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French Poetry since 1950:Tendenciesby Jean-Michel MAULPOIXTranslated 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. 1950 : Dwelling¨ I can delineate the first regrouping around the verb « to dwell ». I apply it to a family of poets, born around the twenties, who may be gathered around the heading of a common quest for place and presence, as well as for a decisive relationship to the elementary. The latter began publishing in the fifties, just after the War, right in the midst of the « era of suspicion », in an epoch stamped both by the exhaustion of surrealism as well as by the « involved » poetry which had come out of the Resistance. As Marie-Claire Bancquart observes : « the exhaustion of surrealism and that of resistance poetry left room, at the onset of the fifties, for vast interrogations and quests carried out with uncertainty ». Such anxieties and research will be part and parcel of what Yves Bonnefoy calls « the act and seat of poetry ». They will follow on at the heart of writing itself, but also in its persisting dialogue with the landscape or with other art forms. ¨ The four most representative poets of this first family are Yves Bonnefoy (born in 1923), André du Bouchet (born in 1924), Philippe Jaccottet (born in 1925), and Jacques Dupin (born in 1927). The latter will indeed bring to its maturity the new poetic tendency that henceforth leads to a revival of the sensible world. As early as 1947, Jean Tortel had written in the N° 123 issue of the Cahiers du Sud that « after the surrealist fireworks », poets wanted to lay the stress on the thorough observation of the universe. Such a desire was illustrated in several ways, notably by the bias of a plain poetry, often of a bucolic tinge, present among the members of the Rochefort School, but it was these four authors, whom I have just quoted, who carried this wish to its fullest intensity and who found out how to articulate it into a deeper analysis of the very meaning of their art. Without ever coming together to creating in their turn whatever « school », the latter poets were nonetheless associated for a while with the Journal L'Ephémère (published from 1966 to 1973). They became close friends to several painters and sculptors such as Giacometti or Tal Coat. With these artists, they took lessons in the perusal, acquired a sense of « lyrical abstraction », perceived space as a site of confrontation, rediscovered matter and light, pondered upon illegibility and dissonance. Hence, Dupin speaking of Tapiès : « Raw, lapidary, blurred, over-hanging signs, they only open onto their present illegibility and incongruity of silent traces ». The latter authors will, in their turn, be specified by its lack of ornamentation, its tension, its dwindling and frugality, in the manner, for example, of Giacometti's sculptures. Fascinated by the material immediacy of the work of art, its haughty muteness, its independence towards readability, these poets' writings « attempt desperately to rediscover the abrupt access which nostalgia saps away ». Like Follain or Guillevic, all differentiate themselves from surrealism. They reject automatic writing, and the rapture of imagination, all that may have anything to do with ideology and « romanticism » in surrealism. They no longer believe in the future solution, as heralded by André Breton « of both these states apparently so contradictory : i.e. dream and reality mingling into some kind of absolute reality, of surreality. From this movement, however, they accept its power to wreak havoc with received ideas, clichés, ready-made phrases. If they inherit surrealism's inaugural violence, they break up with with its bias for images. The concern for dwelling, erecting themselves through poetry in a rightful relationship with the sensible world leads them to being involved in a harsh criticism of images. ¨ Yves Bonnefoy does
not fail to recall it : poetry, if one is not careful
enough, may become a game for dupes, a way to purchase, at
bargain rates, a metaphorical infinite within the language
itself. It willingly offers its service to he who were to
try and attempt to fly like Icarus, because the impossible
is his domain. It is easy for a poet to organize and settle
a few chimaeras with words, to build up a dazzling catalogue
of metaphors which would allow one to believe that the
infinite is our real homeland :
« every single
image », he writes, » is a specificity shrivelling
itself for fear of finiteness
». The far too
sought-after presence quells itself within the image which
entails duplicity for unity. So far as to allow Yves
Bonnefoy to conclude :
« I did voice
the truth of words without eschewing the war against the
image &endash; i.e. the image world &endash; for the
sake of presence".
And yet the latter is ready to accept that poetry can't
wholly bypass the use of images. After having precisely
developed criticism he ends up in exempting it and
recognizing in it some natural form of desire. He
reintegrates it within the living, having assessed its
risks. He asserts that the powerful love of presence,
leading to composing poems, must also know how to love
« this first web
of naiveties, chimaeras in which the will of presence had
become ensnared
». The work of the poet consists henceforth in
relativizing, then requalifying the image, as likewise it
compels to loving language as well as suspecting it. Writing
means knowing one's own finiteness, sizing up the tricks of
language, learning how to distinguish between the possible
and the impossible, but it is also experiencing the
impossible and thus starting again and again to try and
regain some kind of hope Ö « A surging state of impossible fullness », such would be, when all is said, Yves Bonnefoy's definition of poetry : « Our words no
longer look for other words but wander along the latter
ones, they simply side along with them, and if ever one
skims one, they unite. It won't be but still your light, our
brevity scattered. Could we say it's writing dispelling
itself once it's task's achieved.
» The image is that
creation of the mind upon which it falls to brighten
fleetingly man's finiteness, nay to scatter it, spilling its
fruitful figures. As for André du Bouchet, he will
advocate, with a similar reservation, a poetics of the image
« having reached its end full of concern ». As for
Philippe Jaccottet, he sternly takes over criticisms voiced
by Bonnefoy and, with regards to images, says :
« children do
invent some of them at a certain age and every day ; the
surrealists have satured them with modern poetry. If one
just about yields to such an inclination, a profusion of
rather odd and weird relationships take place between things
that may entail one to believe rather cheaply that one has
found out the hidden structures of the world whereas one has
only derived a maximum of a stir from the inaccuracy of an
expression.
» Confronted to this risk,
Philippe Jaccottet wishes a new transparent language which
does not yield to the mirages of « being lucky enough
as to find the accurate expression » and « verbal
coinage » but which bind man to the world in ties of
plainness and weirdness. The Haiku is one of this pattern,
i.e. a « poetry without images » :
« a poetry which
only yielded to establishing relationships without any
reference to any other world, nor to any explanation.
» The main
quality of this glass language would be to let light through
and offer a furtive access to meaning when it skies
away. ¨ Among these four
poets, poetry thus becomes some kind of a precarious ethics
in action. It determines how one should behave, move about
in the world without reference or props to any belief. It
means recapturing speech in its most rigorous, righteous,
and elementary dimension. It wishes to be the seat where
man, confronted to the infinite, sizes his finiteness. Hence
Bonnefoy &endash;thus unfolds his production against the
neo-platonic gnosis which makes the promised plenitude pay
the price of the refusal of the mortal body. In one of his
earliests texts, Anti-Plato, he writes
: « All things from
here, the country of wickers, of dresses, of stones, i.e.
the country of water on the willows and stones, a country of
stained dresses.Tthat laughter covered with blood, indeed I
tell thee, dealers of eternity, symmetrical faces, void of
looks, is heavier in man's head than perfect Ideas which but
run and come off on his mouth.
» ¨ The corollary of
such a search for presence is a questioning on place, nay on
what Yves Bonnefoy calls the « true place ». It is
no abstraction but a fragment of concrete territory where
all of a sudden some kind of profane revelation takes place.
The « true place » is that place wherefrom the
infinite suddenly declares itself and allows itself to be
read in the finite. It represents only in fact a «
waste away instant ». Thus one sees poetry attempting
to reach a new feeling of the universal which, according to
Bonnefoy's words in Les tombeaux de Ravenne (Ravenne's
tombstones) « is not the abstract certainty which for
being everywhere the same is almost worth nowhere. The
universal has its seat. The universal is everywhere in the
way one looks upon that place and how one will handle it
». « True immortality », he adds, « is
simply a taste of the everlasting », and not « the
healing of death ». He repatriates within the heart of
the sensible world and of the clear-sighted human
consciousness what religion formerly fed
on. Words like « glade
», « orchard », « rockface » will
thus refer, in French poetry of the fifties, to some kind of
a chancy geography of the Being and the meaning. They become
essentialized. they erect a protected landscape poles apart
from the city. Poetic language looks like what it describes
and becomes in its turn like an archipelago of
overdetermined sites and places of resistance. Almost as if
modernity, in front of the ephemereal and contingent of
which it is the conscience and the voice needed to erect
some points of reference where the feeling of eternity were
to come and seek shelter, without, for all that, obscuring
the precariousness of the creature who experiences
it. ¨ With Philippe
Jaccottet, the orchard represents the poetic space par
excellence, « I do believe that
in every orchard one may see the perfect dwelling : a place
whose layout is flexible, whose walls are porous, whose roof
is light ; a room so well set in order to house the marriage
of shadow and light that every human wedding should be there
celebrated, rather than inside those tombs into which so
many churches have turned ». ¨ For Jaccottet, the
ultimate task of poetry consists in transcribing a singular
experience that carries within itself its own necessity. In
the manner of the Rêveries of a Solitary Rambler, he
carefully describes the frame and the circumstances. He
grants writing the concern of recuperating the echoes
wherefrom the sensible world springs and of which man is
both at once witness and echo. Here is an example of an
« encounter », taken from the first pages of one
of his latest works « Cahier de Verdure » («
A Copybook of green ») : « This time it was a
cherry tree. Not a cherry tree in full bloom, referring to
some kind of clear approach, but a cherry tree loaded with
fruits, caught sight of one evening in June, on the other
side of a huge cornfield. It was once more as if someone had
appeared there and were talking to you without really
talking to you, without even pointing at you : someone or,
rather, somebody, and a 'beautiful thing' indeed ; but
whereas as if it had been a human shape, a wanderer ; in
which case my joy would have been mingled with some
embarrassement and need to run towards her, to join her,
first being almost incapable to speak, but not only for
having run too fast, then to listen to her, to answer, to
catch her in my net of words and be myself caught in hers
&endash; and then might have begun, if I'd been lucky
enough, quite another story, in a more or less settled
mixture of light and shadow; then a new love story would
have precisely there begun like a new brook, springing from
a new source, in Spring &endash; for that very cherry
tree, I had indeed no urge to meet it, to conquer it and to
possess it ; or, rather, it had been done, I had been met,
conquered, I had absolutely nothing to wait for, I had none
to ask more for ; it was another kind of story, of
encounter, of talk ; even more difficult to catch.
» « A cherry tree
loaded with fruits, caught sight of one evening in June, on
the other side of a huge cornfield », such is the very
simple and plain example of « rapture ». An
experience of the invisible takes place in the midst of the
visible. Nothing apparently more down to earth, more humble,
nor less relying on the society of men. The quiet presence
represents some kind of ever asked question to which no one
will ever answer for it carries within itself its own answer
: « Always on these
abysses of water does the ephemeral sparkle ; and that's the
very thing I wish I could voice nowÖ
» ¨ As for
André du Bouchet's poetry, it meanders between the
present and the immemorial. The very first experience of
such a writing is that of a way out : « one should
leave the limited space of the inside, get out of oneself,
try to escape from the fixed representations of the real,
from the grasp of both culture and language ». Getting
out means going where man is not, to direct oneself towards
an open space, a « free space », where the being
« has no name ». Writing reproduces this
production of movement : « I write as one walks, i.e.
blindly ». It gives an account of elementary
experiences and carefully keeps avoiding diversion in the
very space it confronts. Thus it will not saturate the page,
but attempt there to transcribe this « carrying void
» which is the very basis of poetic experience. Hence
the fragmentary and very spatialized disposition of the poem
: it is, on the sheet of paper, a rhythm set in space,
« the weird expression of simplicity ». This
pre-reflexive and seismographic writing almost constitutes
what I would call a « feeling of writing ». Du
Bouchet shows that poetry almost bleached by the speed with
which it moves away from the circumstance that had bestowed
on it a fake justification. Careful to remain in the truth
of incompletion, he refuses to fill in, with any kind of
ancient rhetorical or lyrical paste, the whites that
separate immediate experiences from the sensible world.
Writing coincides with the surge always to be recaptured
from the present instant : « Enlarged to the
white, the epoch, the piece of earth on which I slide, like
a beam of cold in the jolting day
». ¨ Lastly, Jacques
Dupin, born in Ardèche, i.e. that rocky solar area of
the South of France where du Bouchet had chosen to live and
near to where Bonnefoy and Jaccottet came close on various
moments of the existence. A stony earth, in the image of a
poetry that distrusts words that are too shiny as much as it
does with landscapes that would be too humanized. With
Jacques Dupin, as with André du Bouchet, writing is
experienced as a very « physical » journey to the
heart of a dry land. It speaks of itself in terms of
landslides, loose stones, drought, fissures and furrows. The
first figure of this effort is the ascent of a dry country,
completely opposite to the peacefulness of horizontality.
Here, for example, is the poem « Grand Vent »
(« High Wind ») which opens the collection Gravir,
published in 1963 : « We only belong to the mountain path meandering under the sun between sage and lichen rising at night, a borderline path towards contellations, we have enabled tops to come close to each other the limit of arable lands seeds burst in our fists flames into our bones Let manure rise all the way to us on men's backs Let vine and rye answer to the volcano's old age the fruits of pride, the fruits of basalt will ripe under the blows that make us visible Flesh will endure what the eye suffered from what wolves never dreamt before flowing on to the
sea. » The fundamental movement
of the poem is to move painfully towards the highest which
is also the emptiest, to direct onself towards the scarce,
the rare, nay, the unbreathable. The purpose is to climb
towards an « air burrow » or a kind of « open
sky deposit » where the inside of man himself up there,
very high, becomes a landscape where the obscure and the
secret unfold in light. Jacques Dupin's poetry is
fiercer than Bonnefoy's or Jaccottet's. Its landscapes are
less humanized. It imposes an experience of the abrupt and
expresses a stronger negativity. For this poet, it is a
matter of unweaving the web of perceptions, knowledge and
everyday common facts. Far from seeking any plenitude, it
values deficiency. The central motif of his work is the
crack : « In everything that dispels us outside the
world », he writes, « there lies its heart ».
Altogether hurried and brisk, peremptory and bare, writing
is an experience of unbinding, « an abrupt and infinite
birth ». Like the Ardechian landscape, it is a place of
bedazzlement and shining stones. The titles of his
collections clearly evidence such a violence : « Les
brisants » (breakers) (1958), « L'Epervier »
(casting net?) (1960), « Saccades » (jerks) (1962)
, « Gravir » (struggling up the slope) (1963)).
Close to Michaux for his bias towards confrontation, Dupin
is equally close to Giacometti in his emaciated poetics.
About the latter sculptor, he writes a few sentences which
might very well characterize his own poetical approach :
« Giacometti is hardly giving in to digging things and
play with their outward qualities, the light wrapping them,
the colour diversifying them (Ö) He does not revolve
around appearances, but he tears them, breaks in ».
Thus writing takes on the coat of a fight hand to hand :
« Nothing alive will ever go through but through our
body » : the poet stresses the necessity of a physical
ordeal which alone stands surety for the living, allows one
to thwart the tricks of
language. But this far more
physical, far more vehement conception of writing leads us
to the threshhold of the second step-over of our journey,
i.e. of the sixties Ö © Jean-Michel Maulpoix, 1999, all rights reserved. |
