we are somehow lifeless because of our forgetting. Quite the opposite: forgetting is an essential feature of our makeup. His aim as a writer is to reveal and explore what it is that we forget: what we consist of and where this comes from. The process will also involve an examination of the nature of writing, just as du Bouchet’s exploration of our place in the world was inseparable from an investigation of language. As in all his work, Noël proposes a connection between the body and the text: “le corps a oublié sa formation. Le lecteur oublie devant le texte la main qui l’a tracé”. In this instance, the body is unaware of its creation, while the reader who focuses on a text ignores the physical gesture of writing that produced it. Noël employs the verb “tracer” to describe the writing of a text, and this helps to connect the action made by the hand to the forgetting that is central to the process. The text becomes the trace of its creation, and we are invited to imagine that the body is therefore the trace, or the existence in the presence, of the nature that it has forgotten. The trace is forgetting, then, since forgetting for Noël is the presence of what has gone before. In this way, it resembles the trace of a fleeting moment in nature that du Bouchet appreciates in Tal Coat’s work, and which suggests also the traces of the engraver’s hand retained in the grooves of his images. Indeed, Noël also employs the term “support” that is so important to du Bouchet, although he applies it to the body: Le corps est un terrain archéologique, mais comment le fouiller? Les inscriptions ne se distinguent pas de leur support: elles en sont la substance, et le secret… Le secret de l’organique est de s’inscrire sensiblement en nous, tout en se dérobant à notre lecture. (Livre, p. 12)

His choice of vocabulary incorporates the visual arts, writing and archaeology when he writes that “les inscriptions ne se distinguent pas

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de leur support”. An inscription can be a trace left on canvas, paper, stone or the earth; it could be made up of meaningful signs, such as words, but it might also be a clue to an earlier existence that the archaeologist attempts to interpret. Noël’s originality lies in his attribution of inscriptions to the body, and his insistence that they are inseparable from it. Memories are often described as leaving a mark on a person’s mind at certain points during his or her lifetime. What Noël is proposing, on the other hand, is that traces are part of the body; they are organic and have always been there, but we are rarely able to read them. Noël consistently refuses to separate mind from body. The image of an archaeological dig with which the passage opens suggests the difficult task of digging down through layers of matter to recover traces that may not be legible. Olivier Debré’s illustrations for Le livre de l’oubli clearly do not represent this process, and do not feature written inscriptions. But as each black or white shape appears to emerge from another, they present us with an image that might well evoke the experience of an archaeologist. The engravings are tantalising in their refusal to offer interpretations; they appear to be traces of a presence that remains just beyond the reach of our interpretative skills and, in this way, they respond to Noël’s conception of the body. But it would be reductive to say that they are illustrative of his words; since they gain their significance from their power to suggest veiled depths, they are not required to represent anything beyond their own existence as traces. The Visible and the Invisible Noël finds in Debré’s paintings confirmation of his own complex convictions on the functioning of vision, thought and perception. For instance, he writes: Je crois que c’est Olivier Debré qui établit un rapport entre l’espace et le regard pour dire que notre espace interne va jusqu’où va le regard; voilà une autre façon de dire que notre corps s’illimite à travers nos yeux. (L’Espace, pp. 89-90)

In this comment Noël evokes the connection between vision, the body and space that is central to his poetics as a whole. According to Noël, Debré demonstrates that human beings participate in their environment because the body is not self-contained. Through sight, the limits

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of the self are extended as far as the eyes can see. The boundaries between the internal space of the body and the space around it are removed. What Noël is describing here is a way of being in space. In Journal du regard, he writes: Présence, c’est-à-dire l’intensité dans la manière d’occuper l’espace, de l’orienter, de faire sentir son volume. Et nous, dans ce volume, nous sommes mis en rapport avec quelque chose qui est le Lieu. Ou bien le repère vis-à-vis duquel avoir Lieu. (p. 89)

He defines presence as an intense occupation of space that emphasises its existence as volume. This links space inseparably to time, as instances of presence make us aware of what “takes place”. The relationship of the self to the volume it occupies is something that happens rather than something that exists. It is necessarily temporal, even if its duration cannot be measured. Noël believes that painting, including that of Olivier Debré, is capable of reminding the viewer of this taking place, and even of producing instances of presence. He explains in L’Espace du poème that the surface of a painting gives off volume that enters into the eye (p. 159). This places the viewer in the passive role of being penetrated by the work of art. But Noël does not consider the human subject to be acted upon by art and perception; according to Noël, we live through our participation in and action upon the world around, active involvement that depends on thought. He believes that thought is intimately related to sight because when we look, we immediately convert visual perception into mental imagery; seeing is interpreting. Art is capable of demonstrating how we think, and Noël privileges the work of visual artists because he is engaged in a persistent attempt to reveal the workings of thought in his own writing: Montrer le fonctionnement de la pensée consisterait à détruire sa représentation au profit de son seul surgissement, mais en quel lieu? Il faut une surface volumineuse, une surface d’illusion… (Journal, p. 15)

In the sense of volume created by some works of art, thought can be revealed. Unlike the writer, who is obliged to employ the abstraction of language, the artist need not attempt to describe or represent

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thought, but is able to recreate its emergence in the visual form of volume. Thinking therefore incorporates movement in the same way that seeing is an action rather than the passive acceptance of images. Noël finds it best expressed through volume because he insists on the volume that is internal to the self and that corresponds to the threedimensional space in which we are active. The two realms are constantly exchanging space, because vision, through which perception is converted into thought, is a process of transition between inside and out that he describes as “un renversement perpétuel du dedans et du dehors” (Journal, pp. 17-18). At several points in his writing on art, Noël names inside and outside as visible and invisible versions of the same space, for the reason that while we cannot see inside the mind, we should still understand it in material terms. He proposes a hypothetical experiment in Onze romans d’œil: Imaginez qu’on opère un prélèvement dans le regard: que verrions-nous? Non pas des choses, non pas le monde ni ton visage. Nous verrions ce que nous ne voyons pas, mais qui nous fait voir, ce qui peut-être nous aveugle et qui, en tout cas, nous en met plein la vue: le bruissement, le fourmillement, le frémissement de la matière invisible du visible. (p. 123)

Vision does not contain images, nor is it a mirror of what is there to be perceived. It is matter in itself, the matter of the visible, which he evokes in terms of rapid movements and rustlings. Images are not fixed by perception, but incessantly transformed. Even though they become invisible in thought, they are the stuff of visibility. In a text on Henri Michaux, Noël insists again on the contrast between the abstraction, or making invisible, that writing necessarily enacts, and the making visible of how we see that he believes to be within the power of some artists: Depuis l’origine, l’écriture va du visible à l’invisible et nous laisse devant la page sombre où lire n’est pas voir; mais voici inventée, comme par un retournement original, l’écriture visible de l’invisible.138

Michaux’s work is presented as the opposite of writing, as a force that overturns the apparent order of things to make the invisible present for 138

Vers Henri Michaux ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1998), p. 54.

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us to see. But Noël complicates his statement by choosing to describe Michaux’s work as writing; it is “écriture visible”. This might not strike the reader at first, because Michaux was an equally original writer and painter, and many of his ink drawings take the form of calligraphic figures that encourage the viewer to attempt to read them while also suggesting images of human figures. His use of the term “écriture” is significant, however, because it reminds us that all seeing is creative because we always convert perception into thought. Even when an artist performs the feat of showing us the invisible, we must not be allowed to assume that it is unmediated. An artist must “write” his or her presentation of vision because all seeing is in some sense writing. Noël puts this succinctly in his text on Debré: “L’espace est double: visible et invisible. Dans le visible, le monde nous apparaît; dans l’invisible, nous pensons le monde, nous le re-créons” (Debré, p. 11).139 Just as we do not accept perceptions without acting on them, works of art are not the product of an imagination unaffected by its bodily form. Indeed, in the essays collected in Onze romans d’œil, it is clear that Noël is often more interested in how the artist works than in the finished pieces. Moreover, he does not want to know about the creative process or inspiration for a work, but goes to the artist’s studio and watches the physical movements he or she makes in the process of creating a work of art. The first of the romans presents the artist Jan Voss in his studio, completing a piece by soaking fragments of paper, rolling powdered paint into them with the sole of his foot, projecting paint with his hands and adding shavings of wax. The whole body is at work, from rapid movements of turning or kneeling to the separation of particles of paint with a nail, in a pattern that almost seems choreographed. As Voss finishes his work with a hairdryer, Noël reflects: D’ailleurs le corps n’est-il pas ‘l’atelier’, non comme logement du travail, mais comme lieu actif où l’air même devient un élément tantôt présent aux yeux telle une pensée, tantôt soufflé par l’orifice du séchoir tel un vent 139

Here Noël’s work is closely allied to the phenomenology of Maurice MerleauPonty and, in particular, Le Visible et l’invisible, ed. by Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Merleau-Ponty rejected dualism, insisting rather on interaction between the subject and the world through the materiality of the body, which links the visible world to internal depths.

Art and the Book 161 siccatif. Le sol est à l’œuvre, l’air est à l’œuvre: le corps du peintre est leur liant, avec ses gestes, ses regards, ses déplacements. (Onze, p. 15)

This is far from a conventional discussion of Voss’s work, not least owing to the surprising comparison between the visibility of air and of thought. The artist’s movements reveal to us the invisible inside of his body: the air that makes up his internal mental volume and the thought processes that result from perception. Noël focuses on the artist’s physical presence, on his gestures, gaze and movement. The resemblance is striking with MerleauPonty’s discussion of perception in L’Œil et l’esprit. Merleau-Ponty stresses the importance of the artist’s body to his work, consistently with the phenomenological concept of reciprocal interaction between the subject and its surroundings: Le peintre “ apporte son corps ”, dit Valéry. Et, en effet, on ne voit pas comment un Esprit pourrait peindre. C’est en prêtant son corps au monde que le peintre change le monde en peinture. Pour comprendre ces transsubstantiations, il faut retrouver le corps opérant et actuel, celui qui n’est pas un morceau d’espace, un faisceau de fonctions, qui est un entrelacs de vision et de mouvement.140

Merleau-Ponty describes the artist’s body as “opérant et actuel”, so that, through the medium of physical intervention in his surroundings, “le peintre change le monde en peinture”. For Noël, the body corresponds to a “lieu actif”, inextricably linked to the world in which it moves. He, too, implies productive activity: “le sol est à l’œuvre, l’air est à l’œuvre”, linked to the painter through his or her body: “le corps du peintre est leur liant”. Merleau-Ponty also uses a term that conveys interpenetration: the body is “un entrelacs de vision et de mouvement”, and his emphasis on vision and movement is echoed in Noël’s phrase: “ses gestes, ses regards, ses déplacements”. Artists’ bodies are the source of the gestures that anchor them in the world, and allow them to effect changes to it through art. The movement of the body would not be sufficient in itself to interest Noël. He focuses on the way in which it becomes incorporated into the work of art, producing a painting that appears to be brimming

140

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 16.

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over with captured motion. The artist’s gesture is energy that has produced the work and is always about to pour forth before our eyes:141 Un noir traversé de gestes qui suscitent en lui une tension, un élan. Quelque chose va se montrer, quelque chose qui est déjà là, esquissé, suggéré, désigné, mais indécidable, irréductible. (Onze, p.165)

By repeating “quelque chose” Noël establishes an air of depth and mystery. We are tantalised by potential revelation, we sense that the invisible is about to become visible, although it has, in fact, already been made plain. The viewer witnesses the process of making visible, which is what Noël believes we fail to see in everyday life. He aims at producing the same effect in words as the viewer would experience in front of the painting by hinting at what will emerge, “esquissé, suggéré, désigné”, but refusing to describe it: “mais indécidable, irréductible”. Of course, we would not be allowed to remain passive in the face of works such as this (here Noël is evoking the paintings of Bertrand Vivin). They would not come to life if they did not communicate with the viewer and penetrate his or her internal space. Once a work has broken through what separates the subject from the visible, the subject is then able to penetrate the volume of the painting and set its energy in motion. Noël sees Michaux’s art as a fine example of this process: “Un tableau est après tout un dépôt d’énergie – une énergie communicative. Le regard l’active dans le tableau, si bien qu’elle pénètre en lui, l’envahit, l’anime en retour” (Vers, p. 92). Noël continually reinforces the bodily aspect of the impulse he finds in the works, describing them as containing “des pulsations d’une poussée vers le visible” (Vers, p. 44). The surface of a canvas has taken on animate qualities; “des pulsations” evokes life through the image of blood pulsing round the body. Noël is always sensitive to the sensuality that can be conveyed by a work of art. Representation of physical beauty is not what is at stake; indeed, the paintings which seem to him to suggest desire are not figurative. Rather, the materiality of a work, the energy that

141

I discuss the importance of the gesture to Noël’s art criticism and poetry in “The Creative Gesture: Bernard Noël’s Poetry and Art Criticism” Dalhousie French Studies, 71 (2005), 53-63.

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appears to emerge in the present of looking, has the urgency of desire. Form and content coincide. He writes of Vivin’s work: Le plus étrange est que cette trace ne se comporte pas comme un signe: elle n’évoque pas à travers l’absence, elle impose, elle affirme, elle transmet une sensualité. (Onze, p. 169)

The works of art he evokes “transmit sensuality”; they are in the process of engaging the viewer by their energy. But they are also sensual because they are immediate: Noël insists that they impose and affirm their sensuality. They are not obliquely suggestive; they are a definite presence. In this way, Vivin’s paintings take their distance from any form of sign, because they do not signify by pointing to something absent. They do not transmit meaning, but are meaningful in themselves. Here Noël uses the term “trace” to describe images in which form and content are inseparable. The trace is neither the remnant of an absent object nor a surface mark that has no referent, because it is both sign and surface. It is evidence of the artist’s gesture and, by extension, of his engagement with the world through perception, thought and creation, but it also has an autonomous material existence on the canvas. Noël coins the term “signe-surface” to summarise Debré’s work, in which he finds the same link between form and content. He insists on “le besoin d’identité entre le sens et le tracé pour que le signe soit directement transmissible au lieu de n’être que le support d’une traduction approchante” (Debré, p. 8). The created image transmits its significance directly rather than providing the means by which an abstract idea is conveyed, where its role would merely be that of “support”. Noël’s choice of the noun “support” recalls his writing on the body in Le Livre de l’oubli, as well as du Bouchet’s discussion of the trace, but here Noël gives the term different connotations. Whereas for du Bouchet the background is integral to the trace as significant in itself, here Noël contrasts the meaningful trace with background that would provide a medium for a sign to translate meaning. In spite of this particular use of the term, their understanding of form is closely allied. Du Bouchet values the background of a work of art for its materiality and contribution to the layers and depth of the page or canvas. In the same way as Noël links sign and surface, du Bouchet

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welds form to content as traces in visual images embody gestures and reveal layers of meaning. Noël always emphasises that the trace operates as a process. It cannot remain unchanging because it would have no part to play in the constant interpenetration between artwork and viewer, whose involvement maintains the image in its power to transmit. Moreover, the trace becomes central to our relationship with the visual image and, by implication, with the world we perceive. He writes in Journal du regard that “notre relation avec la réalité passe par le trait, car nous ne la connaissons qu’en instance d’être écrite par nos yeux” (p. 19). As is clear throughout all Noël’s writings on perception, the human subject does not simply see, but actively looks. Even in silence, in our contemplation of the visual, we are constantly writing the world.142

142

Steven Winspur has stressed that for Noël, “what my looking unveils is the formation of form”: “Eleven Ways of Looking in Bernard Noël”, Dalhousie French Studies, 21 (1991), 133-139 (p. 134).

– sur une cassure il nous est donné d’entrevoir parfois, au plus près, quelque chose que toute parole que l’on saisit, à commencer par celles de la langue tenue pour acquise, s’emploie à oblitérer en partie.143

CHAPTER 4 THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE: JACCOTTET, DU BOUCHET AND TRANSLATION Du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noël are accomplished translators, and Jaccottet and du Bouchet, alongside their published translations, have written about the act of translating. They have in common an interest in Hölderlin’s poetry. Hölderlin was also a translator of, for instance, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Antigonae from ancient Greek, and Pindar from Latin. 144 In a brief article on translating Hölderlin, Jaccottet compares the methods used by various translators, including du Bouchet.145 Jaccottet examines the difficult path between word-forword translation and the departure from the letter of the text that might be necessary to convey the writer’s style and emphases to a readership from a different culture. Must the source text be altered to fit the expectations of readers in the target language? Alternatively, perhaps a less transparent version that contains literalisms will convey the poet’s language more faithfully. The use of the vocabulary of translation theory is in some ways inappropriate, because it is not employed by the writers in their discussions of translation; their language in such texts is evocative and allusive, and is in itself worthy of attention. Nevertheless, we shall see that their approaches can be situated in relation to a strand that has developed in writing about translation from the German Romantics onwards. This is why their shared interest in Hölderlin is not coincidental. Indeed, Jaccottet relates that it was a letter du Bouchet wrote to him shortly before his death, in which he quoted Hölderlin, that gave him the inspiration to speak at du Bouchet’s funeral. The 143

André du Bouchet, “Hölderlin aujourd’hui”, in L’Incohérence, n. pag. Oedipus der Tyrann, in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2, ed. by Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt-am-Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), pp. 787-848; Antigonae, in Sämtliche Werke, 2, pp. 859-912. His translations of Pindar’s poetry are included in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 1, ed. by Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt-am-Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), pp. 693-764. 145 “Note sur les traductions de Hölderlin”, Les Lettres françaises, 1182 (1967), 9. 144

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text in which he recounts this, Truinas le 21 avril 2001, takes its title from du Bouchet’s lecture on Hölderlin and Celan, “Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986”.146 They are closely linked by Hölderlin’s prose text “In lieblicher Bläue…”.147 Its publication in the Pléiade collection was controversial because there was some disagreement over whether Hölderlin actually wrote it; Geert Lernout explains that Jaccottet used testimonies from du Bouchet, among others, to support his decision to include it.148 Du Bouchet focuses on this text, which he translates as “En bleu adorable”, in “Hölderlin aujourd’hui”, a text based on a lecture on Hölderlin he gave in 1970. In this lecture, in “Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986”, and in his text “Notes sur la traduction”, du Bouchet suggests ways in which translation might be considered a model for the writing of poetry. 149 At first sight, this would appear problematic, because poetry, even if it can be considered to involve a translation of experience or perception, which is in itself arguable, is not analogous to the movement from one system of linguistic signs to another. But these authors do not offer, or claim to be offering, mimetic representations of non-linguistic reality. Rather, they create a new textual reality that transforms our perception of the real and of language. In the same way, they do not presume, as translators, to present the source text transparently; instead they communicate what is particular to the text through new ways of writing in French. Du Bouchet takes this further, suggesting that his aim is to translate French itself. Translating Hölderlin A reading of their poetry could therefore lead us to believe that these writers would be the ideal translators. After all, the landscape is always at the foreground of their texts; the poetic subject 146

Jaccottet, Truinas le 21 avril 2001 (Geneva: La Dogana, 2004), p. 7. Du Bouchet, “Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986”, in Hölderlin vu de France, ed. by Bernhard Böschenstein and Jacques Le Ridier (Tübingen: Narr, 1987), pp. 95-112. 147 “In lieblicher Bläue…” is included as an appendix in Hölderlin’s complete works: Sämtliche Werke, 1, pp. 479-481. 148 Geert Lernout, The Poet as Thinker: Hölderlin in France (Columbia: Camden House, 1994), p. 26. 149 “Notes sur la traduction” was first published in Ici en deux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), n. pag. This chapter will refer to the revised version in Poèmes et proses (Paris: Mercure de France, 1995), pp. 133-142.

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does not intrude with interpretations of the world presented, and resists transforming perceptions into metaphorical imagery. Similarly, it might seem that the aim of a translation is to grant the source text existence in another linguistic system, and not to produce the translator’s interpretation of the work. The translator is self-effacing, a mere facilitator who grants new readers access to a work they could not otherwise have read. Jaccottet himself is concerned that the text, rather than the translator, should be at the beginning and the end of the translation process, and this appears to correspond closely to the reticence of his poetic voice. In a radio interview, he explained that he regretted his much-quoted phrase, “l’effacement soit ma façon de resplendir”, saying, in a further instance of self-effacement, that he found it insufferably pretentious.150 The self in his poetry is present through the close attention it pays to its surroundings; it does not impose its thoughts or opinions, or describe its individual past. The individual self is effaced equally effectively in du Bouchet’s poetry. This is not so much to allow patient attention to minute changes in the natural world, as to permit the perceiving subject to leave behind all that links it to an individual existing over time, and to take its place within the world through movement and action. The outside world has a more solid presence in du Bouchet’s work than in Jaccottet’s; Jaccottet emphasises this distinction in an article of 1983: Là où André du Bouchet affronte et confronte, jette, brise ou écarte, avec brusquerie, avec fougue, avec hauteur, je vois bien que je laisse plutôt les choses aller et se perdre, sans presque intervenir, et qu’à ma manière plus hésitante, plus prudente, j’aboutis tout de même quelquefois à des trouées semblables, à un même renvoi au dehors qui, ici ou là, heureusement, l’emporte sur le livre. Seulement, je me défais en craintes, en incertitudes.151

The difference between the two writers, according to Jaccottet, is that his own texts are always the product of hesitant evocations, while du Bouchet deliberately disrupts perceptions and language. Both,

150

The line occurs in the poem “Que la fin nous illumine”, in Poésie, p. 76. Jaccottet’s comment was made in his interview with Alain Veinstein. 151 Une transaction secrète, p. 268.

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however, are concerned that reality should be the motivating factor, rather than pre-existing preoccupations of the poetic voice. 152 Jaccottet believes that he has managed to efface his personality and poetic style in his role as translator, and in particular in the case of Rilke’s poetry.153 He also attributes this ability to other translators. When discussing Hölderlin, he writes that, in the philosophical poetry in particular, there is a certain childlike purity of tone that prevents it from becoming too abstract, and that translators such as du Bouchet and Gustave Roud have “la vertu de laisser entendre ces accents” (“Note sur les traductions de Hölderlin”). He contrasts their approach to that of François Fédier, which is “une sorte de mot à mot passionné, d’adéquation, qui ne craint pas de faire violence au français”. This is appropriate for some of Hölderlin’s poetry such as the fragmentary texts, he believes, but works less well for the hymns. Among the qualities Jaccottet values in Hölderlin’s hymns are instances of calm and harmony, and it is such a “moment d’équilibre inouï” that he tries to convey in his translation of an extract from “Friedensfeier” (“Fête de paix”), included in an article about the poem. 154 The original lines read as follows: Leichtatmende Lüfte Verkünden euch schon, Euch kündet das rauchende Tal Und der Boden, der vom Wetter noch dröhnet.155

Jaccottet writes : Les légers souffles de l’air Vous proclament déjà, Déjà vous annoncent les fumées dans la vallée Et le sol qui résonne encore de l’orage, (“Un hymne”, p. 106).

The repetition of “déjà” across two lines produces a lilting motion, while the preponderance of the “s”, and the light “f” and “l” sounds 152

In Truinas le 21 avril 2001 Jaccottet remembers that, on their first meeting, du Bouchet told him that they had ‘les mêmes raisons’ (p. 26). It was above all in their motivations that they were similar. 153 Interview with Jacques Laurens in Les Hommes-Livres. 154 Jaccottet, “La Poésie: Un hymne retrouvé de Hölderlin”, La Nouvelle revue française, 7 (1959), 101-106 (p. 106). 155 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 1, p. 342.

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grant the lines a sense of airiness. Following three lines each containing an odd number of syllables, the alexandrine of the fourth line creates a sense of completeness. A comparison with du Bouchet’s translation of the same passage is instructive: Les souffles de l’air Vous ont, déjà, proférés, A vous, ici, la vallée qui fume, Et le sol, de l’orage frémissant toujours;156

He emphasises the same consonants, but the overall impression produced is very different. He deliberately disrupts the rhythm through the positioning of “déjà” and “ici”, as they necessitate the introduction of commas. He renders the fourth line stilted by separating “et le sol” from the rest of the scene (it is imperative to use a comma before a relative clause in German, but not in French); this short phrase suggests an immobility that is very different from the captured moment of potential movement into the valley in Jaccottet’s verse. The sense of harmony is further implied in Jaccottet’s version by his consistent use of the present tense to set the scene and suggest the presence of that which will follow. Du Bouchet, on the other hand, appears unwilling either to situate the text in a tense or to allow any verbs that he does employ to be active. For instance, where Jaccottet uses two active verbs, “Vous proclament déjà | Déjà vous annoncent”, in a phrase that also possesses balance and symmetry, du Bouchet chooses only one, and employs it to suggest a state that has come into being before the scene is described: “Vous ont, déjà, proférés, | A vous, ici”. His positioning of the words in the following line reveal that it is the solid, elemental valley that is important to du Bouchet, rather than the ephemeral mist that may hover above it for a short time, and which Jaccottet places first. Other active verbs are neutralised by du Bouchet; in this extract, for instance, he chooses a present participle, “frémissant”, rather than Jaccottet’s active “résonne”. This is consistent with du Bouchet’s desire to avoid any description of 156

Hölderlin, Odes, Élégies, Hymnes, trans. by M. Deguy and others (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 148. Jaccottet explains (“Un Hymne”, p. 101) that du Bouchet’s translation first appeared in Botteghe oscure, 20.

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time-bound action or narrative, and thereby to remove the times of writing and reading from linear progression altogether. If a scene is taken out of time, then the self that views and expresses it is no longer obliged to situate itself within linear temporality. Is the strikingly different text that results from du Bouchet’s translation less faithful than Jaccottet’s version? This need not be the case, because, in spite of Jaccottet’s view of du Bouchet’s translations, the latter reads Hölderlin’s poetry as containing the ruptures that he has introduced into his French version. The phrase “parole de la rupture” (“Hölderlin aujourd’hui”) recurs throughout the text of his 1970 lecture. Rupture is, of course, also central to his own poetry. Similarly, the quiet hesitancy Jaccottet makes a feature of his version of “Fête de paix” is also typical of his own poetry. But these factors are neither coincidental, nor an argument that each poet transforms Hölderlin into his favoured image. Rather, du Bouchet and Jaccottet are both drawn to him because they recognise those aspects of his work and respond to them. Equally, neither translation is necessarily more faithful than the other, although every reader of German and French will be able to draw his or her own conclusions about their validity.157 Faithfulness through distance Typical of du Bouchet’s writing is the fragmenting of phrases through the disposition of words on the page, and the creation from this space of a physical presence of air and depth, features that are notable in this extract from “Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986”: pour être proche, la parole – au plus proche – au plus loin – doit prendre distance sur la distance praticable prescrite. distance pour parvenir au plus proche. à défaut d’être attentif au double mouvement, on ne relèvera que l’accentuation de la distance, l’étrangeté sans retour – jusqu’à la terreur. jusqu’à la séparation. (p. 106)

The gaps in this piece of prose serve all these functions. When dashes are included, they rupture the enunciation, “pour être proche, la parole 157

In an essay on Hölderlin published in Une transaction secrète, Jaccottet points out that images of rivers and lightning are central to much of his poetry (pp. 47 and 63). The differing responses offered by Jaccottet and du Bouchet to Hölderlin’s work could be seen to correspond to the prevalence in their own poetry of flowing rivers and disruptive lightning respectively.

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– au plus proche”, at the moment when it appears to evoke closeness. This is reinforced by the subsequent “au plus loin – doit prendre distance”. Gaps can isolate a statement, “distance pour parvenir au plus proche”, in this case also illustrating the effect described. This distance can be terrifying when it culminates in the splitting of subject and enunciation: “jusqu’à la terreur. jusqu’à la séparation”. Du Bouchet’s text performs as well as describes the effect of splitting and isolation, and the necessary taking of distance. If a writer pays no heed to the “double mouvement” that allows a text to maintain a certain distance from its inspiration and then approach it through its own medium, then the result will be total disjuncture, “l’étrangeté sans retour”. Böschenstein insists on the difference between Jaccottet and du Bouchet on the issue of translation, writing that “c’est exactement à l’opposé de Jaccottet qu’il nous faut situer André du Bouchet, qui appartient à la même génération”.158 Jacques Legrand, however, claims that Jaccottet himself employs a technique that involves distance in his translations of Rilke’s poetry. According to Legrand, he does not fear the unpoetic in French, if this accurately translates Rilke’s language, and he will sacrifice smooth rhythm in order to take on Rilke’s syntax.159 Legrand gives the example of Rilke’s line, “sanft, wie ein Frühlingsregen fällt”, which could be translated with “doucement – comme tombe une pluie de printemps”, in keeping with French word order, and he shows how Jaccottet rejects a “natural” translation in order to stay closer to the German: “tendrement, comme la pluie au printemps tombe” (p. 23).160 The distance taken by Jaccottet is from the accepted structures of his own language. This is not making strange for its own sake. Rather, Jaccottet considers the technique of allowing the tone to come through as one of continuity with the original rather than estrangement. The Translator’s Task Jaccottet and du Bouchet, in common with other translators and translation theorists, can be related to a line of thought that 158

Bernhard Böschenstein, “Hölderlin en France: Sa présence dans les traductions et dans la poésie”, in Böschenstein and Le Ridier, pp. 9-23 (p. 16). 159 Jacques Legrand, “Philippe Jaccottet traducteur de Rilke”, in Dumas, pp. 15-28 (pp. 21-23). 160 He is referring to Jaccottet’s translation in his guide Rilke, p. 43.

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originates with the German Romantics. Hölderlin himself, although he did not write theoretically on translation, is likely to be the clearest influence on them. 161 David Constantine, a translator of both Hölderlin and Jaccottet, writes that Hölderlin wanted to find out what German could be made to do. 162 A model for Hölderlin’s hymns, among them “Friedensfeier”, is the poet Pindar and the hymns read strangely because they incorporate the foreignness of Pindar’s language. The performative effect of a poem is vital to Heidegger, who mediated Hölderlin’s poetry for French readers and writers. He cites the opening of Hölderlin’s poem “Wie wenn am Feiertage…”, the line “Jetzt aber tags!”, and insists that “jetzt”, “now”, enacts the coming of day that it names. 163 Foreignness is important to the Romantic theorists. Schleiermacher insists that we always seek the truth through the particularities of our own language and culture, so a translation that attempts to read as if it were written in the language of translation is absurd.164 He insists that the translation should oblige the reader to go beyond himself to encounter the writer in his foreign environment. 165 Lawrence Venuti explains that the link between translation and culture was taken up at the beginning of the Twentieth Century by modernists who looked to literary experiments as a way of revitalising culture, and therefore considered the translated text to be autonomous. 166 He points out that perhaps the most famous theorist of this period, Walter 161

Hölderlin did write in a 1794 letter to Neuffer that translation was a kind of gymnastics for language, in which the translator and reader must accustom themselves to the foreign. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 3, ed. by Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt-amMain: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), p. 144. 162 David Constantine, Hölderlin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 239. 163 Hölderlin, “Wie wenn am Feiertage”, Sämtliche Werke, 1, pp. 239-241. Martin Heidegger, “Wie wenn am Feiertage…”, in Erläuterung zu Hölderlins Dichtung: Gesamtausgabe, 4 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981), pp. 49-77 (pp. 75-76). Angela Esterhammer cites Heidegger and argues that Hölderlin’s poems are performative speech acts that await uptake from an addressee: The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 187-239. 164 Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens”, in Akademievorträge: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 1, 11 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 65-93. 165 For further discussion, see Antoine Berman, L’Épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 234-5. 166 The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 11.

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Benjamin, took further the insistence on foreignizing translation made by Schleiermacher and demonstrated by Hölderlin. He argued that literalisms that depart from standard usage release “pure language” (Translation Studies Reader, p. 12). According to Benjamin, translation: “consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original”.167 He continues: It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work (p. 80).168

The task of the translator is to liberate pure language. This appears to be distinct from the words used, and yet it must be expressed through them. George Steiner explains that Benjamin continues the Gnostic tradition in his concept of a pure language visible only in fragments. 169 All translations express the original text without using any of the same words, which would imply that the text exists as a unique web of interrelated ideas, images or impressions beyond its existence on the page. The translator must try to reach all, or as much as possible, of what the words imply and the structures by which they interrelate, and find in the language of translation a means of recreating these. In 1975, Steiner’s After Babel developed the German tradition again, arguing that all reading is translation, and that translation can be a model for all meaningful exchanges, because it understands the boundaries between different world views and brings them together (p. 293). A text cannot be transparently transferred. The notion of violence and foreignness persists in translation theory. Heidegger insists that in translation, both the translation and

167 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 77. 168 Translation “besteht darin, diejenige Intention auf die Sprache, in die übersetzt wird, zu finden, von der aus in Ihr das Echo des Originals erweckt wird.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by T. Rexroth (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), p. 16. “Jene reine Sprache, die in fremde gebannt ist, in der eigenen zu erlösen, die im Werk gefangene in der Umdichtung zu befreien, ist die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (p. 19). 169 George Steiner, After Babel, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 66.

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our own language appear to suffer violence. 170 Antoine Berman argues that assimilating a foreign text to the target culture is, in effect, systematically negating the foreign language; he calls this “ethnocentric” translation. Paradoxically, this apparently less violent approach to language betrays the text, while a more foreignizing practice would actually be more “faithful”. 171 For example, he discusses two translations of Sappho in a chapter on Hölderlin. 172 He praises Michel Deguy’s near-literal translations, despite the disruption they cause to the French text. That is because they disturb the original Greek. Berman explains: Il y a eu double violence: sur la langue traduisante, mais aussi sur l’original. […] Sappho devient notre contemporaine, là où des traductions plus classiques la renvoient au fond des millénaires, nous la rendent étrangère au mauvais sens du mot. L’étrangeté de la traduction métissante / différenciante abolit la mauvaise étrangeté du temps et de l’espace. Ceci ne va pas sans violence. (p. 84)

The original text may seem strange in translation, but this strangeness is far preferable to the distance in time from the contemporary reader created by the translator whose unadventurous choices do nothing to upset expectations of an ancient text. A translation that aims to fix a text in an unchanging form in the language of translation will not take it out of time, but instead will itself become dated very quickly. Lawrence Venuti himself develops the line in translation theory leading from the German Romantics to Berman, arguing that fluency in the language of translation is likely to mask domestication, so the language used must be made foreign. He does not advocate the use of literalisms, but rather experiments with dialects and styles that will defamiliarise the text without relying on word-for-word translation. 173 170

Martin Heidegger, “Der Sprach der Anaximander”, in Holzwege: Gesamtausgabe, 5 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), pp. 321-373 (p. 328). 171 Antoine Berman, L’Épreuve de l’étranger, p. 17. 172 Antoine Berman, La Traduction et la lettre; ou, L’Auberge du lointain (Paris: Seuil, 1999), pp. 79-95. 173 Translation Studies Reader, p. 341. In The Translator’s Invisibility (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), he argues that it is an illusion that translation can be transparent. The translator should therefore foreignize the translation in order to force a revision of the individualistic concept of authorship that marginalises the translator (p. 311).

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Foreign Language Jaccottet and du Bouchet have in common a sense that the language of France is foreign to them. Jaccottet’s Swiss background means that he considers himself well placed to mediate between French- and German-speaking cultures, and the poets whose influence on his work he cites tend not to be French. As well as Hölderlin and Rilke, he mentions, in a 1989 interview with Jean-Pierre Vidal, Ungaretti and Bashô, whom he has translated, Swiss poets such as Roud, and Mandelstam, who was also important to du Bouchet.174 Du Bouchet was born in France and lived there for most of his life, but he studied and taught in the United States for some years. He said that his relationship to French was at times that of an outsider viewing a foreign language. Translator of Hölderlin, he begins “Hölderlin aujourd’hui” with the statement that he “conna[ît] mal la langue de Hölderlin”. It would not seem to be the best start for a translator, but it is precisely this unfamiliarity with language that he wishes to emphasise and to incite in his readers. In his lecture, he quotes from Hölderlin’s text “In lieblicher Bläue”, and tries to produce the strange sounds that the listener to a foreign language would notice by including phrases in German and Greek. French listeners, or readers of French, are confronted with the sound of the German words before necessarily knowing their meaning, words which, at times, turn out to illustrate his point: “Ein Zeichen… deutungslos…”; Un signe… privé de sens… (“Hölderlin aujourd’hui”)

His translations of German phrases are placed in the margins of the written text; it is not clear at what point in the lecture, if at all, they were read out. They are rendered unfamiliar to the reader by the unusual typographical layout they occupy. This adds a visual dimension to the text that is reminiscent of du Bouchet’s own poetry, while also acting as an extra layer of interpretation and as repetition. The term “privé” suggests that the sign is both deprived and private, 174

Philippe Jaccottet, Pages retrouvées, ed. by Jean-Pierre Vidal (Lausanne: Editions Payot, 1989), pp. 116-140.

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which removes it from the function of transmitting an accepted meaning. The myth of Cassandra dominates the text; her words were only meaningless sounds to those who heard her, “comme murmure inintelligible, vocifération pure, mutité de nouveau, lettre fermée…”. Moreover, when suggested by the German quotations, they are not merely meaningless words, but exclamations of joy or distress, murmurs or cries, which gain in intensity for being unintelligible: “rauschen”, “Geschrei”, “Waldgeschrei”, “Freudengeschrei” (respectively, “bruire”, “clameur”, “vacarme dans la forêt”, “cri de joie”). These noises are intimately linked to the practice of writing because, just as they heralded Cassandra’s death, they announce the disappearance of the speaking subject, “la disparition de qui parle…”, as well as the recent death of du Bouchet’s friend Celan, to whom the text is dedicated. They leave only their physical presence as sound, which is transformed into the cry of swallows, as in the poem “In lieblicher Bläue”. One phrase in particular reveals the complexity of his interpretation-translation because he quotes it on three occasions and translates it in a slightly different way each time. “Ein stilles Leben ist es…” becomes, variously, “alors le silence est vie…”, “cette vie est silence…” and “une vie en silence…”. This technique allows him to show the fragile viability of any translation and the inevitable gap between a phrase in one language and any attempt to translate it: “il n’y a plus parole, semble-t-il, il y a une lacune…”. Most importantly, it presents the practice of translation as an approach to all that is behind the words themselves, but an approach that never claims to attain its goal. Du Bouchet does not believe that we are situated comfortably in a native language. Consequently, we cannot leave one language and move effortlessly into another. We are caught in the gap between them: comme entre deux langues, comme entre deux mots, sur l’impossibilité de passer de l’un à l’autre, exclus alors, n’en disposant d’aucune. (“Tübingen”, p. 97)175 175

Jacques Ancet reminds us of Herder’s insistence that, by its very nature, a language can only be a “mother” tongue if it is engendered by foreignness: “La Séparation”, in La Traduction-poésie: À Antoine Berman, ed. by Martine Broda

The Foreign Language 177

Where du Bouchet includes quotations from Hölderlin in the body of his texts, he depends for effect on the unfamiliarity of German; these words act as eruptions of the outside into all that is familiar: – et cette parole que l’on entend, se révéler comme ici étrangère tout à fait, proférée bruyamment… trop haut toujours… ou trop bas… vacarme… rumeur… et – entourée d’un silence. Ein Zeichen… deutungslos… Parole de la rupture, comme au travers de la langue héritée que chacun de nous possède, le point immédiat de l’irruption, de la dépossession du dehors – de cette dépossession sur laquelle le dehors au plus vite se manifeste. (“Hölderlin aujourd’hui”)

The unfamiliarity of the language used dispossesses the reader or listener of his or her hold on language and causes it to become newly visible as something “dehors”. Not only can translation unsettle the reader’s expectations of the foreign text, it can also point to the gap that exists between languages, and most importantly, between accepted and novel usage. It is not simply that the translated text reminds the reader of its foreignness, but that his or her native language appears foreign as well. This concept has been described by Deleuze as a form of “bilingualism in one’s own language”: qui fera de vous un étranger dans votre propre langue. […] Toujours revenir à la formule de Proust: “Les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère…”176

Remembered Language In “Notes sur la traduction”, du Bouchet writes at the top of the page: “le français. il me reste encore à traduire du français” (p. 142). This is followed by a large blank space and then, at the bottom of the page: “on ne s’aperçoit pas que cela n’a pas été traduit”. Poetry is a translation into its own language; it creates novelty by introducing a gap between accepted expressions and the words used.

(Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1999) pp. 173-186 (p. 176). 176 Gilles Deleuze, “Un manifeste de moins”, in Bene and Deleuze, pp. 85-131 (p. 109).

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Du Bouchet begins “Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986” by explaining the dedication of the 1970 lecture, “Hölderlin aujourd’hui” to Paul Celan when it appeared in printed form in L’Incohérence after Celan’s death. He then notes that this explanation means that it is already necessary for him to translate his previous use of French: là, aujourd’hui, italiques dans la dédicace, signifie - parmi d’autres sens dont je ne ferai pas état aujourd’hui– après la mort de Paul Celan. déjà il me faut, on le voit, traduire du français. (p. 95)

This second lecture includes discussion of, and extracts from, Celan’s work, and he ends by saying that through discussion of Celan, he has also talked about Hölderlin: “ayant longuement parlé d’un autre, je crois avoir parlé de Hölderlin aussi” (“Tübingen”, p. 112). The lecture has taken the form of an interpretation of Celan’s work, just as “Hölderlin aujourd’hui” interpreted the earlier German’s poetry, but “Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986” is also a translation of the 1970 lecture. It seems that, even within French, every text is a translation. Although du Bouchet tends to reject intertextual reference, he lets Hölderlin’s words mingle with his own to form disrupted prose that is situated between commentary and poetic creativity. He employs the same technique in Matière de l’interlocuteur, by including unreferenced quotations from Reverdy’s work in italics. At the end, he writes: “je dois me perdre, comme revenir – sur les jambes d’un autre – à moi” (p. 36). Jaccottet states directly the importance certain reading has had for his own work. For instance, he described his prose collection Paysages avec figures absentes as a translation of Hölderlin’s thought (Interview with Jacques Laurens). The last three sections of this text are devoted to Hölderlin’s work. They are more than critical commentaries or essays; they explore the meanings and suggestions of certain expressions that seem resonant, and use these to structure the present texts. The penultimate text, for example, discusses Hölderlin’s lament for a world apparently deserted by the gods of ancient times (Paysages, pp. 143-161). The following piece, in which Rilke joins Hölderlin as inspiration, ends with Jaccottet’s own meditation on this theme. He emphasises the tenuousness of his own beliefs, but adds:

The Foreign Language 179 je pressens que dans n’importe quelles conditions, à tout moment, en tout domaine et en tout lieu, les actes éclairés par la lumière de ce “ciel” supérieur ne pourrait être “mauvais”. (p. 180)

He does not only discuss what they wrote, but offers his own reflections as they have developed from his reading. The influence of the work of others need not be so explicit, of course. Indeed, discussions of the extent to which translators impose their own preferences as poets on their translations are undermined by the suggestion that these very preferences have been formed by the reading of other poets. Jacques Legrand points out that Jaccottet’s tendency to substantivise adjectives, adverbs and participles might be the result of his contact with German. His preference for alliterative “f”s affects his choice of words when translating, but could equally well be determined by his reading of other poetry (Legrand, p. 25). Even Jaccottet’s wish to reduce imagery and reference as far as possible might be the consequence of his admiration for this quality in Hölderlin’s poetry. It has also been suggested that Jaccottet has inscribed literary memory into his texts by taking on attitudes to death and horror from Dante, Pascoli and Leopardi, mediated by his reading of Ungaretti.177 The deliberate inclusion of others’ work within a text, whether in the form of quotation or the kind of source inspiration that Jaccottet finds in Hölderlin, can be seen as the presence of memory within a work. Tiphaine Samoyault has remarked that intertextuality is the memory of literary language: “Qu’est-elle [L’intertextualité] d’autre, en effet, que la mémoire que la littérature a d’elle-même?”178 If words necessarily refer to one another, and a work is bound to echo what the writer has read, does this mean that all texts are translations of other texts? Perhaps du Bouchet shows a way of overcoming this potentially constraining network of language when he insists on what is forgotten. We have seen that Reverdy’s poetry incites forgetting and that du Bouchet, whose work possesses similar characteristics, particularly values this quality in his work (Lloyd, p. 67). In Matière de l’interlocuteur, du Bouchet does not simply refer to Reverdy’s work or assimilate his texts into his own: 177

J.-C. Vegliante, “Philippe Jaccottet traducteur d’Ungaretti”, in Dumas, pp. 29-41 (p. 33). 178 Tiphaine Samoyault, “Introduction”, L’Intertextualité, mémoire de la littérature (Paris: Nathan université, 2001).

180 Provisionality and the Poem comme je poursuis – jusqu’à être, sans me confondre avec lui, le plus près de celui qui parle, je me rapproche de la réalité de mon point de départ. (Matière, p. 34)

Texts by the two writers exist in dialogue, and poetry’s action, its creation of meaning rather than remembering of it, takes place in the space between du Bouchet and his interlocutor. In this way, it resembles a translation that emphasises the gap between languages rather than trying to dissimulate it. Poetry as Translation Du Bouchet’s “Notes sur la traduction” opens with a pareddown evocation of natural elements that is typical of his poetic writing and seems far removed from translation: village et eau.

et eau, du glacier. (p. 133)

But the basis for this text is language, not the external world. It is inspired by a quotation from Mandelstam, which states that the Armenian for “water” is “djour”, while the word for “village” is “ghyour”. The two words are linked by a linguistic similarity they do not possess in French, and du Bouchet immediately translates “water” into “glacier”, explaining on the following page that: j’ai – pour atteindre plus vite au dehors, traduit par glacier. (p. 134)

The addition of a glacier effected by language, “du glacier”, has created a specific concrete reality from “village et eau”, named without articles, and the solidifying of water into ice brings it closer to the physical reality of the village. This is a sophisticated process involving the creation of a textual world rather than the expression of experience. Du Bouchet chooses to describe the process as translation. Critics such as Jacques Ancet insist that poetry does not exist in order to transcribe experience. That is why it is not a radically different process from translation, which cannot be thought to be the imitation of an original text because no text can claim to exist independently of others. Ancet writes:

The Foreign Language 181 Traduire ne sera donc pas plus imiter, copier servilement, qu’écrire ne sera traduire, transcrire, du réel, du vécu. (p. 176)

Neither process assumes that meaning can be transmitted transparently. Paradoxically, this is what grants poetic writing its significance. While it does not simply convey meaning, it is meaningful in itself. By revealing the gap between conventional descriptions and reality, or between one linguistic system and another, it reveals what is often overlooked, namely: that meaning is created in language and not simply communicated in through it. Jacques Roubaud insists on the importance of form in poetry: Elle [la poésie] est ce qui essentiellement ne peut être réduit à un sens. Elle est en nous le monde qui parle, le monde privé de sens, qui nous parle par et dans la langue, directement dans la langue.179

Poetry says what it says in the way that it says it, through the creation of structures and allusion, and its content cannot be separated from its form. Roubaud employs the expression used by du Bouchet in “Hölderlin aujourd’hui”: “privé de sens”. Both argue that the world emerges in language. Poetic writing does not translate the world if this is understood to mean converting reality into intelligible verbal form. But it is a form of translation in the sense that du Bouchet understands translation: it is in dialogue with the world (or the source language) and makes its own language into a foreign object, words that make the reader see the world afresh. Words become what du Bouchet calls intransitive things, not accompanied by explanations: une parole: chose inexplicable, intransitive: ayant sur le défaut d’explication – elle n’est pas exigible – place au monde. (“Tübingen”, p. 109)

Words can only truly exist if they take on the status of things that are noticed before the meaning they convey is understood. John E. Jackson writes that in du Bouchet’s work: “le mot est ressaisi comme

179

Jacques Roubard, L’Invention du fils de Leoprepes: Poésie et mémoire (Saulxures: Circé, 1993), p. 143.

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mot, et non plus comme fonction, de même la réalité est-elle rencontrée pour elle-même”.180 Through the inclusion of Greek words in the text of “Hölderlin aujourd’hui”, the foreignness of the alphabet stands out from the page and the reader who does not know Greek is aware of the appearance of the letters that make up the words before their meaning. Du Bouchet quotes Hölderlin when he writes: “pauvre étranger en Grèce!”, which is how Hölderlin described Laius in Oedipus the King (Sämtliche Werke, 2, p. 481). It might also suggest, through du Bouchet’s interweaving of commentary, myth and presentation of models of reading, to Cassandra’s failure to be understood, and the unfamiliarity with language that he wishes to incite in the reader. Written language is objectified, as solid as the surfaces and objects in the natural world, which the subject must confront in order to take its place in its surroundings. Yet it is also an opening in that it provides movement and direction towards and into the world: la parole dans le même temps ouverte et telle à nouveau qu’un mur aveugle, n’est pas celle qui perdure, [mais chaque fois elle se verra – je le vois, comme je bute sur elle – localisée non pas dans la pérennité, mais là où de nouveau je suis, dans la durée du [temps qui avive et éteint, annule. (“Tübingen”, p. 110)

Du Bouchet’s aim in his lectures, then, and in the piece entitled “Notes sur la traduction”, is not only to discuss translation, but also to see in the reading of a foreign language a model for reading and writing more generally. Is the same true of Philippe Jaccottet? In Paysages avec figures absentes, Jaccottet reflects on the inspiration offered by the natural world: Je comprends seulement: “ici, ici, ici”, ou: “vie, vie, vie”; et moi qui si souvent tremble et perds pied, moi que le moindre sang dévoyé écœure, je me remets à les traduire, ici, à ma fenêtre de pierre, dans la lumière qui est le lait des dieux, ici, sous la Couronne invisible, en cet instant. (p. 112)

180

Jackson, “L’Étranger dans la langue”, in Collot (ed.), Autour d’André du Bouchet, pp. 13-23 (p. 16).

The Foreign Language 183

Jaccottet emphasises the present moment and particularity of place, which appear to be life-giving, truthful and even blessed, an experience he finds expressed in Hölderlin’s poetry. The here and now incites the poet to write: he begins to “translate” it into words. We have seen how Jaccottet’s poetry creates the present instant rather than simply describing it, because that would excise its essential element: its immediacy. Translation, then, is not a process that takes place in subsequent tranquillity: “je me remets à les traduire, ici, à ma fenêtre de pierre”. The poet’s position is specified and connected to the elemental world through the vision offered by the window and its material, stone. The verb “remets” implies repeated action, so despite the singularity of the poet’s comprehension, his work takes place more than once. Indeed, the title of the text that ends with this sentence is “Même lieu, autre moment”. Translation is a process for Jaccottet, one that requires attentiveness and action. He frequently presents close attention to the natural world in terms of listening to its movements and rhythms. Similarly, his comment that du Bouchet’s and Roud’s translations of Hölderlin allow the “accents” of the original texts to be heard (“Note sur les traductions”) refers not to the particular accent of German speakers, but to the subtle inflections and tone of the poems. In another piece from Paysages avec figures absentes, “‘Si les fleurs n’étaient que belles…’”, he appears to oscillate between passive and active modes, between allowing the real to emerge into his writing and going in search of it: Ces lieux, ces moments, quelquefois j’ai tenté de les laisser rayonner dans leur puissance immédiate, plus souvent j’ai cru devoir m’enfoncer en eux pour les comprendre; et il me semblait descendre en même temps en moi. (p. 125)

The self-exploration described here is rare in his work, but occurs more frequently in this volume than in most. Paradoxically, given its title, the poet’s “je” is central to the poetic prose included here. For Jaccottet, the translation of the natural world involves receptivity, a search for depth and a careful consideration of his own response to that world, alongside the creation of images that produce a sense of the present instant.

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Translation as movement The picture Jaccottet suggests of poetry as translation is similar to du Bouchet’s in one important respect: both writers seek a reciprocal relationship with the text to be translated or the world evoked. The word “translation” comes from “transferre”, and means “to bear across”. But the understanding of translation that can be gleaned from the work of these writers is not the carrying across unchanged of essential meaning, although that might be suggested by Benjamin’s “pure language”. Rather, the movement itself is important, and if anything is brought to the language of writing as a result, it is novelty, which might even take the form of absence, as is the case in du Bouchet’s ruptured texts. As a creative force and as novelty, language opens the way to new perceptions, but ones that cannot be fully grasped or assimilated. The writing of poetry is not, therefore, the communication of a vision of the world, any more than a translation is the transformation into a fixed form of that which was fixed in another language. Both allow the writer and reader to interact with otherness, be it the real or a foreign language. This must be a process, and as a result language is not fully grasped. Du Bouchet evokes duration in the text cited above: “la durée du temps qui avive et éteint, annule” (“Tübingen”, p. 110). It is not the linear passing of historical time, but rather the freshness of repeated newness, the leaving behind of fixed meanings that allows writer and reader to move towards the world through words. Through awareness of the foreignness of words, a reaction produced by their strangeness as sounds, meanings are deferred and a movement is set up that effaces signs as they are passed through. In “Notes sur la traduction”, du Bouchet writes: avant d’avoir saisi, j’ai entendu. le français. (p. 141)

je ne saisis pas. la fraîcheur.

The French language is associated with this novelty because it remains foreign (the text which immediately follows in the collection is entitled “Fraîcheur” (p. 142)). A series of instances of forgetting is what allows the self to move towards the world, as is the case in all his

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poetic writing. Du Bouchet writes that what shines through a word is not what it remembers, but “la perte de la mémoire” (L’Ajour, p. 146). Du Bouchet maintains that poetry can signify without implying certain meanings: alors je tiens aussi à l’inanité des mots pareille à celle de la pierre qui a roulé par le travers de l’asphalte. (“Notes sur la traduction”, p. 139)181

It is through their existence as things, among the mute objects of the elemental world, that words become instances of the real rather than descriptions of it. Du Bouchet links meaning and movement when he evokes the dual definition of the word “sens”: “Je vais, sans pour autant l’avoir élucidé, dans un sens” (“Tübingen”, p. 97). He wishes to move in a direction and to create significance, digging down to undermine any semblance of fixity or explanation, so that words and the poetic subject can interact with the other objects in the world around. The direction taken in du Bouchet’s work is one of dialogue with the real. Poetic writing is a translation of the real that leads ultimately towards its emergence. That is why gaps are so important in du Bouchet’s work. Without them, language would not permit the foreign to enter. He maintains rupture throughout his texts to grant them perpetual openness: le jour de la lacune en formation perpétuelle qui, jusqu’à planitude – cette planitude est le gouffre encore – affleure au travers du sens dévolu, pour traduire un lendemain déjà en cours, présent déjà en tant que silence… (“Hölderlin aujourd’hui”)

Time is present in the sense of potentiality. A textual world is produced that is neither the mimetic representation of an original nor a series of linguistic images divorced from their inspiration, and the role

181

He is perhaps suggesting the opposite of Mallarmé’s famous line: “Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore”, from the “Sonnet en x”, Œuvres complètes, I, pp. 37-38: the initial meaninglessness of words leads to the real existence of language and of the world around, rather than to abolition.

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of time is precisely to maintain the possibilities of creative language in the face of these two opposing extremes. Jaccottet also proposes images of opening up to difference. Many of his texts recount glimpses of a sense of time and space that cannot be clearly defined, or even named. He writes, for instance: Si c’était quelque chose entre les choses, comme l’espace entre tilleul et laurier dans le jardin. (À la lumière, p. 80)

This is an image of space, but the gap evoked cannot be exactly delineated. Rather, its purpose is to incite movement towards the depth momentarily revealed in a scene. In Paysages avec figures absentes, he describes things as offering “promesse”. “Ces roseaux ne devraient-ils pas être nommés “ailleurs” ou “demain”?” (p. 67). We are offered a sense of deferral, and Jaccottet’s poetry resists closure, but the never-ending movement is not a frustrating circularity within language; it is an indeterminate path towards all that is other. Jaccottet believes that the poet can, and indeed must, approach things indirectly: “on songe à nouveau au détour, à la saisie, en passant, d’un élément, à propos d’autre chose peut-être” (Paysages, p. 66). Indirect, hesitant movement is essential to maintain the fragility of the translation, which is what relates it persistently to the real and does not fix it in the past. Although he does not attempt to produce the rupturing estrangement that du Bouchet incorporates into his texts, Jaccottet is aware of the foreignness of the world outside, as if our inability to pin down that which we see, and then write, were in itself an invitation to approach it more closely: Il y a du vrai dans cette appréhension que cela se passe à distance, ailleurs, comme si le texte murmuré l’était bien dans une langue étrangère, comme si l’on nous faisait signe au-delà d’une frontière, là-bas… Là-bas cette frontière de paille et à son pied: est-ce de la neige, un plumage, de l’écume? Comme la neige à la cime de la montagne imperceptible, à la crête de l’eau, ce bouillonnement bref… Ne se pourrait-il pas qu’en s’éloignant ainsi, quelquefois, l’on se rapproche? (Paysages, p. 67)

The mountain (an image that is vital to both Jaccottet and du Bouchet) suggests unattainability. It seems that distance is indeed required in order to achieve proximity. It is the forgetting of appearances and direct links that allows the poet to approach all that is present behind

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and between these: the memory of the world or the translated text. Jaccottet finds in Hölderlin’s poetry the effect he aims to produce in his own: “Peu à peu, prudemment, le monde extérieur s’infiltrera” (Une transaction, p. 47).

On aurait cru néanmoins des paroles entendues en passant, surprises en passant; et qui, en chercherait-on l’origine, se tairaient aussitôt. (Jaccottet, Et, néanmoins, p. 78)

CHAPTER 5 SILENCE: NOËL, JACCOTTET AND THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE Chapter 3 discussed the relationship between word and image, considering poetic responses to works of visual art, the visual elements of texts, and analogous approaches to the real made by writers and artists. Chapter 4 examined the transitions between languages made by translators who also saw poetry as a particular kind of translation: a making new, or foreign, of poetic language that allows the real to emerge. In both cases, reflective texts operate in conjunction with poetic writing. This chapter will examine, alongside poetry by Jaccottet and Noël, their texts that reflect on writing itself, on its origins, its purpose, and what it can and cannot achieve. It might seem, therefore, that words are always being added: to visual images, to texts in foreign languages, to mute reality. The resulting impression could be one of noise, of excessive verbalising. Since these writers appreciate the visual arts and the elemental world, one might think they would wish to keep their texts to a minimum, and certainly not add to them with commentary. Of course, the desire to pare language down to simpler forms does emerge in the work of du Bouchet and Jaccottet, but Jaccottet’s preference for writing unencumbered by imagery is not always carried out in his poetry. Meanwhile, du Bouchet’s reduced vocabulary is inseparable from repetition, so his texts are numerous approaches to variations on the same images. In the case of Noël, the stated wish for simple presence in the world is engaged in a constant struggle with heightened awareness of the subject’s separation from the non-linguistic real. These contradictions are not resolved in their poetry or prose, and yet we are not left with a sense of chatter, or of language covering up what is silent. Instead, they acknowledge the presence of mute reality and its inaccessibility, and are able in their writing to offer us instances in which it makes itself known and is no longer hidden. That this can be done via language is testament to their sensitive renewing of words, in very different ways, so that language can no longer be seen only as a transparent means of communication.

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Jaccottet and Noël are compared in this chapter because they have discussed the problem of the invisible real and how it might be accessed in language. This is also important in du Bouchet’s work, but he does not write reflective texts in parallel with poetic writing. Although the work of Noël and Jaccottet is radically different, they share one concern that is the theme of this chapter: they examine, in theory and in practice, how language incorporates silence, and how it engages with its limits in order to give a voice to what is silent. The Inaccessible Real Both Jaccottet and Noël discuss what language is capable of doing and find it wanting. Their reflections are bound up with a consideration of death and decline, but they draw different inferences. Noël sees language as producing death, whereas Jaccottet is looking for ways of conveying death and suffering in words. In Éléments d’un songe, Jaccottet answers those critics who would “[lui] reprocher [sa] vie à la campagne, à l’abri des ‘beautés naturelles’”. He is indignant: “comme si l’histoire de [son] voisin ne [le] suffisait pas pour savoir presque tout de la douleur!” (p. 146). Suffering and beauty depend on one another according to Jaccottet; they are intertwined veins that run throughout his verse, poetic prose and meditative texts. But his view of the relationship between sadness, death, beauty and writing has changed over the course of his writing career. Death and suffering provide an important impetus for writing in his earlier texts. The 1957 volume La Promenade sous les arbres, for example, reveals confidence that the presence of death renders the beauty of light and love meaningful and justifies writing poetry that celebrates these: Je crus comprendre un instant qu’il nous fallait bénir cette mort sans laquelle la lumière et l’amour, de même que nos paroles, ne pourraient plus avoir aucun sens, ni d’ailleurs aucune possibilité d’existence. (p. 121)

But by 1969, and the collection of poetry Leçons, the subject bitterly rejects the arrogant presumption of wisdom displayed by his younger self: Autrefois, moi l’effrayé, l’ignorant, vivant à peine,

Silence 191 me couvrant d’images les yeux, j’ai prétendu guider mourants et morts. (À la lumière, p. 11)

L’Ignorant was the title of his second collection, first published in 1958. There, the subject acknowledged his ignorance, but the self who looks back now sees only naïveté and the false belief that poetic imagery could express and instruct. He regrets the reliance on imagery that he claims obscured his perception of what language could do. Now he is only too aware of the failings of words. Leçons and Chants d’en bas, of 1974, are collections of mourning, and do not see in suffering a stimulus for creativity. For example, a text from Chants d’en bas rejects the notion that anguish brings illumination, insisting instead that “tourment” and “pitié” are overwhelming: On voudrait croire que nous sommes tourmentés pour mieux montrer le ciel. Mais le tourment l’emporte sur ces envolées, et la pitié noie tout, brillant d’autant de larmes que la nuit. (À la lumière, p. 65)

Suffering does not ennoble, and is not attenuated by beauty. Leçons traces the pain of a subject who has to watch the slow death of a person he loves. At first, he seems to focus on the beauty of the natural world in order to minimise the impact of all that is painful and ugly. But then the poems take on a bitter tone as the subject discovers that it is impossible adequately to convey suffering in words: On peut nommer cela horreur, ordure, prononcer même les mots de l’ordure déchiffrés dans le linge des bas-fonds : à quelque singerie que se livre le poète, cela n’entrera pas dans sa page d’écriture. (À la lumière, p. 22)

The word “horror” is never enough, even if it comes from the depths of what the poet has seen, to render the text any more than a page on which words are printed. Poetry cannot transform the horrific into beautiful language; it is unable even to do justice to the horrific by conveying it.

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The end of the previous poem in the collection exemplifies Jaccottet’s response to this realisation. Rather than trying to force the horror into the text, he prefers to emphasise its absence: Le front contre le mur de la montagne dans le jour froid, nous sommes pleins d’horreur et de pitié. Dans le jour hérissé d’oiseaux. (p. 21)

He evokes the sense of confronting reality without being able to engage with it, through the building up of the terms “front”, “contre”, “mur” and the intractable “montagne”. The last line of the text shows that the world continues around the grieving people, apparently indifferent to what is happening to them; this sums up the sense of incomprehension at their feelings better than any discursive text could aim to do. The real remains inaccessible to language. This is also the case in Noël’s writing, but it takes different forms. What is inaccessible is the subject’s own self and the origins of his or her language. But Noël’s texts also reveal an overwhelming sense of the self as a mortal being whose decline language is incapable of arresting. The “je” of his poetry seems to oscillate between, on the one hand, the desire to take on an impersonal voice, which is accompanied by an awareness of the difficulty of absenting the self from its expression, and, on the other, the fear of lost identity. Writing is motivated both by the wish to move beyond the limits of the individual in time and by the feeling that only in language can the self be retained. In La Chute des temps, impersonality is seen as a means of escaping mortality: mais qui saurait voir comme voit la nature d’un œil indifférent chacun a cette chair qui ne repousse pas. (p. 51)

Nature is impervious to the trials of human life; it does not judge what it sees and it continues through the cycles of birth and

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death that determine living creatures. Rather than positing this kind of non-subjective perception as a possible writing position, however, the poetic subject here is aware that it would be an unattainable goal: “mais qui | saurait voir”. La Chute des temps invites comparison with the eighth elegy in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which emphasises the anguish experienced by the self-conscious human aware of his or her mortality, in contrast to the animal for which there is no death: […] Nur unsre Augen sind wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang. Was draußen ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers Antlitz allein […].182

For Noël, the relationship of the subject to the world around cannot be one of total indifference, but, ideally, neither should it be affected by the past or the particularities of the perceiving “je”. Forgetting is necessary, often to the extent that the present self becomes divorced from its past, and addresses itself in the second person. This splitting of the self in two might free it from its individual mortality, but also prevents the self ever from coinciding with itself. It is a vital element of La Chute des temps, and is also at work in the volume of short prose pieces, Souvenirs du pâle; here Noël creates a “je” that addresses itself as “tu” primarily to show the subject’s experience of his body: En vérité, tu gelais de douceur parce que tu venais de déserter ton corps. Ce blanc regard qui contemplait le vide de ta propre charpente, c’était toi, et le vide, c’était encore toi, mais sans mémoire. Je me suis absenté du devenir, te disais-tu, et la mort désormais ne pourra rien ronger de moimême. Le vide, en effet, n’a plus cessé d’être présent – rien que présent. (p. 18)

182

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, I, ed. by the Rilke-Archiv and Ruth SieberRilke (Wiesbaden: Insel-Verlag, 1955), p. 714. […] Only our eyes are turned inward, like traps set about on the clear path to freedom. What really exists out there we can tell only from an animal’s face […]. Rilke, The Duino Elegies, trans. by Leslie Norris and Alan Keele (Columbia: Camden House, 1993), p. 45. I am grateful to David Midgley for suggesting this connection.

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This is a welcome liberation from fixed identity. The body is emptied of all that would condemn it to grow old and die, and so has been transformed from a physical reminder of the inevitable void to come, into the freedom from anxiety and existence in an eternal present. The loss of identity can liberate the subject from time and therefore from the confines of always being the same person, one who is condemned to decline: j’aime disais-tu j’aime tellement être le contraire de ce que je fus. (Chute, p. 23)

But timelessness can also cause anxiety. Much of the powerful effect of Noël’s work stems from his acknowledgement that we have no stable desire either to escape time or be part of it, let alone any secure understanding of who we are at all times. La Chute des temps exemplifies this anxiety. It is divided into “chants” and “contrechants” in a contrapuntal pattern that mimics the subject’s relationship to itself as “tu”. It questions its own identity and what language can do about the human fear of the void that death seems to be. This is present in the form of theoretical questions and statements such as: “je vis de ma mort | ce futur soulève mon présent” (p. 27). Anxiety is also enacted by the text, as it throws out images of nothingness and proceeds with the rapid pace of unanswered questions and the attempt to grasp fears that cannot be allayed. Each section opens with the word “qui”, which sets off a process of disturbed wondering about identity, language and meaning in the three “chants”. “Chant un” opens: qui et de ce mot lancé est-ce vers toi ou bien vers qui la vieille plainte déchire. (p. 21)

The positing of “qui” as an alternative to “toi” implies a completely disrupted conception of identity. Former suffering continues to affect the present negatively because nothing can be resolved. The following lines open “Chant deux”: qui et la voix perdue la voix faussée. (p. 41)

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Disenchantment with the power of the voice is evident, but it still has the impetus to draw speech out of the body. Despite this disenchantment, Noël calls these sections of the text “chants”. They are undercut by the two “contre-chants”, but it seems that language is determined to emerge even in the face of the writer’s awareness of its impotence. “Chant trois” begins: qui jette bas la cause avec l’explication on ne me fera plus le coup de l’origine. (p. 57)

Anxiety at the difficulty of finding meaning in the world or understanding its cause is still just preferable to the possibility that there may be no meaning to discover, and yet the subject does not allow this fear to lead him to accept religious concepts of origin. The opening lines of the “contre-chants” illustrate the ways in which these sections contain within their very structure the uncertainty that is expressed in the “chants”. “Contre-chant un”: qui langue pâlotte étroit de la glotte vers l’extrémité cherche l’achevé mais la tête trotte. (p. 35)

He suggests that language strains at its limits in the attempt to delineate the world and time, and the short rhythmic bursts of words that make up these texts, tightly packed into rhyming couplets, seem to reduce meaning to the exclamation of sounds. “Contre-chant deux”: qui annonce la nuit avec la peur du noir. (p. 51)

The lines exemplify the fear expressed throughout the text. While night and darkness are an obvious pairing and are linked alliteratively here, the rhyming of “qui” with “nuit” implies that the identity of the night remains entirely unknown, and reinforces the void that has entered into the term “qui” through its numerous repetitions. The selfconsciousness of the unknown self is emphasised, because it is s/he

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who announces the night ahead and acknowledges his or her own fear of the dark. Noël’s restless repetition of “qui” again calls to mind Rilke’s use of “wer” (“who”) in the Duino Elegies. For example, the first elegy begins: “Wer, wenn ich schriee” (Sämtliche Werke, p. 685); “Who, if I screamed” (The Duino Elegies, p. 3). The night in Noël’s text appears to correspond to Blanchot’s concept of the “other night”. The first night is that of sleep; Blanchot insists that we are wrong to understand death as unconsciousness and to fear it for that reason. Rather, death is the “autre nuit”, an insomniac awareness of death as an impossibility; it is horrific, rather than simply nothing: Mais quand tout a disparu dans la nuit, «tout a disparu» apparaît. C’est l’autre nuit. […] cette autre nuit est la mort qu’on ne trouve pas, est l’oubli qui s’oublie, qui est, au sein, de l’oubli sans repos.183

Language is not likely to offer a way out of this knowledge. It seems to be capable only of recounting and reproducing the fear and selfawareness that it cannot describe. Language is both imaginary and the means we must use to communicate and express the real. Moreover, it takes real things and makes them imaginary by giving them a name that is not the same as what they are. In his essay “Changer la mort”, Noël explicitly compares language to death. The section “La Mort, le mot et le motmort” begins: Qu’est-ce qu’un mort? Un personnage imaginaire et cependant emprunté à la réalité; quelqu’un qui a quitté l’existence pour devenir un être; en somme l’analogue de ce qui constitue un mot.184

A word replaces what it names. Blanchot also describes language as murder, substituting the name for the thing: “Le mot me donne ce qu’il signifie, mais d’abord il le supprime”.185 But literary language, according to Blanchot, does not simply replace things with concepts. 183

Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp. 215-216. Treize cases du je: journal (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), p. 9. 185 Maurice Blanchot, “La littérature et le droit à la mort”, in La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 291-331 (p. 312). He is influenced by Mallarmé’s understanding that the word “flower” makes any individual flower inaccessible to the imagination (Œuvres complètes, II, p. 213). 184

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Rather, the chain of references that accompanies literary language means that any single interpretation will always be exceeded, thereby also negating the concept that has replaced the thing. The reader is bound to become aware of the absence at the heart of literature. Noël is also concerned to remind us that the process of obliteration remains in writing, but it is not simply things that are removed. The same applies to writers who are effaced as they write. By using “vous” instead of “on”, Noël addresses the reader and includes him or her in the action of obliteration, since a word negates what it names. Writing: vous efface, mais pour vous conserver dans le mouvement même de cet effacement qui, lui, perpétuellement recommence. (p. 9)

Those who write are nevertheless kept alive in this process. By effacing their subjectivity, writing retains them only in the trace of what they have written. 186 The writing self does not pre-exist the text and gain immortality through it, but rather comes into being in the replacement of personal subjectivity with the textual “je”. Writing, therefore, both mirrors death in its processes and is essential to life. It might be concluded that the importance of writing that brings to life the writing subject is analogous to the importance of language in general to human existence. Subjectivity is created and enacted through language. The power of writing to efface as it names is harnessed for its ability to erase the self, but the loss of language is feared more than that of any other faculty. Noël’s prose text Le Syndrome de Gramsci expresses the horror experienced by the “je” as he fails to remember the name of a writer who is important to him, and fears that this is the first instance of forgetting in a long process that will lead to him losing his language. It takes the form of the subject’s attempts to remember by repeatedly going over the situation in which he wanted to recall the name, in the hope that this will trigger his memory. In so doing, the text repeatedly enacts the instant of forgetting, making the absence at the heart of language evident to the narrator, and carrying 186

In a discussion of why poetry matters, Giorgio Agamben writes that poetry and life diverge where the biography and psychology of an individual are concerned, but are united at the point of “reciprocal desubjectivization” through the medium of language (Agamben, p. 93).

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out the gradual loss of identity that will be the result of forgotten words: En vérité, je me sentais grêlé de partout à l’intérieur, frappé d’une lèpre invisible, qui avait dû nécroser des zones entières de la partie la plus précieuse de mon individu. (Syndrome, p. 14)

However, repetition also plays an important role in language’s effacement of that which it names, and the retention of this absent thing in the process of naming: Le langage, en effet, remplace ce qui n’est pas là; également, il nous donne l’illusion de pouvoir retenir ce qui ne va plus être là. Il possède la clé de la répétition – répétition qui aurait le pouvoir d’annuler le passage du temps. (p. 19)

While the name of Gramsci is not remembered by the narrator of Le Syndrome de Gramsci, and he has to wait until he gets home and can look on his bookshelves, the very fact of writing the book has meant that this absent name is conserved: it is present each time the “je” fails to call it to mind and so is not allowed to pass into the past to be completely forgotten. Noël understands repetition as possessing the power to cancel out the passing of time; it would seem to be the key to countering human mortality that is sought by his texts. His relationship to language will therefore always be ambiguous; it both destroys what it names and retains its trace, and it can resist the “night” of anxiety through repetition while remaining the distinguishing characteristic of the self-conscious and mortal human being. Noël’s investigation of the workings of language always takes him to the body. Not only is the body inseparable from the mind, as we saw in his presentation of visual artists, but Noël considers it to be the source of language. This is important because it elides the distinction between the linguistic and the non-linguistic. Language comes from something other than itself, but this does not mean that language has access to its source, however much we might wish to find it. Blanchot explains that the event that separated language from nonlanguage cannot, by definition, be spoken. In addition, he argues that the writer, whom he compares to Orpheus, is always looking back for the source of the artwork. He seeks “the trembling, pre-linguistic

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darkness of things”,187 and wants to recover their silent materiality (Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, p. 227). Like Eurydice, of course, this is inaccessible. Blanchot equates the source of language with “the other night” of impossible death. Noël’s reflective texts on writing posit a source of this kind, and, as for Blanchot, it is in the act of writing that he sees traces of the origin of language that cannot be grasped: Parce que derrière le travail, derrière les formes qui le portent ou l’orientent, derrière le geste, il y a sans aucun doute un état, un besoin: quelque chose d’aussi peu nommé que l’élan de l’espèce derrière l’amour. Tout comme l’espèce, dans notre corps, est habillée de langage, l’acte d’écrire est habillé d’un projet…188

He calls the impetus to write “un besoin”, and compares it to the “élan” of sexual desire. 189 It remains undefined because gaining access to it would be the equivalent of seeing Eurydice: it would slip forever out of reach. Instead, writing might be made possible by the constant desire to reach its origins, and the inevitable failure of this quest. Noël writes in L’Espace du poème: Par la combinaison d’une impuissance à dire et d’une volonté exaspérée de dire quelque chose s’est produit: un soulèvement ou l’équivalent d’une situation érotique. (p. 105)

The terms “impuissance” and “volonté exaspérée” suggest unsatisfied desire; similarly, it is by being constantly unable to pin itself down that literature becomes possible: “quelque chose s’est produit”. Nowhere does Jaccottet compare writing to sexual desire; the major difference between his work and that of Noël is perhaps Noël’s concentration on the body and the almost total absence of references to the body in Jaccottet’s texts. What they share is a sense of frustration at the apparent inability of language to allow access to what is beyond words, and yet we shall see that they both succeed in offering glimpses of reality by bringing language close to its limits, to 187

Simon Critchley, Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 54. 188 Bernard Noël, Qu’est-ce qu’écrire? (Paris: Paupières de terre, 1989), pp. 7-8. 189 In chapter 2 we saw how he described the acts of reading and writing in erotic terms.

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silence. In his discussion of Blanchot’s work, Leslie Hill emphasises the figure of the limit, and writes that, for Blanchot, “literature is what arises when the relation between limitlessness and the limit is pursued to the point of its limitlessness.” 190 At the limit, language is silent and that is where it makes contact with reality. The Limits of Language Jaccottet insists that the poet must always keep on writing. In À la lumière d’hiver, he writes: “Et, néanmoins, je dis encore” (p. 77); the phrase is taken up again in the title of the 2001 collection Et, néanmoins. Already in Éléments d’un songe, he expresses the aim of being a man who “speaks against the void”: Peut-être faut-il moins encore. L’herbe où se sont perdus les dieux. Les très fines pousses d’acacia sur le bleu, presque blanc, du ciel plus mince qu’une feuille. L’hiver. Être un homme qui brûle les feuilles mortes, qui arrache la mauvaise herbe, et qui parle contre le vide. (p. 174)

This rich passage enacts the attempts Jaccottet makes in poetry to focus on detail, “les très fines pousses”, to render the image ever more precise, “le bleu, presque blanc”, and to situate a scene in time and space while retaining its quality as timeless: “l’hiver.” He also links the ordinary image of a man in his garden to a long tradition of French poetry for which “les feuilles mortes” suggest melancholy, while also emphasising that the poet must try to resist decline by writing, a claim we have seen he was later to question. 191 Attention to detail and simplicity are vital to Jaccottet in his evocations of the natural world. This passage also contains an instance of another side to Jaccottet’s concentration on natural places, when he suggests that the gods are lost in the grass. He finds in certain places, rarely pinpointed geographically, but always clearly specific for the poetic subject, the sense of a “centre”. In Paysages avec figures absentes, he asks: Plus particulièrement: qu’est-ce qu’un lieu? 190

Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 94. 191 The best known poem evoking “les feuilles mortes” is probably Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne”: Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. by Y. G. Le Dantec (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), pp. 72-73.

Silence 201 Qu’est-ce qui fait qu’en un lieu comme celui dont j’ai parlé au début de ce livre, on ait dressé un temple, transformé en chapelle plus tard: sinon la présence d’une source et le sentiment obscur d’y avoir trouvé un “centre”? (p. 128)192

Jaccottet is the poet most referred to by Christine Dupouy in her article on place in post-war poetry. She states that he exemplifies the recent tendency to focus on natural spaces (in contrast to the surrealist insistence on the fabricated image and on urban space), which become true places when they take on the characteristics of a “centre”. 193 Unlike cities, these are not mapped, but are significant because of the depth that seems to be contained within the present. A place might inspire the poet not through its beauty or association with certain historical events, but because it seems to offer meaning in the layers of time buried there; the sense of a centre that it projects structures its surface. The past emerges into the present space and determines it. Time is vital, therefore, to these two central characteristics of the natural world for Jaccottet: the text often evokes the movement he perceives in light, air, water and trees, but it also aims at conveying the sense of depth and buried memory experienced in particular places. Dupouy explains that in Jaccottet’s poetry, descriptions become unnecessary because the poet gives way to the place: “S’effaçant, le poète est à l’écoute du lieu parce qu’il sait regarder” (p. 147). The place is paramount and, crucially, the poet’s task is not to transform it into poetic form, but to listen to what it has to say. Jaccottet valued the sense of place he found in Hölderlin’s poetry, and his own approach can be understood in terms proposed by Heidegger. Following his reading of Hölderlin, Heidegger wrote that poetic language, or “Dichtung” (which has a broader meaning than “poetry” has in English), can reveal the absence behind the habitual way of thinking that tends to make things into its object. But rather than 192

The importance of certain places as “centres” in religious beliefs around the world is set out by Éliade, but Jaccottet’s vague evocations of the sacred always stop short of direct biblical association or any more than general reference to ancient or eastern spirituality. See Mircea Éliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return; or, Cosmos and History, trans. by W. Trask (London: Arkana, 1989), pp. 11-12. 193 Chistine Dupouy, “La Poésie du lieu”, in Poésie de langue française 1945-60, ed. by M.-C. Bancquart (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995), pp. 133-150 (p. 134).

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simply leaving a void, it opens up to a concealed, “sacred” kind of thinking, and this can transform the reader.194 Poetic language is therefore able to bring Being into existence as words rather than representing it in words. This is what Jaccottet’s poetic texts aim to achieve. He frequently describes himself as waiting and allowing images to come to him. He listens rather than speaks: Je me trouvais ainsi embarqué, moi sans courage, dans une aventure où il s’agissait vraiment de confier toute sa vie à des lueurs peu sûres, à des voix sourdes et intermittentes, presque à l’invisible… (Promenade, p. 26)

This is far removed from surrealist techniques of automatic writing, but in the same way as surrealist poets granted visual and verbal images freedom to develop, Jaccottet’s work is driven both by words and the connections they suggest, and by images he perceives in the world around. Of course, these take verbal form, but Jaccottet rarely attempts to translate the exact impression he experienced. Instead, images emerge into the text in fragmented form, as if it had laid itself open to being affected by the world. Such instances of hesitant emergent images are particularly striking when they occur in Leçons, because they contrast sharply with the sense early in the collection that language is powerless in the face of the horror it cannot convey. In the poems towards the end of the sequence, it seems that images do continue despite the death of the man: J’ai relevé les yeux. Derrière la fenêtre, au fond du jour, des images quand même passent. Navettes ou anges de l’être, elles réparent l’espace. (À la lumière, p. 28)

Space is evoked in this poem, as it has been throughout the series, but rather than the incomprehensible space of the void, it is given perspective by the transparent glass through which the subject gazes, 194

See Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”: Gesamtausgabe, 39 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980).

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and the day, rather than the rebarbative “jour froid” which occurred earlier (À la lumière, p. 21), has depth and images pass within it. In the final couplet, images that are construed as messengers or angels are able to repair space; the imaginative and the real are combined. The rhyming of “fenêtre” / “être” and “passent” / “l’espace” grants the text harmony and unity. This short poem does not claim to offer a solution to language’s inadequacy in the face of suffering, but it gives hints that if one pays attention to images, they can become messengers of the real. Jaccottet’s poetry, then, is not inspired equally by the dark and light sides of human experience, nor does it despair of recounting death, as the subject sometimes claims. Rather, we see in the progression from Chants d’en bas to À la lumière d’hiver, which were subsequently published together in 1994, a change from the struggle against an inability to speak, to a sense that the voice might become possible through watching and listening. Voice is of central importance to Jaccottet’s work, although its most important feature is its limitation. Not only must it be guided by the real that is attended to, but it must be reduced, pared down to a delicate whisper, if it is to respond truthfully to the minute changes of the natural world. Often, it seems that it is only through increasingly sparse images, the effacement of the poetic subject, and even silence, that it might come close to achieving this. Jaccottet is noted for his professed wish to reduce or even eliminate images from his work. For instance, the phrase that opens the second section of À travers un verger: “Méfie-toi des images” (p. 17), is frequently cited as an example of his desire to write as simply and truthfully as possible about the world around.195 He insists: il faudrait un poème presque sans adjectifs et réduit à très peu d’images; simplement un mouvement vers le haut, et non point un mouvement brusque, ni intense, ni rapide, mais une émanation, une fumée de fraîcheur. (Promenade, p. 77)

195

See Evelio Miñano, “Nécessité et refus de l’image dans la poésie de Philippe Jaccottet”, Littératures, 17 (1987), 161-171 (p. 164). Denise Rochat describes his sense that images “empêchent le regard de se désaltérer à la source pure du visible” in “Airs de Philippe Jaccottet, ou les chemins de la transparence”, The French Review, 63 (1990), 810-818 (p. 811).

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A poem must attempt to be a gentle, light movement, an emanation rather than a representation. In the following poem from Leçons, the poetic voice is imagined as a single grass seed or even the elusive object that is a knot of air: Un simple souffle, un nœud léger de l’air, une graine échappée aux herbes folles du Temps, rien qu’une voix qui volerait chantant à travers l’ombre et la lumière. (À la lumière, p. 24)

The minute form of the “graine” seems able to escape time. The poet’s voice then takes over, but its singing is described in terms of a natural image, as the seed might float on the air, and it traverses both darkness and light. Enjambement is employed to striking effect over the fourth line and the first line of the second stanza: à travers l’ombre et la lumière, s’effacent-ils : aucune trace de blessure.

All that has been conjured up is removed; there was nothing but the voice, but even this has been effaced. The action appears to have succeeded in overcoming suffering, as with nothing comes the removal of any trace of a wound. Jaccottet continues: La voix tue, on dirait plutôt, un instant, l’étendue apaisée, le jour plus pur.

However momentarily, the poem has had a purifying effect. “La voix tue” has the triple meaning of a voice that silences, one that is silenced, and one that kills, just as Noël insisted on language’s replacing of what it names. But by explicitly relating this to renewed peace and purity, Jaccottet turns the moment into a brief instance of quiet that allows listening to take place, even if, or especially if what is heard is silence. Of course, in this reduction of the poetic voice, Jaccottet has employed a large number of images, which develop and become interwoven with one another as the voice floats across grass and through shade, light and time. He is very aware of the inconsistency of

Silence 205

an approach that advocates the removal of imaginative writing through the use of imagery. The point of images of effacement is that something is there, on the page and in the mind of the reader, before it is removed or superseded. Jaccottet does not wish to banish all images from his work. Rather, he refuses to allow them to rest; they only function suggestively if they are provisional, permitted to hover on the page and then immediately passed through. In this way, language engages with the nothingness that would otherwise remain incomprehensible and ungraspable. This is not very different from Noël’s conception of writing. For both poets, words erase the things they name in the process of naming, but in this way they are able to retain the trace of these things. Similarly, the poetic persona is effaced from the texts only to come into being in the words themselves. Michael Bishop discusses the way in which language seems related to nothingness in Jaccottet’s work, citing in particular images of dust, ash and rotting that recur, for instance: “La pourriture attaque ses paroles”. 196 He then links Jaccottet’s presentation of the act of writing explicitly to the dialectic proposed by Noël of the “mot” and “mort”, and states that writing enacts the death of the self, while demonstrating the provisional nature of language (pp. 57-58). The purpose of poetry is to maintain this provisionality: le monde où nous avons choisi de vivre n’est pas un monde tout fait, ni davantage un monde à faire selon telle ou telle certitude; mais le monde du tâtonnement obstiné, du risque intérieur, de l’incertitude merveilleuse. Le problème, pour notre esprit, serait moins d’entasser des rochers, de bâtir des temples, que d’ouvrir des passages dans les murs. (Jaccottet, Promenade, p. 36)

He emphasises that poetry is not about sealing up, the packaging of the real into categories, but rather about opening up; it is the only approach that might allow a glimpse of reality through into words. The term “tâtonnement” evokes very effectively Jaccottet’s technique. It involves taking small, hesitant risks, offering images then letting them slip away. Above all, things cannot be appropriated in language. He writes in À travers un verger: 196

Michaël Bishop, The Contemporary Poetry of France: Eight Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985), p. 58.

206 Provisionality and the Poem Je ne veux rien affirmer, ici, en ce moment. Je risque un mot, une image, une pensée, je les retire ou les abandonne, c’est tout, puis je m’en vais. (p. 17)

This process is exemplified in the two versions of Leçons in Gallimard “Poésie” collections. The first, currently available as part of the edition Poésie 1946-1967 (pp. 157-181), is subsequently somewhat reworked and published in conjunction with À la lumière d’hiver (pp. 7-33). By their very existence, these two versions testify to the provisionality of any poetic utterance, and where changes have been made, Jaccottet has chosen not to clarify or extend, but to render the texts less explanatory and elaborate. He has pared down lines of poetry until they evoke, rather than state. For example, a poem about the dying man in the earlier version contains the lines: Ce que je croyais lire en lui, quand j’osais lire, était plus que l’étonnement : une stupeur comme devant un siècle de ténèbres à franchir, une tristesse! à voir ces houles de souffrance. L’innommable enfonçait les barrières de sa vie. Un gouffre qui assaille. Et pour défense une tristesse béant comme un gouffre. (Poésie, p. 165)

In the later version this has become: Une stupeur commençait dans ses yeux : que cela fût possible. Une tristesse aussi, vaste comme ce que venait sur lui, ou brisait les barrières de sa vie, vertes, pleines d’oiseaux. (À la lumière, p. 16)

The discursive tone has gone, and the impression felt by the subject who sees the “stupeur” invade this man is more forcefully conveyed to the reader by its positioning alone at the beginning of the text. The absence of the pronoun “je” actually seems to give clarity to the feelings experienced, as the speaker of the earlier version appears more distanced from the scene he describes. The lengthy description of the century of darkness that awaits the man and of the tides of suffering is replaced by the acknowledgement that these cannot be imagined; they are unnamed, and qualified by “vaste”. The repeated

Silence 207

evocation of “gouffre” in the first version seems unnecessary by the same stage in the later text. As Jaccottet might put it, however many times a gulf is named, it cannot appear on the page. Instead, he chooses to evoke the limits of the man’s life in terms of what we can imagine, the walls of a garden full of birds. This is all the more unbearable for the poet who goes on to recount that the man always loved his home and was in control of it: Lui qui avait toujours aimé son clos, ses murs, lui qui gardait les clefs de sa maison. (p. 16)

These final lines retain the more explanatory tone of the earlier poem, but they still evoke through allusion, rather than statement: the man’s death is conveyed by an image of what is lost from his life. In Jaccottet’s texts, the presence of what is absent can appear as the inclusion of expressive silence in the text. For instance, after the death of a loved person, his existence in the text is maintained. In the last poem of Leçons the man is: “ou tout à fait effacé”, “ou invisible habitant l’invisible” (p. 33). He is also present, however, in the subject’s awareness of the small moments of beauty that persist. The man: demeure en modèle de patience et de sourire, tel le soleil dans notre dos encore qui éclaire la table, et la page, et les raisins. (p. 33)

Jaccottet’s poetic images emerge from silence and dissolve back into it, while traces of their presence remain. This is a process of abstraction similar to Noël’s idea of the “mot-mort”: as words efface what they name, they must continue naming and effacing these things in order to retain the effacement in the text. Language is able to involve silence in such very different ways in the work of these two poets because they consider that words include and are included in silence, rather than being its opposite. If words hover briefly in Jaccottet’s texts before moving on, then they are pushed to extremes and exhaustion by Noël. His poetry is often motivated by an “élan”; it tumbles forward and produces words that trip over themselves to generate more words, and images often erupt with violence. For instance, a section from “contre-chant deux” of La Chute des temps opens with the usual “qui”, followed by:

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“voudrait rime en igme”, a question that might be a reference to Mallarmé’s “sonnet en x” (Œuvres complètes, I, pp. 37-38). Noël chooses a scheme of rhyming couplets; he draws attention to the sound of the words over their meaning and to the way they efface what they represent, leaving only a void. The result is “pur caca mental” and the creation of a text that is “sens dessus dessous”: qui voudrait rime en igme pour coupler l’énigme et l’effacement il trouve néant graine de gangrène par quoi le fatal verse à la rengaine pur caca mental nulle autorité car l’humanité vaut bien l’extrinsèque et qu’on l’hypothèque sens dessus dessous mais qui tout à coup. (pp. 35-36)

The rhyme scheme adds to the effect of acceleration as the tightly bound couplets work with the lack of punctuation or pauses to push the text relentlessly on. The abab rhyme in the centre of the section also acts as a pivot between the rhyming pairs on either side, so the sense of forward movement is prevented from becoming pure progression: we are not expected to find the text conclusive. The rhyming of the last line of this section with the first of the next, “dessous” / “coup”, also blocks any kind of ending, and the questioning is taken up again with the insistent: “mais qui”. Images of death and dirt reflect the violence of the sense of being swept along on a deluge of words and emphasise that they are verbal material. This is important because the language is material that seems to have been expelled from the body. Language emerges beyond the conscious control of the writer. The temporality of his texts is complex because their “élan” is by definition an ongoing process. It is both removed from a temporal framework of movement that reaches a goal, and also sets up a new temporality consisting only of the enactment of an energetic force. Here the influence of Bataille

Silence 209

can be discerned, with his insistence that life is essentially energy that strives to expend itself.197 In Noël’s texts, energy is expended in an attempt to reach the source of writing. This would be the paradoxical spending of memory until a state of forgetfulness were achieved. But he is aware that expenditure can never be completed: Écrire est gouverné par le désir de tarir sa source. On voudrait dépenser toute la mémoire. Quelque chose pourtant s’ajourne, car, malgré soi, on n’en finit pas de se souvenir. (Treize cases du je, p. 25)

The only situations in which forgetting would appear to be momentarily possible are absorption in work (writing) and the erotic. In Qu’est-ce qu’écrire?, Noël writes: Quant au corps et ses mémoires, les voilà plongés dans l’oubli, comme l’est pareillement en nous l’élan de l’espèce vêtu d’amour. (p. 10)

Bataille sees in eroticism the movement of life momentarily exceeding its limits.198 The desire Bataille describes as “l’érotisme du cœur” (Œuvres complètes, X, p. 25) results from the human wish to transcend the separation between oneself and another, to overcome individuality and our separation from the sources of life: Nous souffrons de notre isolement dans l’individualité discontinue. La passion nous répète sans cesse: si tu possédais l’être aimé, ce cœur que la solitude étrangle formerait un seul cœur avec celui de l’être aimé. (Œuvres complètes, X, p. 26)

The wish to overcome individual mortality is persistently expressed by Noël, and is often associated with a yearning for immediate, forgetful presence in the world, and for sexual union with a desired woman. But he always insists that desire and expenditure are 197

In a work on economy, “La Notion de dépense”, Bataille wrote that societies did not always follow the capitalist model of production for accumulation, insisting instead that useless expenditure is necessary for its own sake, and surplus must not be fed back into production. Among the examples he gives are luxury, wars, games, arts and sexual perversity: “l’accent est placé sur la perte qui doit être la plus grande possible”. Œuvres completes, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 305. 198 Georges Bataille, L’Érotisme, in Œuvres complètes, X (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 7-270.

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never-ending. Similarly, the poetic subject will always remain unable to expend language and see its source; were it able to do so, that source would run dry because it thrives on the search. It will never pass over the limit into silence. The “je” of La Chute des temps exclaims: mais mon corps sait des choses il lui faudrait des mots des mots des mots. (p. 45)

In poetry, the desire for and outpouring of words is neverending, creating a temporality that is mirrored by the form of the long poem itself. It pushes forward, but has no narrative or teleology. It is the enactment of the expenditure of words, though always complicated by the interweaving of phrases motivated by sound and those in which complex philosophical reflection is expressed. This movement is the opposite of discursive writing; it is never allowed to exhaust itself or reach a conclusion. Bringing the real to life Noël and Jaccottet are doubtful about the power of language effectively to represent what is beyond its limits, but they use this inadequacy of words to create poetic texts that incorporate what is just out of reach. Instead of attempting to represent death, the poetic voice actually brings to life a text that is its own reality. Its time will not be that of the linear life of an individual, but rather the space and time of its writing and reading. In the work of Jaccottet and Noël respectively, the texts take the form of the hesitancy or the impulse that inspired their creation in the first place. The strength of their writing is to offer us fragmented hints of the invisible and the silent. Silence is necessary to acknowledge that language has limits, but in order to demonstrate its existence, words must be used to these limits. The concerns that link Noël and Jaccottet most clearly: time, death and the simultaneous exploration of these theoretically and imaginatively, also serve to highlight the differences between their texts. Jaccottet adopts a tentative tone that aims at being truthful to the world we perceive as fragmented and in constant transition:

Silence 211 cette voix-ci, avec son incertitude, qui s’élève sans que rien l’étaie de l’extérieur et s’aventure sans prudence hors de notre bouche, on dirait qu’elle est moins mensongère, bien qu’elle puisse tromper davantage; on dirait surtout qu’elle ranime le monde, qu’à travers elle il reprend de la consistance. (Promenade, p. 97)

Noël’s poetic texts emerge from the body; he imagines that they bring to life on the page their material source: écoute le grand bruissement des cellules la feuillaison du corps et quelle haleine en est la rumeur je ne veux rien d’autre sur ma langue. (Chute, p. 23)

The dual meaning of “langue” combines speech with the body as nonlinguistic source and medium for the production of language. Breath, similarly, implies poetic utterance, but here Noël focuses on the physical act of breathing; “haleine” is chosen instead of the more metaphorical “souffle”. His short prose piece “Encore”, from 1982, includes an image of the creation of the earth from the bodies of living things that have been buried. It suggests that it is precisely absence, silence and death that create life and language: Les mots sont à l’absence ce que les morts sont à la terre: ils la créent et, l’ayant créée, celle-ci fait pousser leur contraire. (Chute, p. 10)

CONCLUSION The title of this study appears to treat space and time as connected, but separate, categories. The provisional is a characteristic of something that is bound to fade away, as time progresses in linear fashion. Transitions, meanwhile, are movements in space, from one point, or point of view, to a different one. But these terms cannot remain isolated from each other, as a transition in space takes place in time, and it involves some kind of change that invests the previous position with provisionality. In examining the structure of the poetry and its imagery, we saw that the poetic world could only be created, and produce the poetic subject, if the text kept itself open to the world, to movement and to change. The poets’ other activities and interests were revealed to be not merely ancillary to poetic creativity, but important transitions between poetic language and all that is other to it. As well as blurring the boundaries between poetry and prose, and between creative and reflective writing, these texts show that transitions between language and silence are necessary for the real to emerge. Poetic texts must include silence, or be provisional, if they are to take on their own reality. Time and Space Different times of reading are created in the works of these three writers, and they are not always linear. For instance, du Bouchet uses a restricted vocabulary; it produces echoes and networks that incite movement in all directions through texts and between volumes. In his poems of landscape, the furrows, clouds, snow, and so on, are simply named, and they therefore recall other instances of their naming. While the repetitions render each individual piece of poetic or prose writing identifiably his, they do not contain all his work in one infinitely self-referential whole. Variation is introduced by changing parts of speech such as prepositions, rather than by identifying things adjectivally. The consequence of fragmenting sections of text is that intervals cause them to be left behind, yet the echoes they produce retain them as traces on the page and in the mind of the reader. Echoes in sound and vocabulary operate not just within and between lines of verse, but across stanzas or pages of text, and are one of the principal characteristics of poetic prose. Noël and Jaccottet both

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compose passages in which the sounds of the words frequently seem to take precedence in the choice or generation of other words, over and above meaning or context. Noël explores this in texts such as “Poème à déchanter” (Poèmes 1, pp. 185-196) and in Bruits de langues, described by Michaël Bishop as giving: “vent to a ‘buccal’ spontaneity that is often onomatopoetically inspired”.199 Above all, the poets can be compared because their texts always proffer instants and then leave them behind. This is important for Jaccottet because he wishes to create in words the impression of a fleeting glimpse of a moment of change in the world around. In this description of a river glimpsed between some trees, for example, Jaccottet evokes the subject’s first impression and describes the act of looking, while also creating a verbal image: Elle scintille à l’autre bout du pré, entre les arbres. C’est ainsi qu’on la découvre d’abord, un étincellement plus vif à travers les feuilles brillantes, entre deux prés endormis, sous des virevoltes d’oiseaux. Quelle merveille est-ce là, dit le regard, se faisant plus attentif. (Promenade, p. 85)

The perceptions are not confined to an individual subject; they are those of “on” and “le regard”, which take the text beyond an expression of past experience to involve the reader in the act of looking. The terms evoking shimmering light: “scintille”, “étincellement”, “brillantes”, multiply in a way that creates the movement and fragmentation described. This is further highlighted by the repetition of “i” and “ll” to echo these words, as well as the insistence on “t” and “f”: “vif”, “feuilles”, “virevoltes”, “merveille”, “attentif”. We scarcely notice that the water has not been mentioned except in terms of the light reflected on it, and realise that the scene is created by the early morning sun. Of the three writers, Jaccottet’s poetry depends the most on visual images, and it is their hesitant quality that renders his texts so recognisable. He also finds this in the work of others. In a 1957 essay “Approche de du Bouchet”, for instance, he writes of du Bouchet’s collection Air that “il s’agit presque toujours de brèves entrevisions, suivies d’une brusque inflammation de paroles”.200 He captures the glimpse, the instantaneous appearance of the words on the page in du 199 200

‘Bernard Noël’, Sub-stance, 23-24 (1976), 157-165 (p. 160). L’Entretien des Muses: chroniques de poésie (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 261.

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Bouchet’s texts, and his choice of the imagery of flaring up captures their intensity. Andrea Cady suggests that more than the form of the poems themselves, it is the nature of du Bouchet’s “regard” that fascinates Jaccottet.201 Jaccottet’s own hesitant images do not resemble du Bouchet’s stark evocations of things and elements; moments in Jaccottet’s texts hover briefly and then are lost, just as the image of a bird in flight, the reflection of sunlight on water or the changing sky at sunset might seem frozen momentarily, at the point of transition between their past and future movements. His decision to combine verse and prose poetry with more reflective prose texts in some collections means that examples of this kind of poetic writing are found alongside discussion of ways in which it can function. For instance, he writes of a plant: Surtout, ne pas plier cela dans l’herbier des pages; mais le laisser déplier dans l’espace, laisser cela flotter au bout de ses tiges presque invisibles qui en empêchent pour un peu de temps la dispersion. (Et, néanmoins, p. 29)

He uses the image of pressing a flower in a book to preserve it, in order to insist that images should not be contained within the pages of a text, but rather retained only “pour un peu de temps”, before being allowed to follow their course. This extract reveals the difficulty of separating poetic and analytical prose; here Jaccottet discusses the process of creating poetic imagery, but he employs imaginative language to do so. Invisible Depths In du Bouchet’s work also, words emerge and then are passed through; they act to prevent meaning from becoming fixed: futur comme cette déchirure par laquelle point ou particule de la terre de ce qui peut être 201

Measuring the Visible: The Verse and Prose of Philippe Jaccottet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), p. 63.

216 Provisionality and the Poem entrevu, provisoirement se détachera, et alors je ne vois rien, sinon un socle pour matériau à découvert. (Une tache)

Words are dislodged from syntactic links and become visible as things in themselves before they can act as transmitters of ideas; in this way, a textual world is created that has the reality of the natural world evoked without attempting to mimic it in verbal imagery. The words “provisoirement”, and the opening “futur” in this extract emphasise that words and images must be forgotten and passed through, if they are to be creative. They must suggest multiple meanings or echoes, but also need to anticipate the words to come. Therefore their significance cannot be made definitive, nor can their presence impede the movement in the text. The lines of this text are short because they are placed in the margin of a page of poetic prose, a style adopted by du Bouchet in various texts in order to supplement, but also render more complex, the main body of the text. It is employed most frequently in pieces about the visual arts, as is the case here, although du Bouchet also discusses traces and backgrounds elsewhere in a manner that suggests canvases without ever explicitly referring to art. The effect of the margin is to turn the page into a visual, vertically layered space before allowing the reader to consider the meanings that might be expressed there. What is important is the material of the work of art; when the observer sees the forms it takes, before looking beyond it for meaning, then it provides a glimpse of novelty. During their brief appearance, precisely because this is provisional, words reveal gaps and intervals. They are disrupted (the term “déchirure” occurs throughout du Bouchet’s work) in order to cause the reader to see beyond them to the usually ignored background of the paper, in the same way that the canvas is made visible through disruption of painted or engraved forms. Therefore transitions are not surface phenomena, with words giving way to one another through a process of slippage, or images hovering on the surface of the page. Rather, the purpose of

Conclusion 217

maintaining the provisional aspect of poetic writing is to allow glimpses of depth behind the surface. The title of du Bouchet’s last published notebook, Annotations sur l’espace non datées, suggests the concentration on space at the expense of time that often appears to be a feature of his work. 202 Indeed, the fragments in his first two Carnets were ordered only according to the dates on which they were jotted down. Now even this marker has been removed, as if time were excised from the response to space. The text works to nuance this interpretation, however. For instance, du Bouchet writes: disparition de la langue à prendre sur soi comme la parole même aujourd’hui, et, en tout instant, passage de l’intervalle, une enjambée, ciel sitôt par le travers. (Annotations, p. 35)

Time, in the form of “today”, “every instant” and “passage”, is part of the workings of language that disappear when assumed by the poetic subject, but this process is also spatial. The instants of time are intervals that emerge and are left behind, in writing as in walking; the act of taking a step is created in language by enjambement, in the strict metrical sense or simply by the intrusion of blank space into the text. This is how the poetry or prose is able to create a world as real as the landscape; by introducing real gaps in space and time, the physical materiality of the world that is usually ignored can be momentarily seen: “ciel sitôt par le travers”. “Travers” is a complex and rich term that is frequently employed and exploited by du Bouchet, who grants it both temporal and spatial meaning. In “Notes sur la traduction”, he writes: peut-être, par le travers de la parole, elles aussi les choses ont-elles eu jour. (p. 135)

Instead of reality being used as the basis of language, it is through language (“au travers de”) and through its defects (“un travers”) and allusiveness (“de travers”) that things come into being or see the day (“voir le jour”). “Eu jour” also reminds the reader of the word that is so significant for du Bouchet that it forms the title of one of his 202

Annotations sur l’espace non datées (Carnet 3) ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 2000). It is the only one of the three notebooks to have been given a title.

218 Provisionality and the Poem

collections of poetry, “l’ajour” (L’Ajour). Literally meaning decorative openwork on a building, this term suggests seeing through surfaces to that which is beneath, as well as the bringing to light of things themselves. 203 E-vocation In Noël’s work, depth tends to take the form of volume, most frequently in images of mental and bodily space. Rather than emerging in intervals, internal volume is externalised through an impulse. This might be physical, in images that range from breathing to a disturbing emergence of organs, or verbal, as words seem to pour out onto the page. The form of his long poems demonstrates this most effectively, but it is present in all those verse and prose texts that upset the boundaries separating the apparently invisible inside realm from the outside, which we mistakenly think we have in control because we can see it. In extreme cases, Noël distorts language so that it suggests stable meaning and reference while simultaneously refusing to allow it to be grasped. With phrases such as “eh peaucrite lèchteur, mon pareil bookmaker” (Bruits de langue, Carn, p. 209), undermining a wellknown quotation from Baudelaire, Noël succeeds in disturbing language from the inside: L’écriture devait être l’expérience de l’expérience. Il ne s’agit pas de raconter, mais d’éveiller. Alors, le langage étant ce qu’il est, il n’y a plus qu’à le piéger, à le pervertir, à le trouer pour y prendre l’éclair qu’aucun mot ne peut dire, mais qu’une certaine configuration de mots peut sceller. Le rythme parlera; l’image deviendra le mot de la nouvelle langue.204

Noël’s comments on Michaux’s ink and watercolour paintings could equally well be applied to the life of his own poetry. He insists that Michaux’s paintings only remain so alive because the “surgissement” that engenders them is continuous and must therefore be invisible behind the “surgi”, the traces that we see (Vers, pp. 39-40). This in turn reveals how thought functions, because it makes visible the process of thinking usually invisible behind its product. As well as 203

Noël uses this in the title of a text on the artist Chillida: “Chillida: ‘Ajours de terre’”, Derrière le miroir, 242 (1980), 156-163. “Travers” is also a significant term for Jaccottet, although it is employed to a lesser extent. For example, see “à travers ces feuilles brillantes”, cited above (Promenade, p. 85). 204 Le Lieu des signes (Le Muy: Unes, 1988 (1971)), p. 131.

Conclusion 219

turning the inside out, Noël’s own poetry delves into internal areas that can never be mapped, in the vain desire to discover where language originates, to see the invisible. While the source of language remains elusive, the texts themselves show the reader the internal depth and volume that is not perceptible outside such language. Noël’s statement: “il ne s’agit pas de raconter, mais d’éveiller”, could be applied to all three writers, despite the important differences between them. Creativity rather than mimesis is central to their work, which moves towards the world instead of focusing on linguistic experimentation. Hesitant instants for Jaccottet work towards the same end as Noël’s generated “élan”, while for du Bouchet, it is repeated forgetting through the emergence and disappearance of words on the page that can grant a text rhythm and movement. Du Bouchet’s last volume of poetry is typical in that it is unpaginated, and the white space of the page provides the basis for, and structures, the carefully spaced phrases. He writes, for instance: que cela cesse et cesse ce qui devant soi peut-être a été. (Du Bouchet, Tumulte)

The “cela” remains unexplained, but the repetition of “cesse” suggests that it cannot ever truly end, since the process of coming to an end will always be enacted, forgotten and then repeated. Times of present, “cesse | et cesse”, future, “devant soi”, and past, “a été”, are confused. This complicates the question of being in the present, but it is precisely through disrupting the linear that the text is able to create its own reality; it exists in the anticipated and remembered emergence, forgetting and re-emergence of language. The impersonal “soi” is typical of the ways in which du Bouchet, and indeed all three poets, refer to the self; it is devoid of any personal characteristics and, more importantly, appears to come

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into being along with the text. In du Bouchet’s case, it takes on the substance of the page: entré dans la langue, tu te découvres d’un mot à l’autre toi-même interstice élargi. (Annotations, p. 12)

The discovery of the self takes place in the leap from one word to the next; its reality is between words, not quite in the visible surface of language, but rather in all that structures it and can be glimpsed as the movement of writing and reading reveals the gaps. Pierre Chappuis explains that it occurs through the effacement of the self, because this is what allows the movement that produces it to occur. He insists: “que la personne, en se niant, s’affirme, qu’elle est elle-même le lieu et la condition de son effacement”. 205 Anticipation Although the terms “depth”, “thickness” and “invisible structures” are spatial figures of speech, when temporal modes of writing and reading are set up, time and thickness together create the reality of the text. This can be seen in the physical presence of air as breathing that may motivate the poetry, or as the substance of the page or canvas. The practice of translation reveals what lies behind the word used by forcing the translator to consider the multiple meanings and references it conveys, and the text hints at the hidden structure of its translation, although it will not reveal its source transparently. In the writing of poetry, words are revitalised when the gap between their accepted sense and potential meanings is revealed. These writers acknowledge and explore the limits of language, and engage with the silence that disrupts meaning while containing its potential. The interrelation of time and space takes the poetry beyond the simultaneous image, but rather than unfolding in linear fashion, it creates its own times and depths of reading. Du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noël have not participated in current literary theoretical debates. In particular, their concentration on the reality of the natural world would seem to imply that they deliberately ignore or refuse the argument that the textual evocation of non-linguistic reality is impossible. However, I would argue that the 205

Pierre Chappuis, “La Parole en avant d’elle-même”, Critique, 307 (1972), 10741081 (p. 1080).

Conclusion 221

complexity we have seen in their work not only testifies to an awareness of these concerns, but even suggests ways of overcoming differences that an overt engagement in literary theory would preclude. The tension discernible in their writing is principally between, on the one hand, the immediacy of perception, an encounter with the natural world and the importance of evoking this in simple imagery, and, on the other hand, their awareness that language is inescapably their medium for creation, and may therefore actually determine the impressions we naively believe to precede words. The work of Noël, Jaccottet and du Bouchet seems to thrive on the tensions between these ways of considering the world and language, and to transcend the divisions between them. They do not see language as a vehicle for the expression of the world or the response it elicits. Their writing does not exist as a mirror of what is outside it, but rather is significant in itself, in the new images, language and poetic subject that it brings into being. It creates both text and subject, renewing ways of seeing while constantly questioning its own power. It does so, however, by engaging with what is other: the visual, the incomprehensible, the silent, or the unattainable, invisible truth of the world that nevertheless inspires poetic attempts to come close to it. They share with their contemporaries features that cause their work to be considered ontological. Creativity begins with an opening up towards the real of silent matter. Poets of the subsequent generation have moved on from this insistence on the elemental real, but they have retained a sense of the materiality of language. They explore its physical nature, either to transform poetry as an oral form (the TXT group, including Christian Prigent, plays an important role), or in the explosion of the page to create three-dimensional collage (this can be seen in the work of Emmanuel Hocquard and Orange Export Ltd., a group and publishing house). Despite the great differences between these movements and their predecessors, the renewal of language remains paramount. Moreover, gaps, whether in breathing or visual composition, are vital to disrupt language and allow it to take new forms. In texts exemplified by the authors examined in this study, space and time are inseparable because together they form a thickness that is revealed in intervals, instants and exploding boundaries. While

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this is examined in their prose writing, it is the very substance and structure of their poetry. Jaccottet’s “vagues fragments” (Éléments, p. 7) float and hover, but are also examined and extended imaginatively; the stuff of the page allows du Bouchet’s intervals to determine the force of the traces of words that are passed through; Noël’s poetry has a volume that rises up from the page and reflects the planned structure that allowed the words to pour forth onto it. The poetry is motivated by a sense of what is just beyond the grasp of the observer, the “insaisissable”; it could be the inside of the body, the workings of thought and vision, the impression that other times structure the importance of a place, or the solidity of the outside world that will always remain beyond our appropriation, but which allows for contact that gives us a sense of existing in the present: il semble que puissent revenir à lui toutes les magies du temps et de l’espace, cette façon qu’a l’insaisissable de surgir moins dans un lieu que dans ce qui sépare et relie les lieux, dans le passage des instants. (Jaccottet, Éléments, p. 94)

These are texts of the present, but they do not give us frozen instants that have no relationship to lived time, nor eternal truths set down in writing. In each text and at each reading, new times come into being and language is reborn: … parole disparue – comme logée – une fois dite.

… je redis pour déloger.206

206

Du Bouchet, Rapides (Paris: Hachette, 1980).

Illustrations 223

Plate 1

Illustrations 225

Plate 2

BIBLIOGRAPHY André du Bouchet (with Antoni Tàpies) Air (Paris: Maeght, 1971) Air suivi de Défets (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1986) L’Ajour (Paris: Gallimard, 1998) Annotations sur l’espace non datées (Carnet 3) ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 2000) Aujourd’hui c’est (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994) Carnets 1952-1956 ([Paris]: Plon, 1990) Dans la chaleur vacante suivi de Où le soleil (Paris: Gallimard, 1991) De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture (Le Muy: Unes, 1990) D’un trait qui figure et défigure ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1997) L’Emportement du muet (Paris: Mercure de France, 2000) “Hölderlin aujourd’hui” in L’Incohérence, n. pag. (with Geneviève Asse) Ici en deux (Geneva: Quentin, 1982) Ici en deux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986) L’Incohérence (Paris: Hachette, 1979) (with Alberto Giacometti) L’Inhabité (Paris: Hugues, 1967) (with Pierre Tal Coat) Laisses (Lausanne: Simecek, 1975) Laisses (Paris: Hachette, 1979) Matière de l’interlocuteur ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1992) “Notes sur la traduction” in Poèmes et proses, pp. 133-142 Poèmes et proses (Paris: Mercure de France, 1995) Pourquoi si calmes (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1996) Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972) Rapides (Paris: Hachette, 1980) (with Pierre Tal Coat) Sous le linteau en forme de joug (Lausanne: Simecek, 1978) (with Pierre Tal Coat) Sur le pas (Paris: Maeght, 1959) “Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986” in Böschenstein and Le Ridier, pp. 95112 Tumulte ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 2001) Une tache ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1988) Where Heat Looms, trans. by David Mus (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1996)

228 Provisionality and the Poem

Philippe Jaccottet À la lumière d’hiver suivi de Pensées sous les nuages (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) Après beaucoup d’années (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) À travers un verger (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975) Cahier de verdure (Paris: Gallimard, 1990) Les Cormorans (Marseille: Éditions Idumée, 1980) (with Gustave Roud) Correspondance 1942-1976, ed. by José-Flore Tappy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002) L’Effraie (Paris: Gallimard, 1953) Éléments d’un songe (Paris: Gallimard, 1961) L’Entretien des Muses: chroniques de poésie (Paris: Gallimard, 1968) Et, néanmoins (Paris: Gallimard, 2001) L’Ignorant (Paris: Gallimard, 1958) Interview with Alain Veinstein, 12 February 2001, France Culture “Note sur les traductions de Hölderlin”, Les Lettres françaises, 1182 (1967), 9 Pages retrouvées, ed. by Jean-Pierre Vidal (Lausanne: Editions Payot, 1989) Paysages avec figures absentes, rev. edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) Poésie 1946-1967 (Paris: Gallimard, 1977) “La Poésie: Un hymne retrouvé de Hölderlin”, La Nouvelle revue française, 7 (1959), 101-106 La Promenade sous les arbres (Lausanne: Mermod, 1957) Requiem suivi de Remarques ([Montpellier]: Fata Morgana, 1991) Rilke par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1970) La Semaison: Carnets 1954-1979 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) Truinas le 21 avril 2001 ([Geneva]: La Dogana, 2004) Une transaction secrète (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) Words in the Air: A Selection of Poems by Philippe Jaccottet, trans. by Derek Mahon (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1998) Bernard Noël L’Air est les yeux (Trans-en-Provence: Unes, 1982) À propos de l’exposition des œuvres d’Olivier Debré, juin 1976, Galerie Ariel (Paris: Galerie Ariel, 1976) Bruits de langue, repr. in Hervé Carn, Bernard Noël (Paris: Seghers, 1986), pp. 156-163 Le Château de Cène (Paris: Pauvert, 1971)

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INDEX Agamben, Giorgio 12, 197 Air 15, 25, 59-138, 145, 161, 170, 201, 220 Alquié, Ferdinand 22 Ancet, Jacques 176-177, 180-181 Apollinaire, Guillaume 38, 123, 141 Aristotle 150 Artaud, Antonin 20, 34 Asse, Geneviève 140 Bachelard, Gaston 49, 60-62, 65, 66, 92, 94 Baroque, the 142 Bashô 17, 21, 175 Bataille, Georges 22, 38, 142, 208209 Baudelaire, Charles 46, 96, 218 Being 11, 24, 121, 202, 221 Benjamin, Walter 173, 184 Berman, Antoine 172, 174 Bishop, Michaël 23, 205, 214 Blanchot, Maurice 196-197, 198-200; “la nuit” 195-196, 198-199 Bobillot, Jean-Pierre 35, 55 Body 13, 14, 15, 19, 22, 54, 65, 84, 115-126, 130-132, 134-137, 142, 156-158, 160-163, 193, 195, 208, 211, 218, 222 Bokor, Miklos 140, 151 Bonnefoy, Yves 11, 18, 19, 46, 142 Böschenstein, Bernhard 171 Bourassa, Lucie 48 Breathing 12, 15, 25, 38, 41, 44-48, 54, 62, 68-70, 79, 84-86, 115, 117-120, 125-126, 211, 220-221 Bréhier, Emile 101 Breton, André 22 Buber, Martin 120-122 Cady, Andrea 215 Cahiers d’Art 141 Cardinal, Roger 65 Celan, Paul 166, 176, 178 Cendrars, Blaise 135, 141-142 Centre 24, 120-122, 200-201 Change (instances of) 15, 46, 51, 53, 58, 60, 95-98, 108-109, 131, 214-215 (enacted in writing) 25,

49-50, 51, 53, 77, 91-104, 145, 154, 213 Chateaubriand, François-René comte de 46 Chapon, François 139, 154 Chappuis, Pierre 220 Collot, Michel 12, 64 Constantine, David 172 Critchley, Simon 198-199 Dada 20 Dante 179 Da Silva, Vieira 140 David, Jacques-Louis 15 Death 15, 59, 107-110, 113-114, 126127, 130-132, 134-135, 190-199, 202-203, 205-211 Debré, Olivier 139, 155-158, 160, 163 Deguy, Michel 19, 174 Deixis 135 Delaunay, Sonia 141-142 Deleuze, Gilles 55, 177 Depth (and writing) 26, 71-72, 132133, 135-137, 144-148, 170, 186, 201, 203, 215-222 (and art) 152, 154-155, 157, 162-163 Derain, André 141 Derrida, Jacques 121 Derrière le miroir 141 De Bouchet, André 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29-32, 34, 36, 37-41, 42-44, 45, 48-50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 6490, 91, 92, 99, 115, 131, 139141, 143-155, 156,163-164, 165171, 175-182, 183, 184-186, 189-190, 213-222; Air 25, 63, 66, 76-90, 140, 214; L’Ajour 70, 72, 75, 84, 99, 185, 218; Annotations sur l’espace non datées 217, 220; Aujourd’hui c’est 29, 40-41, 42-43, 48-50; Carnets 1952-1956 21, 65, 73; Dans la chaleur vacante 16, 17, 29, 59, 68; Défets 25; De plusieurs déchirements dans les

240 Provisionality and the Poem parages de la peinture 140, 151; D’un trait qui figure et défigure 152; Emportement du muet, L’ 64, 140, 149, 153; Envergure de Reverdy 23; “Hölderlin aujourd’hui” 165-166, 170, 175176, 177-178, 181-182, 185; Ici en deux 140, 166; Incohérence, L’ 17, 68, 165, 178; Inhabité, L’ 140; Laisses 16-17, 72, 139, 145; Matière de l’interlocuteur 16, 19, 23, 32, 178, 179-180; Moteur blanc, Le 67; “Notes sur la traduction” 166, 177, 180, 184-185, 217; Où le soleil 17, 29, 65-66, 71-72, 74; Poèmes et proses 166; Pourquoi si calmes 49, 57; Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous 72-73, 140; Rapides 222; Retours sur le vent 74-75; Sous le linteau en forme de joug 139, 143-148; Le Surcroît 84; Sur le pas 139, 154; “Tübingen le 22 mai 1986” 166, 170, 176, 178, 181-182, 184-185; Tumulte 17, 29, 219; Une Tache 150, 151, 152-153, 216 Dubuffet, Jean 142 Dupin, Jacques 18, 30-31, 59, 84, 142 Dupouy, Christine 201 Echo 12, 14, 24, 48-52, 105, 131-132, 145, 213, 216 Élan 17, 25, 26, 33, 36, 53, 134, 199, 207-210, 218-219, 222 Elemental landscape 15, 18, 19, 30, 59-74, 84-87, 88-90, 91, 115117, 132-133, 135, 147, 157, 166, 169, 183, 185, 189, 213, 215, 221 Éliade, Mircea 61, 201 Eliot, T. S. 135 Éluard, Paul 61, 123 Enjambement 12, 16, 31, 37, 39, 41, 42-44, 69, 95, 105, 118, 130, 133, 146, 204, 217 Éphémère, L’ 18, 21 Erotic, the 117-118, 121-122, 162163, 199, 209

Event (poetry as) 35, 52, 54, 56-58, 137 Expenditure 208-210 Fautrier, Jean 142 Fédier, François 168 Fetzer, Glenn W. 31, 65-66 Forgetting 32, 37, 39, 43, 49, 132, 136, 143, 145-146, 153, 155157, 184-186, 193, 197-198, 209, 216, 219 Frontier, Alain 37, 40, 56 Futurism 23 Géricault, Théodore 15 Gesture 54, 156 (and art) 148, 150, 161-164 Giacometti, Alberto 17, 72-73, 140, 142, 152 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 61 Goldschmidt, Victor 101 Gnosticism 173 Haiku 17, 21, 36, 54, 97, 99 Heidegger, Martin 24, 172, 174, 201202 Heidsieck, Bernard 20, 34-35, 45 Herder, Johann Gottfried 176 Hesitation 15, 17, 25, 27, 50, 91, 112, 167, 186, 202, 205, 210, 214215, 219 Hill, Leslie 200 Hocquard, Emmanuel 221 Hölderlin, Friedrich 24, 26, 61, 165166, 168-172, 174-179, 181-184, 187, 201-202; ‘In lieblicher Bläue’ 166, 175-177 Homer 34 Hugo, Victor 111 Instants 17, 24, 25, 36-37, 52-53, 54, 56-57, 91-92, 97-98, 100-104, 109-110, 114, 115, 126, 153, 183, 204, 214-215, 221-222 Intervals 16, 17, 18, 25, 31-32, 36, 40-41, 42-44, 48, 49, 57, 145, 147, 153, 170-171, 176-177, 184-186, 213, 216-218, 220-222 Jaccottet, Philippe 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 34, 36-37, 41-42, 44, 45-48, 5051, 52-53, 54, 56-57, 58, 59, 60,

Index 62, 63, 91-114, 115, 126, 165171, 175, 178-179, 182-184, 186-187, 189-192, 199-207, 210, 213-215, 218-222; Airs 17, 25, 36, 63, 91, 94, 97, 104-114, 203; À la lumière d’hiver 18, 41, 45, 59, 60, 91, 93, 95, 99, 102, 186, 190-192, 200, 202-207; Après beaucoup d’années 17, 18, 36, 94; À travers un verger 41-42, 51, 91, 98, 203, 205-206; Cahier de verdure 36, 57, 91, 100; Chants d’en bas 14, 191, 203; Cormorans, Les 91; Correspondance 1942-1976 23; Effraie, L’ 36; Éléments d’un songe 53, 190, 200, 222; Entretien des muses, L’ 214; Et, néanmoins 18, 29, 36-37, 46-48, 50-51, 52-53, 98, 189, 200, 215; Ignorant, L’ 36, 96, 191; Leçons 14, 190-191, 202-217; ‘Note sur les traductions de Hölderlin’ 165, 168, 183; Pages retrouvées 175; Paysages avec figures absentes 18, 24, 91, 178-179, 182-183, 186, 200-201; Pensées sous les nuages 18, 91; Poésie 1946-1967 14, 17, 59, 63, 91, 94, 96-97, 167, 206; “Poésie, La: Un Hymne retrouvé de Hölderlin” 168-169; Promenade sous les arbres, La 91, 92, 9596, 190, 202-203, 205, 211, 214, 218; Requiem 21; Rilke par luimême 24, 171; Semaison, La: carnets 1954-1979 91, 104; Truinas le 21 avril 2001 166, 168; Une transaction secrète 23, 167, 170, 187 Jackson, John E. 19, 66, 181-182 Joubert, Jean 91 Kawanabe, Yasuaki 97 Laforgue, Jules 61-62 Lebrat, Isabelle 46 Legrand, Jacques 171, 179 Leiris, Galerie Louise 141 Leopardi, Giacomo 179

241

Lernout, Geert 166 Levinas, Emmanuel 120-121 Livres d’artistes 13, 26, 139-164 Lloyd, Lucy-Jean 49, 179 Luca, Ghérasim 51-52, 55-56 Maeght, Galerie 141 Magritte, René 15 Mahon, Derek 18, 59, 63, 103, 111 Maldiney, Henri 48, 57 Mallarmé, Stéphane 22, 23, 30, 46, 56, 61, 138, 141, 185, 196, 208 Mandelstam, Osip 175, 180 Manet, Edouard 141 Matisse, Henri 15 Maulpoix, Jean-Michel 104 Memory 12, 124, 131, 136, 150, 154155, 157, 179, 187, 197, 201, 209 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 160-161 Michaux, Henri 142, 159-160, 162, 218 Miñano, Evelio 203 Miró, Joan 142 Movement (in art) 73, 143-144, 150154, 160-164 (in nature) 46, 48, 59, 91-102, 106-107, 111-113 (in writing) 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 25, 26, 42-44, 48-50, 53-54, 6970, 72, 74, 89-90, 109, 115, 120121, 126, 134, 142, 145-149, 159, 167, 169, 182-187, 208, 210, 213-217, 219-220 Musil, Robert 24 Nature 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 41, 46, 51, 58, 70, 91-115, 117-118, 131, 137, 147-148, 153, 156, 167, 182-183, 191-192, 200-201, 203-204, 211, 216, 220-221 Nerval, Gérard de 46 Noël, Bernard 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 29, 32-34, 36, 37, 38-39, 41, 44, 45, 53-55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 63, 92, 105, 115138, 139-141, 155-164, 165, 189-190, 192-199, 204-205, 207-211, 213-214, 218-222; Air est les yeux, L’ 25; À propos de l’exposition des œuvres d’Olivier

242 Provisionality and the Poem Debré 139; Bruits de langue 55, 214, 218; Château de cène, Le 21; “Chillida: ‘Ajours de terre’” 218; Chute des temps, La 16, 21, 29, 32-33, 38-39, 55, 123-125, 136, 192-195, 207-211; David 15; Debré 139, 160, 163; Debré: dessins 1945-1960 139; Espace du poème, L’ 33, 56, 120, 157, 158, 199; Espace du sourire 139; “États de l’air, Les” 25; Été langue morte, L’ 16, 33, 53, 59, 60, 122, 127; Extraits du corps 15, 54, 118-119; Face de silence, La 16; Géricault 15; Journal du regard 15, 119, 139, 140, 158-159, 164; Langue d’Anna, La 16; Lettre verticale XXXI pour Olivier Debré 139; Lieu des signes, Le 218; Livre de l’oubli, Le 139, 155-157, 163; Magritte 15; Maladie de la chair, La 16; Maladie du sens, La 16; Matisse 15; Moitié du geste, La 115-117, 126; Olivier Debré 139; Olivier Debré: le rideau de scène de l’Opéra de Hong-Kong 139 Ombre du double, L’ 117, 124; Onze romans d’œil, 123, 140, 159, 160-162, 163; Onze voies de fait 16, 22; Poèmes 1 15, 54, 117120, 125, 214; Qu’est-ce qu’écrire? 199, 209; Reconstitution, La 16; Reste du voyage, Le 59; Rumeur de l’air, La 16, 25, 63, 117, 125, 127138; Sens, la sensure, Le 21; Souvenirs du pâle 124-125, 193; Sur un pli du temps 16, 29, 33, 53-55; Syndrome de Gramsci, Le 16, 197-198; Treize cases du je 196-197, 209; Tu et le silence, Le 16, 121-122; URSS, allerretour 21; Vers Henri Michaux 159-160, 162, 218; Vieira da Silva 140; Zao Wou-Ki 140 Ong, Walter 33-34

Oral poetry 12, 24, 25, 33-37, 46, 56, 120 Orange Export Ltd. 221 Orpheus (and Eurydice) 198-199 OuLiPo 20 Parry, Milman 34 Pascoli, Giovanni 179 Performativity 19, 25, 62, 78-79, 101, 118, 153, 171-172 (J. L. Austin) 19 Pernoud, Emmanuel 142-143 Peyré, Yves 44 Phenomenology 13, 160 Picasso, Pablo 141 Pindar 165, 172 Ponge, Francis 102 Potential (in nature) 101, 107 109, 169 (significance of language) 12, 13, 14, 20, 38, 39, 40, 86, 89, 96, 103, 118, 121, 136, 162, 185-187, 220 Prepositions 49-50, 51, 133, 213 Prigent, Christian 20, 45, 56, 221 Provisional, the 24, 25, 26, 27, 96, 114, 205, 206, 213, 216-217 Punctuation 16, 31, 37-41, 44, 88, 100, 105, 126, 127, 208 Queneau, Raymond 20 Real, the (experience of) 18, 22, 93, 98, 107, 130, 132, 136, 148, 184-187, 192, 200 (writing creates the real) 11, 13, 19, 27, 32, 43, 56, 91, 95, 139, 141, 142, 143, 152-155, 163, 166, 168, 180-182, 189-190, 203, 205, 210, 213, 217, 219-221 Religion 24, 61, 89, 109, 112, 114, 133-134, 137, 195, 200-202 Repetition 20, 24, 32, 34, 40, 41, 47, 48-52, 54, 66, 70, 98, 99, 100, 130-132, 145, 152, 153, 154, 175, 183-184, 189, 195, 196, 197-198, 213-214, 219 Ressemblance 119-120, 131, 137 Reverdy, Pierre 16, 23, 49, 71, 141, 178, 179 Rhythm 23, 24, 32, 33, 34, 36-58, 171, 183, 195, 219

Index Richard, Jean-Pierre 109, 114 Rilke, Rainer Maria 24, 168, 171, 175, 178, 193, 196 Rimbaud, Arthur 40, 46 Rochat, Denise 36, 203 Romanticism (poetry) 14, 24, 62 (translation theory) 165, 172, 174 Rothwell, Andrew 71, 119, 155 Roubaud, Jacques 12, 20, 181 Roud, Gustave 23, 168, 175, 183 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 46 Roy, André 37 Rudwick, Hans H., 62 Samoyault, Tiphaine, 179 Sandras, Michel 41, 45 Sappho 174 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 172-173 Silence 12, 26, 40-41, 49, 57, 58, 86, 102, 121-122, 147-148, 164, 189-211, 213, 220-221 Sivan, Jacques 56 Sophocles 165 Sound poetry 20, 34-35, 36, 37, 45, 51, 58, 221 Sourdillon, Jean-Marc 104 Space (of the page) 11, 14, 16, 22, 23, 29-32, 49, 64-65, 72-73, 76, 77, 84, 99, 131, 143, 145-147, 150, 152, 155, 217, 219-220 Stamelman, Richard 18 Steiner, George 173 Stoics, the 101 Structuralism 13 Subject (poetic subject) 11, 13, 14, 15, 20, 22, 30, 59, 62, 64-75, 8487, 88-90, 92-95, 102, 106, 110, 115-127, 132, 134-138, 156, 166-168, 183, 185, 189-198, 203-207, 210, 213-214, 219-220 Suffering 190-191, 194, 203-204, 206-207 Surface (and art) 151-152, 158, 162, 163 (and writing) 26, 32, 71-72, 74, 93, 116, 122, 125, 132-133, 134, 135-137, 182, 201, 216218, 220 Supervielle, Jules 61

243

Surrealism 20, 22, 35, 142, 201-202 Tal Coat, Pierre 17, 139, 140, 143150, 153, 156 Tàpies, Antoni 140, 154 Time (exploration of) 15, 19, 101, 106-107, 109-111, 114, 115, 124-127, 130-135, 145, 158, 184-186, 194-195, 198, 201, 204, 210, 213-215, 217 (temporal structure) 24, 31-58, 153, 170, 208, 219-222 Touch 116, 121-123 Traces 43, 126, 148-151, 154, 156157, 163-164, 197-199, 204, 205, 207, 213, 216, 218, 222 Transitions (experience of) 24, 26, 70, 72, 91-99, 102, 108-110 (between modes of expression) 14, 25, 26, 27, 120, 143, 150, 159, 189 (in poetry) 13, 14, 25, 27, 31, 43, 48, 52, 58, 77, 104, 112, 210, 213, 215-216 Translation 14, 17, 25, 26, 165-187, 189, 220 Trévison, Carine 141 Tu 14, 84, 110, 121-125, 134, 193194 Tyers, Meryl 117 Ubac, Raoul 154 Ungaretti, Giuseppe 24, 175, 179 Valéry, Paul 12, 32, 161 Vegliante, J.-C. 179 Venuti, Lawrence 172-174 Verlaine, Paul 200 Vidal, Jean-Pierre 175 Violence 15, 18, 20, 66, 136, 173174, 207, 208 Vision (the visual) 13, 14, 16, 24, 25, 26, 37, 45, 53, 57, 59, 64, 88, 90, 95, 98, 102, 114, 119-126, 130132, 134, 140-143, 148-155, 157-164, 175, 202, 214-216, 218, 221-222 (visual arts) 16, 17, 18, 72-73, 89, 139-164, 189, 198, 216, 218 Vivin, Bertrand 162, 163 Volume 25, 26, 64, 158-159, 222 (and mental space) 115, 119-

244 Provisionality and the Poem 121, 125, 131-132, 137, 161162, 218-219 Voss, Jan 160-161 Walking 15, 44, 59, 67-70, 74, 84-87, 91, 117, 217 Winspur, Steven 164 Zao Wou-Ki 140