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French
Poetry
since
1950:
Tendencies
II
by
Jean-Michel
MAULPOIX
Translated
from
the
original
French
by
Catherine
Wieder
My purpose is to run again
along the poetical space of this half-century, «
pointing » out the most significant tendencies that
have emerged in the course of the most recent decades. In
order to be clearer and offer a far better educational
perspective, I will grant each of them a verbal determiner
to sum it up, though I am well aware that it may not be
sufficient enough to account for the complexity of
tendencies taking place during each
period.
1960 : Figuring
A new generation of poets seem to emerge
around the sixties. It is a decade marked by the
overwhelming influence of human sciences, by the development
of structuralism, the primacy of the textual and of the
political, of research and avant-gardes. The era of
subversion follows the era of suspicion. It is the time of
the Oulipo and of Tel Quel. Attention turns away from
landscape and focuses upon writing.
¨ Born for the most part of them in
the thirties, the most representative writers of this new
generation are Michel Deguy, Denis Roche, Marcelin Pleynet
(who all three belonged to the committee of Tel Quel), or
again the Oulipian Jacques Roubaud, and the subversive
Bernard Noël.
The cultural circumstances lead to a
multiplication of theoretical propositions, as are to be
found in the flourishing of militant publication : «
TXT », « Change », « Chorus ». A
polemical atmosphere of political and ideological upheaval
characterizes this century that will find its acme in May
1968. Innovations and breakings up multiply therein. For the
time being, what is at stake is epistemology. Reading
Saussure, Jakobson, Althusser, Greimas and Lacan increases
the crisis of poetry that had already been latent during the
preceding decade. A large scale enterprise on language
develops while the notion of «textual writing »,
which tends to substitute itself for that of literature,
imposes itself. In the 1960 summer issue of Tel Quel
Jean-Pierre Faye insists that the word « poetry »
is « the ugliest word in the French language
».
¨ The work of language thus becomes
the very object of poetry. One becomes more and more
interested in the power of transgression. According to
Bernard Noël, «language is born of a breaking up,
all of a sudden it can no longer bear being at the service
of its references, naming them, reflecting them. The French
language is quite naturally submitted to the signified : it
has to offer evidence, give the detail of the accounts,
edict rules, give some representation. But all of a sudden,
there's a breaking up which is not a general one, but surges
from one's specific mouth which becomes the point wherefrom
the revolution starts up. »
The poetical act is thus willingly
perceived as a revolutionary act. Writing must re-enliven
language by establishing a singular relationship which
dissociates it from its traditional articulation. The poet
becomes he who imposes a new rhythm, a new way of saying or
of provoking the real. But this task of revitalization may
also rest on an unusual use of tradition, of «
source-texts » and of their inherited formal models.
Such is for example the case of the work of Jacques Roubaud
who is influenced by the works of the troubadours or by the
fixed forms of Japanese poetry, like the tanka. The
constraint is thus deliberately chosen, according to the
Oulipian pattern, as a principle of invention.
¨ Whereas for the poets of the
preceding generation the patient placing into perspective of
distances gave open way to presence, the writers who appear
during this new decade will privilege motifs of «
surface » and « speed ». For Denis Roche, as
for Michel Deguy, writing poetry means retranscribing with
abruptness the sputtering of the modern. Denis Roche calls
upon the spirit of Ezra Pound, whose work was introduced
into France with the translation of the Cantos by
René Lautrès in 1958. He says he had been
stunned by the swiftness of his writing :
« Pound too had understood
everything just at once glance without any kind of torment.
Without any rules. Without any data. Without any footage. He
had heard that something was ceaselessly spluttering. That
an almost mad teleprinter, but also maybe a highly lucid
one, with a true stubbornness and cynicism, was transmitting
out in space (i.e. outside America) and out of time (since
at the same time from everywhere and from all times).
»
¨ For Denis Roche, poetry is like
photography, a matter of focus : it aims and frames, it
slices the world into sequences of images. (For Jacques
Roubaud, it will be a matter of mathematical sequences
serving as formal models). Thus poetry outstripped common
language. It proceeds through electro-shocks and
short-circuits. It constitutes a « surface language
». About this, Denis Roche wrote :
« One is well aware of it : there's
no human activity, whether artistic or not, or even less
literary, but of surface. Hence billions of men stuck by the
soles of their feet on to the huge lawn of the earth and who
don't care at all for the content. Hence façades of
houses and buildings they erect perpendicularly on it ;
hence sheets drying, hence the horizon which is the ECG of
the dying, the horizontal scoffing at the vertical ; hence
canvasses painted by painters after the latter have checked
they were tight enough between their wooden frames, hence
too sheets of paper, international format, on which writers
always desperately strain themselves to lay down and spread
their ink or type carbon paper ; hence of our skin which is
the only thing we know of our bodies. »
¨ Dominique Fourcade will illustrate
a little later in his own way the photographic bias for
speed in a curious volume entitled « Rose trigger
» whose title revives the old poetical cliché of
the rose, this time become that of the camera diaphragm. He
insists that poetry is a writing « all in flights and
contemporary percussions ». Language itself constitutes
the site of an infinitely mobile relationship with the
contemporary. Writing is a matter of motivity, a question of
speed, of accelerations or dead stops, an incessant shifting
: « Whether one rages or controls, one remains a single
point in the world, and that is its extremity ». In
«Outrance utterance », he also writes :
« I wish I could shorten, more and
more, again and again, to the utmost smallest point of
voluptuousness whose length would be adjustable to the
infinite, a point of absolute pain and communication, the
most intense linguistic point in the world wherefrom one
would be able to ponder once more over the whole length of
love. »
¨ If I have thus kept «
figuring » as being emblematic of this period, it is
because all of these authors put forward the concept of
relationship. Relationship is poetical or what is poetical
is relationship. The same word « figure » in
French refers to the aspect of things, to faces and to turns
of phrases. Poetry is where the real comes, in the strictest
sense, to take figure (shape). As Michel Deguy showed it,
figuration summons to appear (almost as in court) : it
enables things to appear through comparison. Connotation is
the major poetical fact. A word becomes within a given
context the signifyier of a signified. Multiplying isotopes,
the poetical text is polyphonic. Images, correspondences,
metaphors, poetry says one thing through another. It is the
kingdom of analogies. The relationship thus indicates a
specifically human way in which to inhabit the world. A way
of being that one might say is both at once filled with
wonder and dramatic. Filled with wonder by the huge
metaphors at play, dramatic too nonetheless because we do
not possess the object that we covet : we have access only
to figures, to allegories, to enactments. We remain at once
both bound and separated. Poetry's vocation is not to solve
these contraries, but to make them appear in front of each
other and live together. When Michel Deguy spells the word
« Po&sie » (« Po&try ») by
inscribing at its heart the ampersand, he places it
completely under the sign of conjunction/disjunction. He
understands it and practices it as a « generalized
metaphorical status ». « Poetry, like love, risks
everything on signs », he writes. Or again elsewhere :
« My life is the mystery of the as if
».
¨ By confronting these poets who
appeared in the sixties with their predecessors whose works
began to emerge in the fifties, we thus see emerging in
broad strokes an opposition between two kinds of poetry: one
looking towards the side of the elemental landscape in order
to therein re-discover the feeling of presence, the other
which values more city, history, circumstance, the
accidental and the chancy. With Jaccottet or Bonnefoy,
Nature remains present and a link is set by the very
poetical experience, between the ephemereal and the eternal.
Hence, the meaning of the key-idea of the « true place
». For Michel Deguy, conversely, such a place could
only be represented but by the partitioning world of the
« like ». It is the figure that allows the
inter-belonging. In it, the scattered elements of a scrappy
world joint. The loss of meaning gives free rein to a «
generalized figuration ». It is therefore no longer
neither the being (the subject) nor the world (nature) who
serves as center, but language itself. The latter is the
only one that can allow a new visibility of that which is.
The world is what takes place in the poem : a huge share of
liabilities. Since any reality is liable to being joined to
another by the grace of a « like », « the
world becomes an infinite combinatorics of possibles which
the poet reveals, in a way, to itself, because it is the
very seat where figures work themselves a way up, or
delineate themselves. » The evolution of French poetry
in the seventies will lead to an even greater stress on this
privilege of the text, nay of the literal with respect to
landscape.
© Jean-Michel Maulpoix, 1999, all rights
reserved.
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