André du Bouchet : Poetic Forms of Attention [1 ed.] 9789004432888, 9789004427143

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André du Bouchet

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432888_001

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Collection monographique Rodopi en littérature française contemporaine sous la direction de Michael Brophy, University College Dublin comité de rédaction Dominique Combe, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris Mary Gallagher, University College Dublin Shirley Jordan, Newcastle University Bruno Thibault, University of Delaware Nathalie Watteyne, Université de Sherbrooke

VOLUME 58

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/clfc



André du Bouchet Poetic Forms of Attention By

Emma Wagstaff

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover illustration and page 157: photos from André du Bouchet, Andains. Pages de Carnet. Photographs © Francis Helgorsky (Éditions A Die, 1996). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wagstaff, Emma, author. Title: André du Bouchet : poetic forms of attention / by Emma Wagstaff. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2020] | Series: Collection monographique Rodopi en littérature française contemporaine, 0169-0078 ; volume 58 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020023488 (print) | LCCN 2020023489 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004427143 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004432888 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Du Bouchet, André--Criticism and interpretation. | Du Bouchet, André--Literary style. | Attention in literature. Classification: LCC PQ2664.U288 Z95 2020 (print) | LCC PQ2664.U288 (ebook) | DDC 814/.914--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023488 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023489

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0169-0078 isbn 978-90-04-42714-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-43288-8 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Contents

Contents Acknowledgements VII Abbreviations IX x Introduction 1 1 Du Bouchet and his Poetic Context 21 2 Du Bouchet’s Contributions to the Review l’Éphémère 34  L’Éphémère and the Twentieth-Century French Literary Review 36  L’Éphémère and 1968 39 ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage » [Notes du mai 1968]’ 45 The Form of l’Éphémère 53 3 Poetry and Pauses 62 The Material World 64 Time in the Texts 74 Forms of Temporal Attention 84 ‘Soutiré à un futur’ 90 4 Tensions and Translation  97 Foreignness and Relation 98 ‘Notes sur la traduction’ 107 ‘Lit de neige’ 115 5 Criticism and Slowness  124 Du Bouchet critic 126 Art Writing 134 Du Bouchet’s Slow Art Writing 139 De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture 146 6 A Life Writing 158 Autobiography and Projects 161 Rewriting the Carnets  165 Rewriting Published Texts 175 ‘À l’arrêt’ 184

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vi Conclusion 193 A Note on Translation 202 Poetry’s Role? 205 Bibliography 209 Index 224

Contents

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the publishers who granted permission for me to reproduce and translate extracts from André du Bouchet’s works: Le Bruit du temps, Fata Morgana, Éditions Unes, and Mercure de France, as well as to Sun&Moon and Yale for permission to reproduce published translations into English of his writing by David Mus and by Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers respectively. Suhrkamp and Gallimard have generously allowed me to reproduce in full Paul Celan’s ‘Schneebett’ and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre’s translation of the poem into French. Philippe Blanc at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet helped with access to Du Bouchet’s notebooks and letters and I am grateful to Anne de Staël and Bertrand Badiou for allowing me to read and cite them. Francis Helgorsky kindly permitted me to reproduce two of his photographs from Andains, by Du Bouchet, and provided the images. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked I shall be pleased to make the necessary arrangements. Thank you to Christa Stevens at Brill for her guidance and to Michael Brophy for his careful reading of the manuscript. Any errors which remain are my own. Jean Khalfa introduced me to the work of André du Bouchet a long time ago and has been a source of inspiration throughout my time studying poetry. I have presented aspects of the research in this book at seminars and conferences in Dublin, Durham, Kent, Leicester, and Oxford, and am grateful for constructive discussions with participants at those events. Colleagues in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham have listened to papers or read drafts of chapters, as well as giving me the opportunity to learn from their own research. I have benefited from research leave at Birmingham to complete this project and assistance to visit libraries. I should like to acknowledge the advice and support offered by Helen Abbott, Caroline Ardrey, Hugues Azérad, Jeff Barda, Michael Bishop, Hilary Brown, Martyn Cornick, Lisa Downing, Elliot ­Evans, Stephen Forcer, Charles Forsdick, Andrew Ginger, Jennifer Gosetti-­ Ferencei, Nigel Harris, Susan Harrow, Edward Hughes, Sara Jones, Michael G. Kelly, Emily McLaughlin, Sofia Malamatidou, Nina Parish, Gabriela Saldanha, Shane Weller, James Wishart, and the late Angela Kershaw and Michael Sheringham, who are greatly missed. My most patient readers continue to be Peter and Rosemary Wagstaff. Thank you also to Edmund Newey for discussions of poetry and for support every day. Our children, Eleanor and James Newey, have taught me a lot about the importance of time and varieties of attentiveness, and they have put up

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with the occasions when my own attention has been elsewhere: this book is dedicated to them.

List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements

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Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used for the titles of André du Bouchet’s works:  L’ajour A  Andains. Pages de Carnet Andains  Annotations sur l’espace non datées. Carnet 3 C3  Au deuxième étage ADE  Aujourd’hui c’est AC  Aveuglante ou banale. Essais sur la poésie 1949-1959 AB  Axiales Ax  Carnet C  Carnet 2 C2  Carnets 1952-1956 Carnets  La Couleur Couleur  Dans la chaleur vacante suivi de Ou le soleil DLCV  De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture DPD  L’Emportement du muet EM  Entretiens d’André du Bouchet avec Alain Veinstein Entretiens  Ici en deux Ici  L’Incohérence I  Laisses L  Matière de l’interlocuteur MDI  Openwork OW  Peinture P  La Peinture n’a jamais existé. Écrits sur l’art 1949-1999 LPNJE  Poèmes et proses PP  Pourquoi si calmes PSC  Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous QNPTVN  Retours sur le vent RSLV  Le révolu R  ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage » [Notes du mai 1968]’ SLPLP  Le Surcroît S  Sur le pas SLP  Tumulte T  Une lampe dans la lumière aride. Carnets 1949-1955 Lampe  Voyage en Arménie, by Ossip Mandelstam, translated by  Louis Bruzon Voyage 1973  Voyage en Arménie, by Ossip Mandelstam, translated by  André du Bouchet Voyage 1984  Where Heat Looms WHL

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List Of Abbreviations

Introduction Introduction

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Introduction attentif – autant qu’à soi, à l’inattention.1 attentive – as much as to oneself, to inattention.

⸪ André du Bouchet (1924-2001), along with other poets of his generation, privileged the natural and elemental world in contrast to the dominant Surrealist paradigm of the pre-1945 era. His name evokes uncompromising poems that appear to express the perceptions of a solitary walker in a sparse landscape, and someone who was reticent to speak about his writing despite his interest in other poets and in the work of artist contemporaries. The aim of this book, in addition to bringing to wider attention in the anglophone world a major poet of the second half of the twentieth century in France, is to show how his work displays a particular approach to attentiveness that advances understanding of late-twentieth-century French poetic practice while shedding new light on attention itself. Du Bouchet’s writing troubles the distinction between poetry of ‘presence’ and poetry of ‘the text’ that is frequently drawn in relation to French poetry of the 1960s to the 1980s. I argue that study of the temporal forms he produces shows how his work crosses that boundary. Du Bouchet, far from being the difficult, ontological poet of some critical assessments, demonstrates how poetic forms can embody and promote attentiveness, to others and to the world around. He achieves that in a body of work that rejects the notion of the expressive poetic subject, and refuses to separate words from the material world, without for all that making them solely material. I shall consider his writing from the earliest notebooks and essays to his last volume, Tumulte (2001). My approach focuses on close analysis of selected texts, in their specificity as well as the ways in which they exemplify his approach, rather than attempting a survey that would encompass every publication. The book will pay substantial attention to texts other than poetry: translations, writing on art, and circumstantial pieces. It will also examine his poetic prose as much as texts that take more obviously poetic form, and will argue that form is as important in those pieces as it is in poetry 1 André du Bouchet, ‘Notes sur la traduction’, Ici en deux, ed. by Michel Collot (Paris: Gallimard ‘Poésie’, 2011 [1986]), pp. 91-138 (128) (henceforth Ici). Translations are my own unless otherwise stated, and are intended to enable a parallel reading of the text.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432888_002

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immediately marked as such by its layout. Consequently, it argues for a reading of Du Bouchet that reveals the contribution poetic writing can make to debates on attentiveness, and the power of literature to help readers and writers tolerate uncertainty. Poetry might appear to be the obvious genre in which to express and incite attentiveness, as it is a time-bound form with origins in oral performance requiring attention by an audience. But modern French poetry has not been studied through the lens of attention, and theorists of attention tend not to devote much space to poetry. Before the nineteenth century, attention was perceived not in psychological terms but rather, theologically, as a form of contemplation with the potential to afford access to truth. A foundational reference is Augustine, who understood contemplation as bound up with earthly life even as it was directed towards heaven: people should both take an active part in a temporal life of responsibilities on earth and direct their attention towards higher truth.2 In the seventeenth century, Malebranche argued that attention is work, and that distraction, as the state of being open and available to whatever might merit one’s attention, should be valued over excessive concentration on what one is expecting to notice.3 Enlightenment thinker Condillac then understood attention to result from sensation, thereby linking physical stimuli with mental states. In important ways, attentiveness for Du Bouchet resembles an early modern or Enlightenment definition: the perceiving and acting subject labours to engage with the external world through the material resistance that it offers. En pleine terre les portes labourées portant air et fruits ressac blé d’orage sec le moyeu brûle je dois lutter contre mon propre bruit la force de la plaine que je brasse et qui grandit tout à coup un arbre rit 2 Allan D. Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 233. 3 Nicolas de Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité : livres IV-VI, ed. by Jean-Christophe Bardout (Paris: Vrin, 2006), 1, 2.

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comme la route que mes pas enflamment comme le couchant durement branché comme le moteur rouge du vent que j’ai mis à nu.4 On open ground the furrowed portals bearing air and fruit backwash storm wheat dry the axle burns I have to fight my own noise the plain’s strength that I stir and that grows suddenly a tree laughs like the road that my steps inflame like the harshly connected west like the wind’s red engine that I laid bare.5 Du Bouchet’s poetry does not restrict itself to calm contemplation or, alternatively, to fierce concentration on particular details, but insists instead that the poetic subject moves through the landscape, on foot or, as in this example, on a motorcycle, open to involving itself in the features of the environment that will then emerge. The attentiveness visible in his work combines the various roots from which the word ‘attention’ has grown: it is both listening and waiting, watching over 4 André du Bouchet, ‘En pleine terre’, Dans la chaleur vacante, suivi de Ou le soleil (Paris: Gallimard ‘Poésie’, 1991), p. 75 (henceforth DLCV). The collection dates from 1961 and the first edition appeared with Mercure de France. 5 David Mus’s freer translation reads as follows: ‘Broad earth’s full store / tilled gates lifting into yield of air / bounty out of doors / sea-surge / storm’s ripe grain / parched / the hub of iron sears / having to wrestle down your own din / bursting land throughout / this thrust I wield / which grows on you / a sudden tree laughs / as the open road burning where my steps vex / as the sun setting skewered on trees / as the wind’s red-lunged thrust / here revealed / all I bare anew.’ André du Bouchet, Where Heat Looms, trans. by David Mus (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1996), p. 73 (henceforth WHL). André du Bouchet, excerpts from Where Heat Looms, translated by David Mus. Copyright © 1961 by Mercure de France. English translation copyright © 1996 by David Mus. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Green Integer, greeninteger.com.

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and noticing. As theologian Jean-Louis Chrétien explains, the Latin verb ‘tendere’ has developed in different directions. ‘Intendere’ and ‘adtendere’ both express attention through the act of aiming for something: Mais le premier a donné en français « entendre » et « intention » ( sans verbe correspondant ), le second « attendre », « attente » et aussi « attention » […]. L’anglais to attend a perdu depuis longtemps son sens d’« attendre », mais garde celui de l’assistance et de la vigilance ( l’attention pratique du médecin ou de l’infirmière à leur patient, ou du domestique d’autrefois à son maître ) sans parler du sens militaire de « garde-àvous », comme en italien attenti. Mais il y a le vocabulaire, non latin, de la marque, comme dans le sens ancien du verbe « remarquer » (être attentif à…) et dans l’allemand aufmerksam, Aufmerksamkeit, le plus courant pour « attention », même s’il est assez tardif.6 But in French the first became ‘entendre’ [to hear] and ‘intention’ [intention] (without a corresponding verb), and the second ‘attendre’ [to wait], ‘attente’ [wait], and also ‘attention’ [attention] […]. The English ‘to attend’ has long lost its sense of waiting, but retains that of helping, or watching over (the practical attention of the doctor or nurse to their patient, or, formerly, that of servants to their master), not to mention the military meaning of ‘Attention!’, as is also the case in Italian with attenti. But there is also the non-Latin vocabulary of marking, as in the old meaning of the verb ‘remarquer’ (to be attentive to…) and in German auf­ merksam, Aufmerksamkeit, which is the most common term for ‘attention’, despite being quite recent. In spite of those distinctions, all the meanings have a temporal dimension, so that attention is not something given out of time, during a period of exclusive focus abstracted from everyday life, but embedded in everyday activities, and often related to other people. Du Bouchet’s writing has been described as constituting a negative theology,7 but studying his work in relation to attentiveness reveals an uncertainty and privileging of process that takes it outside theological frameworks with truth as a telos. He is Modernist in the implication that can be drawn from his poetry that attentiveness is a constructive process, though we shall see that the 6 Jean-Louis Chrétien, Pour reprendre et perdre haleine. Dix brèves méditations (Montrouge: Bayard, 2009), pp. 73-81 (72). 7 Serge Champeau, Ontologie et poésie. Trois études sur les limites du langage (Paris: Vrin, 1995). Champeau also examines the work of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet.

Introduction

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inconclusiveness implied by his writing is a matter for active acceptance rather than resignation or despair. The ways in which perception appears intertwined with memory links his poetry to Henri Bergson’s influential understanding of attention. Bergson is one of those thinkers, along with psychologists including William James, whom Jonathan Crary identifies as constituting the late-nineteenth-century psychological turn in understandings of attention.8 In Matière et mémoire Bergson demonstrated that perception is always inflected by memory, and that multiple times interact simultaneously in the human mind. Our memory ‘prolonge le passé dans le présent, parce que notre action disposera de l’avenir dans l’exacte proportion où notre perception, grossie par la mémoire, aura contracté le passé.’ ([Memory] prolongs the past into the present, because our action will dispose of the future in the exact proportion in which our perception, enlarged by memory, has contracted the past.)9 Crary argues that Bergson’s understanding of attention was too rigid: ‘Bergson wanted an impossible attentive concentration, an absorption that would never lose its conscious connection to the willed activity of the body.’10 The heightened attentiveness in play in Du Bouchet’s poetry appears similar to Bergson’s ideal, as does Du Bouchet’s link between attention and the movements of the body, but this book will also investigate the ways in which distraction forms part of attentiveness for Du Bouchet. As an art critic, for instance, he states that artworks often inspire him to look away from them.11 The moment when attention fades is of interest to English Romantic poet Wordsworth, according to Lily Gurton-Wachter, who describes attention’s ‘unusual position somewhere between exertion and passivity, and between security and susceptibility’.12 Gurton-Wachter counters Crary’s identification of the late nineteenth century as the moment when attention came to the fore as an idea, and extends her argument to propose that the combination of active alertness and relaxation is particular to the historical context in which Wordsworth was writing, when news of war was awaited with anxiety. The argument that attention is indissociable from social or political context was made most directly in the early twentieth century, with Walter Benjamin’s writing on 8

Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Cultures (Cam­bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001 [1999]), pp. 22 and 317-27. 9 Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire, in Œuvres (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1959), pp. 159-379 (344-45); Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2004), p. 279. 10 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p. 325. 11 André du Bouchet: Entretiens avec Alain Veinstein (Nancy: L’Atelier contemporain et L’institut National de l’Audiovisuel, 2016), p. 33 (henceforth Entretiens). 12 Lily Gurton-Wachter, ‘“Ever on the watch”: Wordsworth’s Attention’, Studies in Roman­ ticism, 52, 4 (2013), 511-35 (p. 513).

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distraction. Benjamin starts from the basis that the modern, urban, industrialised world transformed the ways in which human beings pay attention. Premodern contemplation, often taking place in the context of religious orders or practice, was collective even if carried out in silence. Benjamin argues that modern, secular contemplation tends to focus introspectively on the individual, and leads to a dangerous, incomplete absorption.13 In its place, Benjamin advocates concentration that is actually increased by the distractions offered by modern life: it is in the shifts between attention and distraction that the mind becomes most alert to the world. As Duttlinger argues, Benjamin’s position is political because the critical frame of mind he recommends will resist the deadening of thought that occurs when people become absorbed in the stimulation provided by mass entertainment. When distraction is part of a process of alertness to the world around and to others, it encourages a frame of mind oriented towards the collective and creates the potential for collective action. While Du Bouchet is primarily known as a poet of the natural world, suggesting the image of the solitary contemplative walker, chapter two below will argue that he values the collective, insisting that the individual writer should make sure to vacate space rather than occupying it. Critical attentiveness to the other and to the social and historical context in which people live runs throughout his work, even in the majority of texts where there is no direct reference to that context. There is a tendency in the twenty-first century both to pathologise distraction and to seek it. Commentators lament the supposed reduction in attention span, especially among children and young people, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is treated as a medical condition. At the same time, however, the capacity of digital technologies to provide a seemingly limitless choice of entertainment and information, trustworthy or otherwise, is embraced. Yves Citton challenges the notion of reduced attention spans as a common­place, demonstrating that a fear of being overloaded by excessive information has been recorded since at least the Renaissance, and probably for two millennia.14 He proposes moving on from studying attention in economic terms, as has been the focus of many scholarly texts since the 1970s. The term ‘pay attention’ in English implies an understanding of attention as a commodity to be bestowed on objects if the subject in question deems them worthy of 13

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In her discussion of Benjamin’s view of attention, Carolin Duttlinger cites the early frag­ ment ‘Über das Grauen’: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwep­penhäuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), VI, 76. Carolin Duttlinger, ‘Between Contemplation and Distraction: Configurations of Attention in Walter Benja­ min’, German Studies Review, 30, 1 (2007), 33-54 (p. 35). Yves Citton, Pour une écologie de l’attention (Paris: Seuil, 2014), p. 31.

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his or her valuable time and energy.15 In the twenty-first century attention has replaced material goods as a scarce commodity, the attention of consumers being particularly valuable to businesses.16 In place of an economic conception of the term, Citton suggests looking at attention as an ecology, where people are not considered as individuals, but as part of a collective.17 He argues that being attentive is an action,18 and suggests that, through aesthetic experiences, a person can better know how to: choisir ses aliénations et ses envoûtements, […] construire des vacuoles de silence capables de nous protéger de la communication incessante qui nous surcharge d’informations écrasantes, […] habiter l’intermittence entre hyper-focalisation et hypo-focalisation.19 choose our alienations and our enthralments, […] establish vacuoles of silence capable of protecting us from the incessant communication that overloads us with crushing information, and […] inhabit the switches between hyper-focusing and hypo-focusing.20 Once again, the shift between the states of being attentive and distracted appears to be valued, and that corresponds to the process visible in Du Bouchet’s poetry of the poetic subject pausing to take in the world around before moving on. The association of poets such as Du Bouchet with Romantic writers – usually the German tradition – is strengthened by the central place they accord to the poetic subject’s orientation towards the sensory perceptions of the environment. An understanding of attention as not only combining deliberate focus with openness to experience but also hovering on the boundary between moments and states corresponds to the particular capacity of poetry to produce moments of hesitation. For instance, the final poem in Aujourd’hui c’est 15

In French, attention is both done (faire) and lent (prêter), for instance; in Spanish it is lent (prestar) and in Irish it is given (tabhair). 16 Citton cites a number of critics including Daniel Kahneman, Attention and Effort (Engle­ wood Cliff, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1973), Georg Franck, Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit: Ein Entwurf (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1989-2013), and, more recently, Richard Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago, Ill.: Uni­ver­ sity of Chicago Press, 2006). Citton pp. 20-24. 17 Citton Pour une écologie de l’attention, pp. 35-41. 18 Citton Pour une écologie de l’attention, p. 247. 19 Citton Pour une écologie de l’attention, p. 41. 20 Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, trans. by Norman Barnaby (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), p. 19.

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(Today It’s) enacts the acceleration and pausing that it evokes through enjambement and line breaks: mais le      mot est en avant si c’est du mot que je pars la terre suit.21 but the     word is ahead if it’s the word I’m starting from the earth follows. It seems that productive attentiveness to a stimulus or a task comes from an ongoing va-et-vient between the mind and the external environment; Du Bouchet makes explicit that language is the driving force here and illustrates that with a layout that produces an onward impetus. In her study of ways of reading and its consequences, Marielle Macé gives the example of reading or writing while travelling by train, suggesting that the setting provides a valuable combination of time to concentrate on an unfolding text and a changing external environment at which the reader or writer can occasionally look.22 When Du Bouchet’s writing is viewed through the lens of temporal forms, it becomes clear that he devotes attention to shifts and revisions. Studies of literature in terms of attention tend to examine the ways in which attention is portrayed in the texts. From Wordsworth’s moment of relaxation 21 22

André du Bouchet, Aujourd’hui c’est (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1994 [1984]), p. 37 (henceforth AC). All citations from Aujourd’hui c’est © Editions Fata Morgana 1994. Marielle Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être (Paris: Gallimard ‘Essais’, 2011), p. 63. Macé’s experience was borne out in the writing of this book, much of which was drafted during my daily commute by train.

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after intense focus to analyses of Modernist writers who pursue a character’s stream of consciousness, attention is a subject of the works themselves. Critics have associated attention with the everyday,23 arguing that texts find their meaning in paying attention to the quotidian. Despite the apparently clear connection between poetry and attention, Andrew Epstein demonstrates that critical studies of English-language poetry and attention have focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He argues, moreover, that making a link between poetry and attention is ‘historically conditioned and specific to our time and place, a reflexive response to widespread fears that “our ability to pay attention isn’t what it once was.”’24 Epstein’s book studies various strands in American poetic practice including the New York School, Language poetry and conceptual poetry, alongside writers and artistic practitioners who cannot be so categorised: they examine the everyday in its singularity, and Epstein finds in their different representations of the everyday the contemporary expression of attentiveness. Du Bouchet’s writing is different from the poetry discussed by Epstein in that detail of everyday life and anecdote are largely absent. Nevertheless, his poetry is of the everyday in that it concentrates on acts such as walking and breathing in a context – usually but not exclusively natural – that is bound up with daily and seasonal rhythms, though Du Bouchet frequently destabilises what readers might associate with particular seasons: Je départage l’air et les routes. Comme l’été, où le froid de l’été passe. Tout a pris feu. (DLCV, p. 89) I share out the air and the roads. Like summer, when the cold of summer passes. Everything has caught fire.25 The difference between the present study and Epstein’s, apart from my focus on a French-language poet, is that attentiveness in Du Bouchet’s work will be considered primarily as a formal phenomenon rather than dependant on what he evokes in his texts. Donald Revell, poet and translator of Apollinaire, 23 24

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See, for instance, Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 13. He is citing Joshua Corey and G. C. Waldrep (eds), The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Boise: Ahsahta, 2012), xxiii. David Mus translates these lines as follows: ‘From the start I sort out air from road, in summer’s / image. Where its cold went, the whole set ablaze, up / in smoke.’ (WHL, p. 87).

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describes poetry as a form of attention, focusing in particular on translation and on poetry as a temporal process of paying attention to the material world. His approach therefore resonates with Du Bouchet’s work, but the latter does not suppress the element of crafting language, as will be seen in discussion of his practice of rewriting, nor is he content to see the peace that might result from attending to material things in spiritual terms.26 Du Bouchet’s particular blend of attentiveness and distraction, and the value he accords both to the material and to the workings of language, mean that the detail of formal structures is central to the evocation, performance, and inciting of attentiveness. While a poem frequently represents an instance of illuminated focus, it may also set up, through its rhythms and structures, a framework that frees the reader’s attention to become a kind of attuned distraction, available for capture at unexpected moments. This study examines the rhythms, enjambements and line breaks that Du Bouchet creates, and his projections forward to moments of looking back, alongside his innovative use of repetition with variation, even as he rejects conventional metre and experiments with typographical layout.27 Despite the similarities between Du Bouchet’s presentation of attention and theological, philosophical, or psychological notions of attention, his work does not illustrate any of those approaches. He privileges the labour of attending to things and to people, but has no teleological imperative. The past inflects the present in his work, but he does not deal with the recollections of an individual. Attentiveness is oriented towards the material world for Du Bouchet, but the subject is displaced from a central perceiving position. Its political import is oblique rather than overt, and his focus on the everyday is different from an enumeration of contemporary detail. What Du Bouchet develops instead of all these, as will be suggested over the coming chapters, is a properly poetic form of attentiveness, valuing openness, pauses, tension, slowing down, and a constantly incomplete process of revision. In Image parvenue à son terme inquiet (Image at its Uneasy Limit), a rare text in which he discusses poetry, Du Bouchet writes: Ce feu qui, sans même adhérer au terme qui le désigne, ne tient pas en place (qu’on le nomme froid, aussi bien …). Cette image déroutée qui, 26

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Donald Revell, The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2007). In the influential Forms of Attention: Botticelli and Hamlet, Frank Kermode examines how canons are adopted, influencing the literature and art we come to value and deem worthy of attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Gurton-Wachter cites rhythms, line breaks, enjambement, and caesura in her discussion of Wordsworth’s forms: ‘“Ever on the watch”’, p. 518.

Introduction

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une fois éteinte, nous accompagne au cœur de notre inattention. Cet élargissement de son premier éclat jusqu’à la banalité. Aveuglante ou banale, l’écart est peu sensible, comme d’une lampe qui ignore le jour.28 This fire that, without even adhering to the term that designates it, doesn’t stay in place (you could just as well call it cold …). This diverted image that, once extinguished, accompanies us to the heart of our inattentiveness. This expanding of its first explosion to the point of banality. Blinding or banal, the gap is barely noticeable, like that of a lamp unaware of the daylight. The image in Du Bouchet’s assessment is both unstable and enduring: fire might as well be called cold, and yet it stays with us once it has gone. ‘Notre inattention’ is inherent to the self, designated in this case by the plural ‘nous’; it appears therefore not as the opposite of attentiveness, but rather the essential quality that allows the memory of images to become part of our consciousness. At the same time, he shifts the focus from the human to things when he writes not that we cannot perceive the difference between images that have changed or moved on, but rather that the gap between them itself lacks that awareness. The images that reach us are novel, but also integrated into the fabric of the world. In place of a phenomenological view of attention that posits it as the premise for action and impossible to separate from perception, Du Bouchet’s attention is a complex process by which perceptions and created images are inseparable from the world around, and the subject becomes intermeshed with the astonishing everyday.29 28

29

André du Bouchet, ‘Image parvenue à son terme inquiet’, DLCV, pp. 111-15 (111). This is the version revised for publication in 1979 under the title ‘Image à terme’ and which appeared in L’Incohérence (Fontfroide-le-haut: Fata Morgana, 1979), n.p. (henceforth I). All citations from L’Incohérence © Editions Fata Morgana 1984. It is unchanged apart from the title in the 1991 publication. The first version, which appeared in 1954 in Cahiers G.L.M. and was reprinted in Aveuglante ou banale. Essais sur la poésie 1949-1959, ed. by Clément Layet and François Tison (Paris: Le Bruit du temps, 2011) (henceforth AB), pp. 86-88, was rewritten as ‘Résolution de la poésie’ in Arguments, 4 (1960), 42-44. The significant changes occurred between versions two (1960) and three (1979). I am indebted to Julian Koch for setting out the gestation of this text in his PhD thesis, ‘Effigies or Imaginary Affinities? The Conception of the Image in the Poetry and Poetics of Paul Celan and André du Bouchet’ (Queen Mary, University of London, 2017), p. 117. Koch’s book, A Poetics of the Image: Paul Celan and André du Bouchet is forthcoming from Legenda’s series ‘Studies in Comparative Literature’ in 2020. Paul Ricœur’s 1939 lecture on attention placed it firmly in a phenomenological framework, arguing, first, that ‘faire attention’ is an intentional act always oriented outside the subject, and, second, that it is thereby the same act as perception; a subject does not pay attention

12

Introduction

Indeed, in an early notebook entry he had written: ‘La poésie n’est qu’un certain étonnement devant le monde, et les moyens de cet étonnement’.30 (Poetry is just a kind of astonishment at the world, and the means of that astonishment.) ‘Étonnement’ contains both wonder and surprise in the way that the word ‘astonishment’ does. Despite his association with the heritage of Romanticism, his writing does not primarily express awe. It offers, rather, a carefully elaborated engagement with the world around that always sees it as new while not forgetting what came before. It is striking that he emphasises ‘les moyens’ of astonishment: it results from deliberate attentiveness and inattentiveness. Later in Image parvenue à son terme inquiet, he writes: La toute-puissance des mots décolorés. Rien – et l’air. Cette bouche, ces mains, ces yeux, leur attention confondue, ce sont de tous temps les nôtres, et nous ne quittons pas ce ciel, à un pouce du sol, où nous sommes établis. (DLCV, p. 113) The total power of words drained of colour. Nothing – and the air. This mouth, these hands, these eyes, their attention confused, have always been ours, and we don’t leave this sky, an inch from the ground, where we are established. Such ranging attentiveness is visible in the deixis used throughout the text: everything is ‘this’, here and now, without being tied to an identifiable context. It is a way of anchoring the speaking subject to the material present, ‘où nous sommes établis’, without making its perceptions the source of the scene evoked.

30

to a perception. Ricœur was invited to give his lecture, entitled ‘Étude phénoménologique de l’attention et de ses connexions philosophiques’ (A phenomenological study of attention and its philosophical connections), by the Cercle philosophique de l’ouest, and delivered it in Rennes on 2 March 1939. Olivier Abel presents and glosses the lecture on his personal website (last accessed 15 November 2018). Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenome­ nological approach also insists on the simultaneity of perception and attention: ‘En même temps qu’il met en marche l’attention, l’objet est à chaque fois ressaisi et posé à nouveau sous sa dépendance.’ Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 39. (At the same time as it sets attention going, the object is at every moment recaptured and placed once more in a state of dependence on it.’ Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2002 [1958]), p. 35.) André du Bouchet, Carnet (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1994), p. 68 (henceforth C).

Introduction

13

The first two publications of ‘Image à terme’, where Du Bouchet’s thoughts on attention occur, precede his translation of Paul Celan’s speech Der Meridian (The Meridian), which appeared in the first issue of the review l’Éphémère (The Ephemeral) in 1967.31 Celan takes via Malebranche and Benjamin the notion of attention as contemplation, and describes a poem as ‘the natural prayer of the soul’.32 For Celan, the poem carries out concentration that is not measurement: The attention which the poem pays to all that it encounters, its more acute sense of detail, outline, structure, colour, but also of the ‘tremors and hints’ – all this is not, I think, achieved by an eye competing (or concurring) with ever more precise instruments, but, rather, by a kind of concentration mindful of all our dates.33 In Du Bouchet’s translation it is notable that ‘le poème’ now opens the sentence, in place of attention: Le poème, dans l’attention qu’il voue à l’objet de la rencontre – à ce detail, couleur, structure, coupe, qu’il restitue, ces « tressaillements », ces « allusions », n’est en rien tributaire, je crois, de quelque avance du regard rivalisant avec des appareils chaque jour plus perfectionnés – ou avalisant leur progrès – : son attention, ici, à travers nos dates que, toutes, il maintient, est une concentration plutôt.34 This shift allows him to replace the notion of acquisition (‘Die Aufmerksamkeit […] ist […] keine Errungenschaft des […] Auges’), which is weaker in the 31 32 33

34

The spelling of l’Éphémère, with a lower case ‘l’, follows Alain Mascarou, who in turns bases his decision on correspondence with the journal’s editors: Alain Mascarou, Les Cahiers de « l’Éphémère » 1967-72. Tracés interrompus (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), p. 16. Paul Celan, ‘The Meridian’, Collected Prose, trans. by Rosmarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), pp. 37-55 (50). Celan, ‘The Meridian’. The original German reads as follows: ‘Die Aufmerksamkeit, die das Gesicht allem ihm Begenenden zu widmen versucht, sein schärferer Sinn für das Detail, für Umriß, für Struktur, für Färbe, aber auch für die ‘Zuckungen’ und die ‘Andeutungen’, das alles ist, glaube ich, keine Errungenschaft des mit den täglich perfekteren Apparaten wetteifernden (oder miteifernden) Auges, es ist vielmehr eine aller unserer Daten einge­ denk bleibende Konzentration.’ Paul Celan, Der Meridian. Endfassung – Entwürfe – Mate­ rialen, ed. by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), p. 9. Paul Celan, Le Méridien, trans. by André du Bouchet, in Strette, poèmes, suivis du Méridien et d’Entretien dans la montagne (Paris: Mercure de France, 1971), pp. 177-97 (192).

14

Introduction

English translation (The attention […] is not […] achieved by an eye […]), with a structure that retains the poem as subject. Moreover, attention is displaced without being elided: it is repeated, its second occurrence opening the last part of the sentence after a dash and colon. As a noun it takes on an analogous status to the poem. Du Bouchet’s reading of Celan suggests that attention is, if not synonymous with poetry, then a core attribute of it rather than a quality possessed by people. Following his translation of poetry by Celan, discussed in chapter four below, Du Bouchet was accused of wilfully ignoring Celan’s Jewish heritage and his troubled relationship with the German language, and is frequently presented as ignoring history.35 Moreover, critics such as Henri Meschonnic accused Du Bouchet of distorting the reception of Celan in his translations.36 This book will not attempt to find anecdotal evidence to support or refute the claim that Du Bouchet ignored history, but it will discuss some of his translation decisions and examine the ways in which his writing displays political engagement through its form even where that is not evident in its content. Poet Yves Bonnefoy argued that ‘la poésie est moins absente, aujourd’hui, du problème social qu’engagée dans son étude d’une façon qu’on peut estimer radicale’ (poetry is not so much absent from the social question, as engaged in the study of this question in a way one could call radical).37 For Bonnefoy that engagement functions through poetry’s essentially symbolic approach, which means that it resists reification, or the tendency of language use to become solidified.38 Du Bouchet’s writing does resist becoming fixed and explores the question of reification. The resulting relationship between temporal forms and attentiveness reveals the potential political import of literary form. Du Bouchet’s poetic texts exemplify attentive writing and demand reading that is equally attentive. He attends to the natural world, but also, on occasion and contrary to the perception that has grown up of his writing as anchored in 35

36 37

38

See for instance, Hedi Kaddour, ‘Le Bancal aujourd’hui: André du Bouchet’, NRF, 446 (March 1990). Michel Collot writes : ‘malgré toutes les épreuves que l’antisémitisme a fait subir à sa famille, André du Bouchet s’est montré peu attentif à la place qu’occupe la condition juive dans l’œuvre de Paul Celan’ (despite all that antisemitism meant his family had to bear, André du Bouchet did not devote much attention to the place the Jewish condition occupies in the work of Paul Celan). Michel Collot, ‘Propositions’, in Présence d’André du Bouchet, ed. by Collot and Léger, pp. 323-26 (323). Henri Meschonnic, Pour la poétique II (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 369-405. Yves Bonnefoy, ‘La Poésie et la société contemporaine’, Revue des sciences morales et politiques, 4 (1988), p. 473, cited in English translation by James Petterson in his discussion of Du Bouchet in Postwar Figures of L’Éphémère (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), p. 13. Bonnefoy, ‘La Poésie et la société contemporaine’, p. 476.

Introduction

15

the natural and elemental landscape, to his social and even urban environment, by opening up to allow in the voices of others. He is attentive to the literary and artistic context in which his own works are situated, particularly in relation to poetry in other European languages and to visual art. His writing gives attention to the verbal and to the non-verbal, and thereby resists categorisation as either seeking to approach what lies beyond language or, alternatively, as caught in a web of self-referential words. The argument presented here participates in what Thomas Allen has described as the ‘temporal turn’ in literary criticism.39 Acknowledging that the study of time and literature has operated alongside a concentration on space, he nevertheless identifies an increased focus on temporality in anglophone criticism of the last fifteen years. Most relevant to analysis of Du Bouchet’s work is the argument made by Michael W. Clune that there are three forms of temporal aesthetics since ancient times: he names these an aesthetics of the ‘enduring word’, an aesthetics of ‘timeless experience’, and an aesthetics of ‘finitude’.40 ‘Timeless experience’, Clune argues, dates from Augustine’s presentation of time, according to which awareness of the past and the future prevents full experience of the present, and finds its expression in the Romantic and Modernist privileging of defamiliarisation in the attempt to enable a heightened appreciation of the present.41 It might appear at first sight as if Du Bouchet’s unfamiliar uses of language, along with his sophisticated associations between past, present and future, place him in the Modernist vein identified by Clune, and strengthen the association between his poetry and a Romantic search for timeless presence. It is Clune’s third category of an aesthetics of ‘finitude’, however, which I see as closest to Du Bouchet’s approach. Clune sets it in contrast to the first two phenomena, referring to works since Lucretius’s De rerum natura that look for ways to demonstrate the acceptance of mortality rather than seeking timelessness.42 The attentiveness visible in Du Bouchet’s texts, and which he incites in the reader, is a means of tolerating both awareness of mortality and uncertainty more generally. ‘Intolerance of uncertainty’ is a concept discussed in the literature of psychology and psychopathology, and indicates ‘an individual’s dispositional 39

40 41 42

Thomas M. Allen (ed.) Time and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 2. The essays in his edited volume span multiple disciplines, and indicate that time is particularly pertinent to new perspectives such as ecocriticism, and the study of race, gender, and sexuality. Michael W. Clune, ‘Time and Aesthetics’, in Time and Literature, ed. by Allen, pp. 17-30 (17). Clune, ‘Time and Aesthetics’, pp. 22-24. Clune, ‘Time and Aesthetics’, pp. 25-26.

16

Introduction

incapacity to endure the aversive response triggered by the perceived absence of salient, key, or sufficient information, and sustained by the associated perception of uncertainty.’43 Poetry as a genre deals both in the unexpected, through surprise, innovation, or a deliberate challenge to linguistic norms, and also in conventions and structures – even where these are explicitly rejected – that encourage the reader to deploy strategies of memory and anticipation. Poetic texts that obstruct smooth reading while experimenting with repetition and variation, such as Du Bouchet’s verse and prose poetry, are thus able to foreground the reader’s expectations and uncertainties, drawing attention to her awareness of uncertainty and simultaneous anticipation of the text’s unfolding. Specifically, Du Bouchet’s construction of gaps and pauses slows down the reading process without a clear indication of how or when it will resume, and encourages movement back and forth between the sense conveyed by the words and their material existence on the white of the page. The revisions that he makes between versions of published texts or between notebooks and poems thwart expectations of definitive pronouncements, and words repeated in different parts of speech create echoes while insisting on change over time. Uncertainty is not identical to ambiguity, ‘which results from features perceived as equivocal or perceived with insufficient knowledge for a singular, definitive interpretation’,44 and both are in operation in Du Bouchet’s work, where awareness of ambiguity incites uncertainty.45 His writing produces process without a telos and encourages the reader to engage in the ongoing present of that process. In that way, it does not amplify the anxiety that might be induced by an uncertain world, but rather allows spaces and time to acknowledge and accept uncertainty through attentiveness to other people, material phenomena, and words. It is in recognition of Du Bouchet’s detailed attentiveness to texts that this book includes a close reading of a selected poem or extract in each of chapters two to six. While quotations are analysed throughout in order to illustrate or nuance an argument, the shift in focus to discuss longer extracts enables the argument of a particular chapter to be seen in the context of works that are 43

44 45

R. Nicholas Carleton, ‘Into the Unknown: A review and synthesis of contemporary models involving uncertainty’, Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 39 (2016), 30-43 (p. 31). Carleton also discusses the distinction between fear, prompted by immediate threats, and anxiety, which comes from the potential for a threatening situation in an unknowable future. Carleton, ‘Into the Unknown’, p. 31. Ann E. Berthoff, in her discussion of how teachers might best teach writing, notes that student writers find it difficult to ‘tolerate ambiguity’ and that students should be encour­ aged to view ‘false starts, unfruitful beginnings, contradictions, and dead ends’ as a pro­ cess rather than as mistakes: The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models, and Maxims for Writing Teachers (Montclair, N. J.: Boynton/Cook, 1981), p. 22.

Introduction

17

complex and multi-layered. The extracts are chosen from volumes of poetry and poetic prose, including three that have a circumstantial origin: the events of May ’68; a book by Ossip Mandelstam; and art by Miklos Bokor. They were selected to demonstrate Du Bouchet’s interest in his social, political, historical, and cultural environment, across national and linguistic boundaries and across media, while not claiming that all his work overtly engages with others in this way. Each chapter also considers theoretical material from francophone and anglophone contexts that itself is not specifically concerned with poetry, with the aim of showing how the study of Du Bouchet’s work can bring together diverse theoretical approaches to literary commitment, time, translation, criticism, and the project, as it takes forward a reflection on temporal forms and attentiveness. Chapter one sets out his poetic context, and, in particular, proposes that he straddles the boundary between poets of ‘presence’ and poets of ‘the text’. The association of poets in the late twentieth century with particular literary and cultural reviews has led to the categorisation of poets, but is also a means by which a clear division can be challenged. Du Bouchet rarely wrote directly about political events, but his text published in the review l’Éphémère in September 1968 is an exception, and it is analysed in chapter two. Its title, ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’ (Under Paving Stones, the Beach), is one of the May ’68 slogans.46 He produces a piece of poetic prose that emphasises the importance of opening up to other voices, and is oriented towards the future in its temporal structures and insistence on the potential for change. Jacques Rancière’s work on the ‘distribution of the sensible’ is helpful in connecting literary form and political engagement, and the chapter reads Du Bouchet’s essay as an attempt to suggest how that sharing might begin. Du Bouchet was instrumental in the inclusion of visual art and translated texts in l’Éphémère. This chapter argues that, far from representing the solitary reflective poet, Du Bouchet was engaged in the contemporary cultural and political moment, actively bringing new voices together via his editorial work, and demonstrating in his poetic writing that form, rather than just content, can be used to propose change. The openings at work in his texts correspond to temporal gaps and potential. Similarly, the fruitful juxtapositions created by his editorial decisions constitute a formal means of producing transformation through encounters between words and non-verbal material that are ‘other’ to a given text. 46

André du Bouchet, ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage » [Notes du mai 1968]’, l’Éphémère, 6 (été 1968), 5-11 (p. 5) (‘“Under the paving stones, the beach” [Notes from the May 1968]’) (henceforth SLPLP).

18

Introduction

Chapter three argues that gaps for Du Bouchet are above all a temporal phenomenon. It notes the similarities between his understanding of time and memory and that proposed by Bergson, who insists that time should not be conceptualised using spatial terminology and that it resists measurement. Like Bergson, Du Bouchet rejects the stasis that can result from words being used to designate fixed notions. Instead, he employs repetition with variation to demonstrate that perception of the present environment is always inflected by past memories without associating that with personal history: he achieves this formally, through attentiveness to linguistic variation, as well as making the point semantically. He is therefore attentive to the everyday, not in the sense of detailing minutiae or specificity, but rather through his focus on common human physical and mental faculties such as walking, breathing, and imagining alternative future scenarios. Du Bouchet’s poetry is not ‘unreadable’ owing to its depersonalisation, but rather ‘otherwise readable’ once it is viewed as evoking shared experience. The subject in twentieth-century poetry is often taken to be constructed in and by the text, rather than constituting its starting point, but the subject in Du Bouchet’s work has to be understood as transformed by its encounter with what is outside the text. This has broadly political implications in that it positions the poet firmly ‘in’ the world. Key to the temporal structure of his work are pauses in the present that prevent a sense of straightforward onward progression while remaining unmeasurable and resisting fixity. Du Bouchet translated from several languages, not all of which he knew well, and concentrated on translating extracts of well-known texts that have a reputation for presenting difficulties even in their own language. This work is not ancillary to his poetry, but closely connected both to his editorial activities and to his poetic writing in that he understands the process of writing poetry as engaging with language as foreign. Chapter four examines examples of his translation work, focusing in particular on Celan. As as well examining one of Du Bouchet’s translations, this chapter reads his text ‘on translation’, in which thoughts on the process of translation and poetic creativity are interwoven in poetic prose form. His interest in these questions might seem to suggest that he sees poetry as a language apart, more elevated than everyday language use. Instead of demonstrating preoccupation with the difference between the native and the foreign, however, Du Bouchet questions the definition of both and the extent to which an individual can be secure in his or her relationship to either, and this lack of a settled position is presented as not only a desirable but a necessary maintaining of tensions. Although he published poetic texts exclusively in French, he was far from embodying the image of a native speaker of French encountering other European languages. Instead, his cultural influences and personal background were multiple and hybrid. His writing displays

Introduction

19

tension between languages, cultural references, and shared historical circumstances across geographical boundaries. Du Bouchet also engages with what is different from his own texts through his critical work. Chapter five briefly considers his writings on poetry, showing that he frequently finds in poets such as Hugo, Ponge, and Pasternak effects that would go on to feature in his own texts. It will argue, however, that it is in his writing on art that Du Bouchet develops an innovative form of ‘slow’ criticism, which corresponds to the kinds of critique advocated by theorists who insist on the transformative effects of reading, or reject art writing that ignores the materiality of its object. Du Bouchet’s writing on art distinguishes between haste, which paradoxically fails to engage with the material world it wishes to grasp, and urgency, which prompts the writer-viewer to move away from an artwork to produce written texts that offer a sense of engagement with the material world. The temporal forms he develops to achieve that engagement produce an experience of slow reading as the reader is encouraged to devote detailed attention to the text, artwork, and physical surroundings which he or she encounters. That attention involves productive engagement with the material world rather than isolated concentration. A close reading of Du Bouchet’s writing on art by Miklos Bokor shows not only how this operates in a single text, but also how temporal forms can ‘make time’ in a text responding both to Bokor, and, indirectly, to his experience as Holocaust survivor. Chapter six looks at one of the most distinctive aspects of Du Bouchet’s work as a whole: his habit of rewriting and republishing notebooks and previously published texts. That practice came not from a feeling of failure or dissatisfaction, but rather from his sense that he saw them differently as time passed, owing to experience and change, and because his literary project was one of paring back. Critics have discussed the ways in which the circumstantial notes of his early notebooks were transformed and depersonalised in his poetry, and have commented that his œuvre could be said to consist of one continuous text.47 The expressions ‘œuvre’, with its connotations of construction, and ‘body of work’, or ‘corpus’, are all terms relating to material phenomena. In Du Bouchet’s case, his work retains that sense, but is also transformed by the effects of non-linear change over time: he constructs forms that are bound to refer to one another, but do so as an ongoing process, just as a life develops, rather than in self-referential circular fashion. Du Bouchet’s œuvre does not conform to definitions of autobiography or life-writing, and his banishment of anecdote means that he presents no particular moments as having determined the course of his life. Nevertheless, the notion of turning points as giving shape 47

Pierre Chappuis, André du Bouchet, ‘Poètes d’aujourd’hui’ (Paris: Seghers, 1979), pp. 15-16.

20

Introduction

to a life, in relation to the concept of the project, can be compared to Du Bouchet’s terms such as ‘le révolu’ (bygone). This chapter demonstrates that Du Bouchet uses rewriting to question the notion of original texts and thereby problematises the modern convention of separating the finished book from its drafts. Analysis of a poem from his final collection, Tumulte, reveals less an exceptional ‘late work’ and rather an exemplary text whose temporal forms produce process itself.48 The temporal forms that he makes, both on the level of attentiveness to textual detail and through the rewriting of books, therefore show that his is a ‘life writing’ where the past is constantly reviewed in the light of the present, and the present projects ahead to the perspective of the future reading self. Du Bouchet’s writing offers more than a reflection on mortality and the passing of time, and does not propose that poetry offers an answer to the uncertainty that awareness of them incites. Rather, his work demonstrates that poetry is important, through its form, in enabling and requiring readers to engage in a measured, open-ended, and unhurried way with the words on the page, and thereby with the world and words in which they are enmeshed. Writing such as Du Bouchet’s poetic and prose texts enacts and produces attentiveness that resists speed while being constantly on the move, and combines with distraction to produce focused alertness instead of harried responsiveness to multiple stimuli. His work shows the value and importance of poetic attentiveness in an environment beset by the fear of time wasted and time lost. 48

André du Bouchet, Tumulte (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 2001) (henceforth T). All citations Tumulte © Editions Fata Morgana 2001.

Du Bouchet and his Poetic Context

21

Chapter 1

Du Bouchet and his Poetic Context André du Bouchet was born in 1924 in Paris to a French mother, Nadia Wilter, whose parents were Russian-Jewish émigrés. His father, Victor du Bouchet, had American and Russian origins and had lived in Russia when he was young.1 His mother was a doctor and his father had trained as a sound engineer, but poor mental health prevented him from working. The family lived in the square Henri Paté, in the apartment above novelist Natalie Sarraute, who was a friend of Nadia du Bouchet. André’s sister Hélène described an unhappy home that revolved around Victor’s irascibility, but also memories of loving maternal grandparents.2 When Nadia obtained a post in Dreux in 1939 the family moved there. In 1940 they were able to flee France on the last steamship to leave Lisbon for the United States, owing to Victor’s American heritage. The family was dispersed, with André attending a school in Connecticut, followed by Amherst, and then Harvard, taking a Master of Arts in English and also teaching for a year. There he began keeping the notebooks that would accompany him for the next four decades. English was the language of academic reasoning and everyday interactions, and French the language he associated with the heart and his inner life, including the notebooks and letters to his mother, who was completing medical training elsewhere.3 His father was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was confined to a psychiatric hospital. While at Amherst André du Bouchet met French artist André Masson and they became friends, and, when visiting New York, Tina Jolas, who would become his first wife. On returning to France in 1948 he was struck by the destruction visible in the landscape; Michel Collot argues that in Du Bouchet’s post-war poems evocations of collapsed walls and torn open houses refer directly both to what he saw, and to his sense that the war constituted a collapsing of the world.4 He published his first poems in Les Temps modernes, and worked for art historian

1 Details taken from Didier Cahen, ‘Une relation perdue’, Europe, 986-87 (2011), 7-14 (p. 7). 2 Anne de Staël, ‘Chronologie d’André du Bouchet’, L’Étrangère, 14-15 (2007), 355-87. 3 He published his first articles in English, on French poetry and art, beginning with ‘Péguy in part’, The New Republic (1944). For more details see Elke de Rijcke, L’Expérience poétique dans l’oeuvre d’André du Bouchet, 2 vols (Brussels: La Lettre volée, 2013), II: p. 269. 4 Michel Collot, ‘Postface’, in André du Bouchet, Carnets 1952-1956, ed. by Michel Collot (Paris: Plon, 1990), pp. 99-119, (106) (henceforth Carnets).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432888_003

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Chapter 1

Georges Duthuit, contributing to, and editing, the review Transition.5 He began research at the C.N.R.S., but never completed the doctorate, his funding not having been renewed after his supervisor Jean Wahl and mentor Gaston Bachelard suggested that his talent lay in the writing of poetry.6 He worked at different stages as a librarian at the C.N.R.S., literary advisor at the ORTF7 and the Centre Pompidou, and as reader for the publisher Gallimard. Much later, from 1981, he co-created a series of programmes called ‘Promenades ethnologiques’ (Ethnology Walks) for the radio station France Culture.8 In Paris Du Bouchet met poets and artists, including René Char, Francis Ponge and Pierre Reverdy, the influence of whose work on his own can be seen in different ways, and was friends in particular with artist Pierre Tal Coat and poets Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, and Yves Bonnefoy. The latter are among his co-editors on the literary and art review l’Éphémère that appeared between 1967 and 1972. Reverdy and Ponge praised Du Bouchet’s early poems.9 His first poetic publication was Air in 1946, but it only came out in a commercially available edition in 1951, and a number of small publications, often illustrated by artists, appeared over the course of the 1950s.10 His work began to achieve wider attention with the publication of Dans la chaleur vacante (In the Vacant Heat) in 1961, for which he won the Prix de la Critique. Du Bouchet’s poetry of the 1950s and 60s takes largely verse form, but the lines are sparse, of irregular length, and often dispersed across the page. The 1970s and 80s were the period when he produced most of his poetic publications and essays. Many of Du Bouchet’s texts in poetic prose straddle genres. They stand between prose writing which uses the full width of the page, and poetry whose form is essentially vertical, by pushing lines of text to 5

6 7 8 9 10

Two articles that first appeared in Les Temps modernes, 42, in April 1949, are reproduced in AB: ‘Pierre Reverdy, Le Chant des morts’ (pp. 29-24), and ‘René Char, Fureur et mystère’ (pp. 35-42). His poems appeared in Les Temps modernes, 39 (1949), pp. 279-86. Du Bouchet’s essay in English, ‘Félix Fénéon or the Mute Critic’, was published in Transition, 49 (1948), and was reprinted in French translation by Jean-Baptiste de Seynes in La Peinture n’a jamais existé. Écrits sur l’art 1949-1999, ed. by Thomas Augais (Paris: Le Bruit du temps, 2017), pp. 51-58 (henceforth LPNJE). Clément Layet, ‘Préface’, in André du Bouchet, AB, pp. 9-20 (14). Du Bouchet’s research proposals are published in this volume: pp. 180-82 and 285-90. Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, which provided public radio and television in the late 1960s and early 1970s. De Staël, ‘Chronologie d’André du Bouchet’, pp. 375-79. Clément Layet, ‘Préface’, in André du Bouchet, Une lampe dans la lumière aride. Carnets 1949-1955 (Paris: Le Bruit du temps, 2011), pp. 7-18 (13) (henceforth Lampe). These include Au deuxième étage, ill. by Jean Hélion (Paris: Dragon, 1956) (henceforth ADE), Sol de la montagne, ill. by Dora Maar (Paris: Jean Hugues, 1956), and Sur le pas (Paris: Maeght, 1959), ill. by Pierre Tal Coat (henceforth SLP).

Du Bouchet and his Poetic Context

23

the right-hand margin of the page and thereby introducing enjambement, and also by incorporating gaps of varying sizes between sections of text that still remain far from the designation of stanza. Moreover, he pays careful attention to the repetition and variation of words, phonemes and sounds in the vast majority of his texts. Nevertheless, Du Bouchet always maintained a distinction between poetry and prose writing, with the circumstantial texts such as those written for an occasion or in response to the work of another writer or a poet considered to be prose; in 1979 this distinction was clear when he published two volumes with Hachette, containing poetry and prose respectively: Laisses (Leads; ‘laisses’ is also a verse form) and L’Incohérence (Incoherence).11 The following lines, which open the last page of ‘parce que j’avais voulu’ from the 1986 volume Ici en deux (Here in Two), include several features that had been, or would remain, consistent aspects of Du Bouchet’s writing.             . . . pour que dehors le centre à quoi je demeure soudé, se déplace.12            . . . so that, outside, the centre to which I remain welded moves on. It opens with suspension marks, which he began regularly to use from the early 1970s, and which imply an utterance emerging from what is non-verbal. The opening words, ‘pour que’, seem to suggest that these lines form an addition to an earlier main clause, but there is no such preceding clause. The layout of the lines, in prose rather than centred verse, nevertheless draws attention to itself through its combining of the width of the page with the displacement of lines towards the right-hand margin, thus forcing enjambement. The poetic subject is named as ‘je’ even though that self has no identifying characteristics and is not expressing thought or emotion. Most striking of all is the displacement in time and space, as movement (‘se déplace’) combines with stasis (‘le centre’, ‘demeure soudé). Du Bouchet’s engagement with change in relation to space emerges in his particular form of attentive distraction. While Du Bouchet is known as a poet, from early on the critical reception of his writing has referred also to activities that might be considered ancillary to poetic creativity: his texts on art and artists and collaboration with artists on livres d’artistes (artists’ books); his writing on translation and translation

11 12

André du Bouchet, Laisses (Paris: Hachette, 1979) (henceforth L). André du Bouchet, Ici, p. 189.

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practice; and his contributions as editor and author to l’Éphémère.13 While not restricting his attention to contemporary artists – he had a longstanding fascination with Poussin, for example – he wrote about artists including Nicolas de Staël and Alberto Giacometti in texts that can also be read as performing the practices he saw in the artists’ work.14 Not a prolific translator, Du Bouchet has nevertheless garnered disproportionate notice for the controversy incited by his translations of Paul Celan and, to a lesser extent, Friedrich Hölderlin, which focus on the intransigent foreignness of the German words. He accompanied his translation practice with reflections on the process of translating such as the piece discussed in chapter four below, ‘Notes sur la traduction’ (Notes on Translation).15 Du Bouchet’s early essays on poetry have received more critical interest of late, following the inclusion in Aveuglante ou banale (Blinding or Banal) of previously unpublished essays and pieces that had appeared in inaccessible journals. Critics have begun to trace in them the origins of Du Bouchet’s own poetics.16 Du Bouchet frequently rewrote his published texts, and they appeared slightly or significantly modified in new collections. He stated in an interview that prose, for him, meant going back over what he had written to make it more precise, whereas poetry involved ‘precipitation’ and ‘crystallisation’ (Entretiens, p. 114). While he did rewrite pieces he would classify as prose, the poetry is not immune from revisions, and in fact the kinds of changes he made to his prose writing resemble the detailed adjustments one might expect of a poet: words are exchanged for others with an almost identical meaning; one part of speech is replaced with another; the tenses of verbs are altered. In 1983 he was awarded the Prix national de lettres, and, in 1996, the Grand Prix de poésie de la Ville de Paris. He received the Légion d’honneur in 2000. He continued to write throughout the 1990s, and his final two volumes, L’Emportement du muet (The Mute’s Rage), a collection of important, previously-published essays, and Tumulte, a short volume of new poetic texts, appeared in 2000 and 2001 respectively.17 He was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1996, and died in April 2001 aged 76. 13 14 15 16 17

See, in particular, Michael Bishop, Altérités d’André du Bouchet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), and Philippe Met (ed.), Écritures contemporaines, 6. André du Bouchet et ses autres (Paris: Lettres modernes Minard, 2003). I discuss Du Bouchet’s texts on Giacometti in Writing Art: French Literary Responses to the Work of Alberto Giacometti (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011). André du Bouchet, Ici, pp. 91-138, revised and published in Poèmes et proses (Paris: Mercure de France, 1995), pp. 133-42 (henceforth PP). See, for instance, Layet, ‘Préface’, in AB. André du Bouchet, L’Emportement du muet (Paris: Mercure de France, 2000) (henceforth EM).

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Du Bouchet had two children with Tina Jolas: Gilles and Paule. He collaborated with Gilles on a translation from the Russian of Journey to Armenia by Ossip Mandelstam, writing under the pseudonym of Louis Bruzon.18 Some of Bruzon’s poems also appeared in l’Éphémère. His subsequent companion was the American poet Sarah Plimpton, and then he lived with, and later married, Anne de Staël, daughter of Nicolas de Staël, with whom he had a daughter, Marie. Du Bouchet always lived in Paris, but from 1971 had a home in the hamlet of Truinas in the remote Drôme region of Southern France. He is buried there, and Jaccottet wrote of his funeral in the snow in Truinas, le 21 avril 2001 (Truinas, 21st April 2001).19 He was an intensely reserved person, and many of the biographical details noted above were not made public until after his death in, for instance, the chronology established by Anne de Staël for the double special issue of the review L’Étrangère that was devoted to him in 2007. Du Bouchet, in 1965 still a young writer with relatively few substantial publications, was one of those poets examined by Jean-Pierre Richard in Onze études sur la poésie moderne. Richard took a phenomenological approach to Du Bouchet’s work, focusing on his evocations of the natural and elemental world, and arguing that poetry came into existence via a ‘pressentiment’ (premonition) of being.20 Du Bouchet is most frequently associated with those writers who look to the German Romantics, and, in particular, Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, as philosophical counterpart to their poetic project.21 Hölderlin had returned to the Classical tradition and asked the question: why poets in times of distress? Hölderlin expressed a sense of loss, as if the gods had deserted the earth, and saw poets as conveying doubt and strangeness. Interpreted through Heidegger’s notion of alētheia – a clearing or opening – this leads the way for poets to anticipate that which always remains just out of reach, but might be glimpsed.22 By focusing on the natural and elemental 18

19 20 21

22

Ossip Mandelstam, Voyage en Arménie, trans. by Louis Bruzon (Paris: Mercure de France, 1973), n.p. (henceforth Voyage 1973). Du Bouchet subsequently published under his own name: Ossip Mandelstam, Voyage en Arménie, trans. by André du Bouchet (Paris: Mercure de France, 1984) (henceforth Voyage 1984). Philippe Jaccottet, Truinas, le 21 avril 2001 (Geneva: La Dogana, 2004). Jean-Pierre Richard, ‘André du Bouchet’, Onze études sur la poésie moderne (Paris: Seuil, 1964), pp. 233-55 (236). Martin Heidegger, Erläuterung zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1971); Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. by Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000). French readers will have encountered this text as Approche de Hölderlin, trans. by H. Corbin (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 53-59. Heidegger defines alētheia as ‘the unconcealment of beings’, and specifies that: ‘it is not we who presuppose the unconcealment of beings; rather, the unconcealment of beings (Being) puts us into such a condition of being that in our representation we always

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world, which has a rhythm or a durability that exceeds human mortality and means of expression, they offer their writing as a way towards that sense of presence without ever claiming to be commensurable with it. The temporalities explored by such poets constitute an important link with Du Bouchet’s writing. A mediator of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin for Du Bouchet’s generation was René Char. Born in 1907, Char was a member of the Surrealist group in his twenties, before withdrawing in 1934. His work has been described as ‘aspir[ing] to a measured alertness and austerity’, a characterisation that finds echoes in Du Bouchet’s poetry, but also as ‘oriented to a range of aesthetic, emotional, and moral concerns’, the influence of which is less easily seen in Du Bouchet’s writing.23 According to Patrick ffrench, Char sought, in the wake of the Second World War, during which he was a member of the Resistance, ‘some kind of re-establishment of the value of humanity, through a striving towards the sacred, or Being, in the Heideggerian sense’.24 Char and Heidegger became friends in 1955, and Heidegger visited Char’s home on several occasions. The extent to which the influence was one-way, with philosophy informing poetry, has been challenged by Michael Worton, but Hölderlin forms the connection between them.25 Petterson argues that the young Du Bouchet, who reviewed Fureur et mystère in 1949, saw in Char a poet who rejected the fascination with death that had gripped nineteenth-century poets as well as breaking away from Surrealism’s ‘reduction of poetry to nothingness’.26 Du Bouchet shares with other poets of his generation, such as Jacques Dupin, Jaccottet and Bonnefoy, a profound suspicion of the Surrealist image. The notion of the image in his work has received some critical attention, and it is not defined in terms of comparisons, however arbitrary or appropriate these might be.27 Du Bouchet remain installed within and in attendance upon unconcealment.’ Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, trans. by Albert Hofstadter [1971], in Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrell Krell, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 139-212 (176-77). 23 Roger Cardinal, ‘René Char’, ‘Gravité’, in Twentieth-Century French Poetry: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Hugues Azérad and Peter Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 147-54 (148). 24 Patrick ffrench, The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (1960-1983) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 37. 25 Michael Worton, ‘“Between’ Poetry and Philosophy: René Char and Martin Heidegger”, in Reconceptions: Reading Modern French Poetry, ed. by Russell King and Bernard McGuirk (Nottingham: University of Nottingham Monographs in Humanities, 1996), pp. 137-57. 26 Petterson, Postwar Figures of L’Éphémère, p. 157. 27 The terms ‘arbitraire’ and ‘juste’ are key to definitions of the image by André Breton and Pierre Reverdy respectively: André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Folio’, 1995 [1924]), pp. 48-50; Pierre Reverdy, Nord-Sud, Self-Defence et autres écrits sur l’art et la poésie (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), p. 73. The image in Du Bouchet’s work has

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27

rarely employs the term ‘image’, other than to present it as blocked in some way.28 That is because the attention to change so evident in his work prevents images from remaining fixed. Despite those affinities, however, it is possible to see connections between his work and an influential strand of poetry in French that has taken its philosophical inspiration from Wittgenstein, and which stands in apparent contrast to a lineage from the Romantics through to Heidegger and Char. Wittgenstein famously insisted that language can and must only talk about that which is within the realms of language. An echo of this can be seen in a note from Du Bouchet’s Carnet (Notebook): ‘ce dont je ne peux pas parler, il faut le laisser / briller.’ (C, p. 45) (that of which I cannot speak, must be allowed to shine.) Wittgenstein’s later work on language games, where words are put to use in various ways, is referenced by poets with practices that can be loosely grouped under the heading ‘littéralité’, deconstructing, reusing, and reconstructing pre-existing texts from inside and outside literature, focusing on language use rather than what words might be deemed to represent in the non-linguistic world. ‘Littéralité’ is a term that covers a variety of approaches, including those taking their inspiration from Dada, from formalism, and from sound poetry.29 The influence of Wittgenstein on ‘littéralité’ is particularly visible, however, through his insistence that form ‘is not a matter of special language or some form of linguistic deformation’, but rather deals with everyday life and uses the language of information.30 Jean-Marie Gleize defines it as poetry that ‘serait littéralement littérale’; it ‘voudrait dire ce qu’elle dit en le disant’31 (would be literally literal; it means what it says by saying it). The poets described as writing ‘poésie blanche’ in the 1970s and 80s, including Emmanuel Hocquard, Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud and Jean Daive, are important exponents of ‘littéralité’. They were concerned to produce writing that was as ‘flat’ as possible, rejecting lyricism, and removing all expression and anecdote

28 29 30 31

recently been given serious attention by Julian Koch in ‘Effigies or Imaginary Affinities?’ (op. cit.), and by Glenn Fetzer in ‘Du Bouchet et la dynamique de l’image’, Dalhousie French Studies, 111 (2018), 35-41. Particularly relevant is Du Bouchet’s text ‘Image à terme’ and subsequent variants (see note 28 in the Introduction). Michel Collot, ‘Lyrisme et littéralité’, Lendemains, 34 (2009), 14-24 (pp. 14-15). Collot shows that the distinctions between ‘lyrisme’ and ‘littéralité’ are not as clearly marked as might be supposed from overly simplistic characterisations of both approaches (p. 16). Marjorie Perloff, ‘The Conceptualist Turn: Wittgenstein and the New Writing’, in Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, ed. by Andrea Andersson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), pp. 27-40 (32-33). Jean-Marie Gleize, À noir [1992], in Littéralité (Paris: Questions Théoriques, coll. ‘For­ bidden Beach’, 2015) pp. 339-539 (537).

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from their work. Du Bouchet is sometimes cited as an influence on their approach, owing to his paring back of expression and his rejection of anecdote that would situate utterances in relation to a subject’s experiences.32 Attention here is directed towards what words can do, independent of any notion of selfexpression. Although Hocquard’s writing developed beyond ‘poésie blanche’, he remained connected to Albiach, Royet-Journoud and Daive through their journal and publishing venture ‘Orange Export Ltd’, founded with the artist Raquel, and both Wittgenstein and the American Objectivists were a constant inspiration.33 ‘Orange Export Ltd’ published Du Bouchet’s Le révolu in 1977.34 Du Bouchet is known to have read Wittgenstein and poetry by the Objectivists during his time in the U.S.A., but Daniel Guillaume argues that he found the Objectivists to convey ‘une certaine platitude’ (a certain flatness), and that he favoured instead the different poetic œuvres of Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, particularly Moore’s preciosity of vocabulary and the formal rigour of Williams and Stevens.35 Similarities can be noted between Du Bouchet’s work and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and in particular the notion of contradiction, which Guillaume finds in Du Bouchet’s work as a contradiction between ‘une apparence fixe et un mouvement latent qu’elle condense ou qui l’emporte’ (a fixed appearance and a latent movement condensed by appearances, or which carries it off).36 In the same way, Du Bouchet was receptive to that aspect of Wittgenstein’s writing that represented ‘une saisie

32 33

34

35 36

Jean-Marie Gleize, ‘Daive, Jean’, in Dictionnaire de poésie de Baudelaire à nos jours, ed. by Michel Jarrety (Paris: P. U. F., 2001), pp. 176-77 (176). Abigail Lang demonstrates not only the influence of the Objectivists on several generations of French poets, but also the different interpretations of the Objectivists’ work based on various translations produced by poets whose agendas are visible in their translation decisions: ‘La réception française des objectivistes. Politique de la traduction’, in Poetry’s Forms and Transformations, ed. by Nina Parish and Emma Wagstaff (= spec. iss. of L’Esprit Créateur, 58, 3 (2018)), pp. 114-31. Setting out the production process of Orange Export Ltd., according to which a typed or handwritten author manuscript was circulated by post, and copied by interested readers, Gleize points out that it was therefore independent of the large publishing houses, unlike the influential reviews of the early-twentieth-century Avant-Garde. Jean-Marie Gleize, ‘Parnasses contemporains. De quelques revues’, in Poétiques et poésies contemporaines, ed. by Daniel Guillaume (Cognac: Le Temps qu’il fait, 2002), pp. 69-83 (75). Daniel Guillaume, ‘Distance et sensation. Du Bouchet, Wittgenstein, Hocquard’, in Écritures contemporaines, 6. André du Bouchet et ses autres, ed. by Met, pp. 129-54 (130-31). Guillaume, ‘Distance et sensation’, pp. 140-41; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investi­ gations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, ed. by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 4.461.

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du vivant dans la langue’ (grasping what is alive in language).37 It is here, rather than only in a shared interest in removing anecdote, that the connection between Du Bouchet and Hocquard, along with those subsequent writers interested in Wittgenstein, are most productive, though similarities should not be overstated. The sense in which Du Bouchet and the poets with whom he associated formed a group emerges from their work on l’Éphémère and the critical tendency to link them through that project.38 The Éphémère poets are generally contrasted with those poets who contributed to the review Tel Quel, the former deemed to have ‘retained a faith in the power of poetry to name’.39 ‘Tel Quel’ was unique in being both a journal and a theoretical movement. In apparent contradiction to the attention paid to l’Éphémère’s visual and tactile quality, and its focus on poetry and the visual arts and relative distance from the social and political context at the time, Tel Quel’s stance was to resist ‘literature’ as a category. Gleize insists that l’Éphémère represented ‘l’affirmation radicale de la valeur poésie’ (the radical affirmation of poetic value), in apparent contrast to Tel Quel’s rejection of it.40 Christian Prigent, on the other hand, argues that, rather than rejecting poetry, Denis Roche’s famous statement, ‘la poésie est inadmissible, d’ailleurs elle n’existe pas’ (poetry is inadmissible, and anyway it doesn’t exist), shows that he wanted to subvert it from the inside.41 Du Bouchet was among those who published in Tel Quel before it ‘establish[ed] its own poetic voice with Marcelin Pleynet and Denis Roche’.42 Reviews are therefore a further lens through which classification of Du Bouchet becomes problematic, owing to the combination of his editorial work on l’Éphémère and publication in Tel Quel and Orange Export Ltd. The description of Du Bouchet as an Éphémère poet has contributed to a critical reception of his work that tends to elide the distinction between l’Éphémère editors and overplay the extent to which he takes a different approach from the textualist writers of Tel Quel and ‘littéralité’. For example, Du Bouchet has been described as employing words to reveal the muteness of things,43 or as revealing ‘la 37 38

Guillaume, ‘Distance et sensation’, p. 150. See, for instance, Richard Stamelman, Lost Beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 159-93. 39 ffrench, The Time of Theory, p. 155. 40 Gleize, ‘Parnasses contemporains’, p. 71. 41 Christian Prigent, Denis Roche (Paris: Seghers ‘Poètes d’aujourd’hui, 1977), p. 20. 42 ffrench, The Time of Theory, p. 38. See also De Staël, ‘Chronologie d’André du Bouchet’, p. 371. 43 Jean-Michel Reynard, L’Interdit de langue. Solitudes d’André du Bouchet (Paris: Fourbis, 1994), p. 7.

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naissance de la parole’ (the birth of language), both of which underline his connection to l’Éphémère writers.44 Collot’s exploration of the structure of the horizon in modern French poetry situates Du Bouchet as investigating what remains just out of reach: the site of air that we will not inhabit.45 Even recent criticism that focuses on the event in Du Bouchet’s poetry tends to present poetry as absence when it concludes that signs are reduced to matter.46 In his important study Habiter en poète, Jean-Claude Pinson includes Du Bouchet firmly among the ‘ontological’ poets of presence,47 and approves of the suggestion that he is in the lineage of ‘le grand lyrisme occidental’ (great lyricism of the West) in which poetry is based on the elements.48 ‘Lyrisme’ is a contested term when applied to poets of Du Bouchet’s generation and later. Frequently dismissed by poets associated with ‘littéralité’ or by critics as implying a naïve, even reactionary, basing of poetry on self-expression, it has been characterised instead by Jean-Michel Maulpoix as an ‘[é]preuve de l’altérité, altération du sujet, soif de l’être altéré’ (experience of otherness, othering of the subject, desire for the othered being).49 While engagement with what is other is a feature of Du Bouchet’s writing, as he gives attention to the natural environment, to non-verbal creativity and to other languages, it is notable that he is not among the poets Maulpoix mentions in his article, despite Maulpoix’s references to the work of Bonnefoy and Jaccottet.50 Indeed, Pinson also stresses the affinities between Du Bouchet and Ponge, both artisans who ‘cisèle[nt] les mots’ (craft words),51 thus suggesting that the distinction between poets of presence and those who focus on the 44

Henri Maldiney, ‘La naissance de la parole’, Prévue, 3 (1993), 69-82 (77). Christine Dupouy presents Du Bouchet’s writing as typically Modernist when she argues that it is about the birth of language: La question du lieu en poésie. Du surréalisme à nos jours (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 223-24. 45 Michel Collot, L’Horizon fabuleux II: XX e siècle (Paris: José Corti, 1988), p. 194. 46 Victor Martinez, André du Bouchet: poésie, langue, événement (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013). Martinez also edited the issue of Europe devoted to Du Bouchet, 986-87 (2011), whose contributors explore Du Bouchet’s work from the point of view of the event. 47 Jean-Claude Pinson, Habiter en poète (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1995), p. 64. 48 Pinson, Habiter en poète, p. 269. He is citing Renaud Camus, Esthétique de la solitude (Paris: P. O. L., 1990), p. 157. 49 Jean-Michel Maulpoix, ‘Existe-t-il en France un nouveau lyrisme ?’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 34,3 (1997), 259-69 (p. 260). Maulpoix argues that rather than there being a ‘nouveau lyrisme’ in the 1980s, it was simply part of an ongoing, albeit changing, lyrical current in poetry in French (p. 261). Its apparent revival at that time was due to its affirmation of poetic experience in the face of Tel Quel’s insistence on the grammatical and syntactical, with lyricism offering a move back towards the world and away from the page and the writing table (p. 262). 50 Maulpoix, ‘Existe-t-il en France un nouveau lyrisme ?’, p. 264. 51 Pinson, Habiter en poète, p. 90.

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resources of language is not clear-cut.52 Taking for its title the same phrase from Hölderlin that inspired Pinson, ‘Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch’, the ‘Anthologie Manifeste’ (Manifesto Anthology) Habiter poétiquement le monde notably omits Du Bouchet from a substantial volume that does include extracts of work by Bonnefoy and Jaccottet.53 I propose, in contrast to the various ontologizing approaches that have dominated Du Bouchet criticism, that his work is not principally concerned with presence and absence, but with attentiveness to change over time. That attentiveness enables Du Bouchet to investigate the ways and extent to which words can relate to the non-linguistic world as well as the internal resources of language, and to place subjectivity at the heart of his project while rejecting the expressive poetic subject. As a result, it demonstrates that clear distinctions between a Heideggerian approach and one inspired by Wittgenstein, in many ways superseded in twenty-firstcentury writing, can no longer be made even for the time in which Du Bouchet was writing.54 I would argue with Elke de Rijcke that: ‘Il faudra donc comprendre comment le langage s’ajuste l’expérience vécue, comment un travail sur le langage n’exclut pas l’orientation du poème vers l’immédiat.’55 (It is therefore necessary to understand how language aligns itself with lived experience, how work on language does not preclude a poem’s orienting itself towards the world immediately outside.) Finally, approaching Du Bouchet’s work through the legacy of nineteenthcentury poetry suggests once again that he straddles fault-lines. Poet Claude 52

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Philippe Met points out that, while Ponge is primarily interested in giving voice to that which is mute, which is distinct from Du Bouchet’s linking of words and things in a ‘contradictory’ and ‘reciprocal’ ‘éclairage aveuglant’ (blinding illumination), they both wish to illuminate the world ‘dans son expression la plus banale’ (in its most banal expression). Philippe Met, ‘« Hors de l’usage et analogue à un lapsus ». Francis Ponge et André du Bouchet’, in Écritures contemporaines 6. André du Bouchet et ses autres, ed. by Met, pp. 55-76 (71). Frédéric Brun (ed.), Anthologie manifeste. Habiter poétiquement le monde (Paris: Poesis, 2016). As Petterson argues, ontologizing readings that, accepting Richard’s characterization of Du Bouchet as revealing poetry’s ‘sacred gift of unveiling’, link him with ‘Heidegger’s ontologizing revelatory structure, lead to a rather rapid and ill-demonstrated Heideggerian legacy’. Petterson, Postwar Figures of L’Éphémère, pp. 155-56. Petterson cites Richard (p. 475), and points the reader to Mark M. Anderson’s study of the reception of the debate over the Heideggerian influence on French poetry: ‘“The Impossibility of Poetry”: Celan and Heidegger in France’, New German Critique, 53 (1991), 5-18. In discussion of Du Bouchet’s lecture on Hölderlin, ‘Hölderlin aujourd’hui’, Petterson proposes instead that Du Bouchet’s understanding of language, which warns against ‘eras[ing] the temporality conditioning words […] distinguishes him both from Heideggerian readings of Hölderlin and from the romantic suggestion that poetry expresses man’s profound destiny’ (p. 170). De Rijcke, L’Expérience poétique dans l’œuvre d’André du Bouchet, vol. I: p. 117.

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Esteban argues that in the post-Surrealist period poetry hardened into two strands: the Mallarméan heritage, which Blanchot expressed theoretically, of neutral, impersonal language which examines its own processes, and an emphasis on presence that comes from Rimbaud’s dérèglement de tous les sens (disordering of all the senses).56 While often associated with the poets of ‘presence’, Du Bouchet’s work – and particularly his prose dispersed across the double-page spread – also appears to owe a great deal to Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897). Mallarmé offered a constellation of multiple meanings in the latter, however, whereas Du Bouchet’s use of space is inseparable from his emphasis on time: despite the double-page spread being vital to the text’s form, the reader always knows to begin reading at the top of the page, and to read the verso before the following recto.57 Du Bouchet was embedded in his poetic context, therefore, but also represents a troubling figure who can cause us to reassess that context. His interests were typical of the Éphémère generation: the poetic subject in the elemental world, the interaction between poetry and visual art, privileged attention accorded to the material and layout of the book, and the translation by poets of work written in other European languages. Clearly rejecting the Surrealist image, and inspiring those subsequent poets interested in the natural world, the ineffable, or impersonal ‘poésie blanche’ (white poetry), he complicates the distinction drawn between Rimbaldian presence and Mallarméan neutrality. Moreover, his focus on the poetic impetus provided by linguistic variation reveals affinities with writers who emphasise textuality over experience. Clément Layet argues that Du Bouchet sets himself the following task: ‘[…] affronter le mouvement sans supposer une éternité préalable. Employer le langage en vérité sans procéder par divisions conceptuelles. Montrer le caractère 56 57

De Rijcke, L’Expérience poétique dans l’œuvre d’André du Bouchet, vol. I: p. 117; Claude Esteban, ‘Inactuel et modernité’, Critique de la raison poétique (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), pp. 20-25. Yves Peyré’s exploration of space in Du Bouchet’s writing is also inseparable from time: ‘C’était la singularité même du temps qui venait se mettre en page, tombant sur la page tel un bloc de lumière.’ (It was the singularity of time itself which had laid itself out on the page, falling on the page like a block of light.) Yves Peyré, ‘La coïncidence des temps’, in Autour d’André du Bouchet, ed. by Michel Collot (Paris: Presses universitaires de l’École Normale Supérieure, 1986), pp. 41-54 (41). Peyré insists on the solidity of words, including the most ordinary conjunctions and prepositions, arguing that ‘Ce qui se passe dans le poème, c’est la loi du vivant, la préférence donnée à ce qui est en cours.’ (What takes place in the poem is the law of the living, with priority given to what is in process) (p. 46). Peyré expands on his argument in À Hauteur d’oubli. André du Bouchet (Paris: Galilée, 1999). Also in Autour d’André du Bouchet, Pierre Chappuis entitles his poetic study of Du Bouchet ‘La réitération dynamique’ (dynamic reiteration), emphasising the role of time in his writing, in this case through the lens of repetition (pp. 139-46).

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d’image du sensible sans prendre appui sur l’être’.58 ([…] face movement head on without presupposing the existence of eternity. Use language truthfully without proceeding in stages divided up conceptually. Show what an image of the sensible world is like without depending on being). This astute assessment, which has to proceed by stating what Du Bouchet does not do, demonstrates why his work resists typical critical characterisations. His writing is apparently phenomenological but stops short of positing a pre-existing subject to engage with the material world; it emphasises the material world without for all that seeing language only as a material phenomenon; and it manipulates the internal resources of language without replacing human agency with that of grammar or syntax. More than just unclassifiable, the work of this ‘unjustly ne­glected giant of French literature’ questions those distinctions altogether.59 He undertakes a rigorous, original poetic practice that is very far from the reductive critique implied by the title of Denis Roche’s introduction to his volume Éros énergumène, ‘Leçons sur la vacance poétique’ (Lessons on Poetic Vacancy), which recalls Du Bouchet’s Dans la chaleur vacante. In his introduction Roche describes what he calls ‘le bas lyrisme’ (base lyricism) as a ‘nostalgie de l’espèce de transcendance immédiate qu’on attribue avec tant d’empresse­ment à la création poétique’ (nostalgia for a kind of immediate transcendence that is ascribed so readily to poetic creativity).60 Du Bouchet’s writing is anything but nostalgic. It frequently looks back, as is evident most clearly in his rewriting of previously published texts, and his choice of titles and recurrent terms including ‘le révolu’ (what has gone before), and ‘soutiré à un futur’ (extracted from a future). Far from reconstructing the past or harking back to earlier idealised states, however, it never relents in its shifts and revisions, insisting on change without positing progress, and obliging the reader to confront the passing of time and mortality while not offering resolution. The following chapter will begin the process of examining what constitutes the temporal forms that structure his work. 58 59 60

Clément Layet, ‘Temps apparent’, in Présence d’André du Bouchet, ed. by Michel Collot et Jean-Pascal Léger (Paris; Hermann, 2012), pp. 227-43 (p. 241); emphasis original. Hoyt Rogers, ‘Introduction’, in André du Bouchet, Openwork: Poetry and Prose, selected, translated, and presented by Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014) (henceforth OW), pp. xi-xliii (xi). Denis Roche, Éros énergumène (Paris: Seuil, 1968), p. 12. Cited by ffrench, The Time of Theory, p. 157.

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Du Bouchet’s Contributions to the Review l’Éphémère                … maintenir la place      découverte vide ( ouverte ) (SLPLP, 5)               … keep the uncovered      place empty (open)

⸪ Despite André du Bouchet’s reputation as a solitary figure, signs of the attention he devotes to others are visible in his work for the literary review l’Éphémère. As editor and writer, his contributions show openness to the work of others, to the natural, cultural, and, in some instances, political environment, and that openness emerges as much through form as in the content of the review. The discernment and sensitivity that he brought to l’Éphémère is as clear in the format of a given issue as it is in the layout and detail of the poetic texts he published there. Often considered a successor to Le Mercure de France, which was a review of ‘la vie culturelle du temps’ (contemporary cultural life) with a long, interrupted history that finally closed in 1965,1 l’Éphémère (1967-72) occupies a small but significant place in the history of the review in French in the twentieth century. Alain Mascarou, who has written a thorough account of the history of l’Éphémère, suggests that one of its influences on successors such as L’Argile, edited by Claude Esteban, and Yves Peyré’s L’Ire des vents, is that all the editors considered their reviews to constitute ‘lieux’ (places) where different writing came together.2 L’Éphémère published contemporary commissioned or unsolicited texts, with an emphasis on poetry, alongside writing from all periods that particularly interested its editors, whose own work constituted a 1 Jean-Michel Maulpoix, ‘Mercure de France (Le)’, in Dictionnaire de poésie de Baudelaire à nos jours ed. by Jarrety, pp. 486-87 (487). 2 Mascarou, Les Cahiers de « l’Éphémère », p. 18. Mascarou questions the association with Le Mercure de France, arguing that l’Éphémère did not follow the eclecticism of Le Mercure de France (pp. 55-56). He mentions Verve and Mesures as previously adopting a similar approach to l’Éphémère (p. 11).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432888_004

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significant proportion of its content. Translated texts from other (largely European) traditions were given priority, and it is also distinctive for its high-quality reproductions of drawings and engravings, included not to illustrate the written pieces, but as standalone contributions, often interspersed through the pages of text without explanation. At the heart of this enterprise was André du Bouchet, an editor throughout the six years of the journal’s history, who is an acknowledged influence on certain aspects of the journal and on particular numbers displaying strengths in visual art, translation, and the work of young, unknown poets. His role as editor is also tangible in every number of the review, tangible in part because he was influential in developing its distinctive form and layout. In line with the editors’ strong authorial presence, he contributed texts of his own to eleven of the twenty numbers, and translations to twelve. At the moment in late 1965 when, along with Jacques Dupin, Yves Bonnefoy, Louis-René des Forêts, and Gaëtan Picon, he was invited by Aimé Maeght to co-edit a quarterly review of poetry and literature to be printed by Arte, Du Bouchet was a literary advisor at the ORTF. He had published thirteen poetic volumes, many of them brief works illustrated by contemporary artists. He had also published translations from English and German. He was therefore an established writer, but aspects of his mature style were not yet in evidence. In his piece inspired by the events of May ’68, which appeared in issue 6, he wrote: L’écart – le nouvel écart – est à trouver – l’écart dont nous voici, dans la parole de nos proches, dépossédés soudain… (SLPLP, 11) The gap – the new gap – remains to be found – the gap of which we are now, in the words of those who surround us – suddenly dispossessed… Several important elements of his approach are encapsulated here. Gaps, ruptures, and openness, both evoked and produced by disrupted syntax, are essential if the writer is to be attentive to the words of others and to the world around. A sustained temporal openness – it is always ahead, ‘to be found’ but not appropriated – motivates all of his writing. The temporal forms taken by that openness are the subject of this book, and this chapter examines the place, time, and role of gaps, figured in the text as ‘écarts’, but also as ‘brèches’ (breaches), ‘ouvertures’ (openings), and ‘vides’ (voids). This is a very different understanding of openness from that which could be attributed to Du Bouchet if his work were viewed through a Heideggerian lens. In that case, gaps and

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openings would be construed as alētheia, akin to a glimpse of presence, but this chapter argues that Du Bouchet is more interested in the space between people and gaps in discourse than in seeing beyond everyday visibility. We will see that he writes not from the first person subject position, but as part of a ‘nous’, a non-exclusive collective which he glimpsed as active potential in May 1968. That collective does not remain associated only with the ‘events’ of that time, however. Indeed, this chapter aims to show that Du Bouchet resists the notion of ‘event’, replacing it with openness. ‘Nous’ includes the protesters, but also his fellow editors, all those whose voice has not previously been heard, and his readers. His interest in the work of other poets and of artists is well established, but ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’, reveals how vital such openness was to him. L’Éphémère has been described as offering a position based primarily on aesthetics rather than politics, and that is considered to be in keeping with the literary projects of its editors.3 Du Bouchet’s text, however, is political in the broad sense, as were a number of contributions by other editors. This chapter will set l’Éphémère in the context of reviews in twentieth-century France and responses to May ’68, before examining, through close analysis of Du Bouchet’s text ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’, how his poetic writing can be considered political in a subtle way that reveals the potential import of poetic writing: as the vehicle for attentive openness to other voices and spaces, and the production of a sense of shared experience. The notion of ‘le partage du sensible’ (the distribution of the sensible) in the work of Jacques Rancière is helpful in establishing what the connection between openness and the collective might mean.  L’Éphémère and the Twentieth-Century French Literary Review  L’Éphémère is both a manifestation of a particular aspect of French cultural production and an exception among French literary reviews. Charles Forsdick and Andy Stafford describe the ‘quintessentially French and Francophone culture of the revue’, in their introduction to an edited volume of essays that covers many examples spanning the twentieth century, from ‘landmark periodicals’ such as La Nouvelle Revue Française to less well-known, non-metropolitan reviews, and from the early Avant-Garde to the end of the century.4 The prestigious place accorded to the review within the cultural landscape can be seen 3 Mascarou, Cahiers, p. 60. 4 Charles Forsdick and Andy Stafford (eds), ‘Introduction’, in La Revue: The Twentieth-Century Periodical in French (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), pp. 1-23 (2).

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in the existence of an annual ‘salon de la revue’ and a journal itself dedicated to the form: La Revue des revues (founded 1987). A new review can be considered as a project launched with the expectation that it will persist and develop over time.5 Despite its name, the circumstances of l’Éphémère’s creation suggest a wish to create a publication that would testify to, and promote, the approach to literary and art publishing that Maeght shared with the editors. Gaëton Picon left the editorial team after the Summer 1968 issue, following a well-documented rift that will be discussed below, and subsequently Paul Celan and Michel Leiris joined the board. Those changes are in line with the argument that reviews are often based on the desire to form a poetic community, but that maintaining that community in relation to the priorities of individuals is difficult.6 The ‘prière d’insérer’ (review slip) to l’Éphémère, authored by Yves Bonnefoy, suggests that the editors will work together, consistently: Il s’ensuit que l’Éphémère ce ne sera que quelques personnes, mais ensemble, et durablement, pour une recherche en commun par leurs voies certes fort différentes.7 It follows that l’Éphémère will only be a few people, but they will work together and over the long term, in order to pursue a common endeavour through their very different orientations. Typically of twentieth-century French journals, l’Éphémère was based in Paris and the editorial team was exclusively male. Although female writers were on occasion included, they were vastly outnumbered: out of 201 pieces across the twenty issues, just fifteen were by women, and half the issues had no femaleauthored contribution.  L’Éphémère exemplifies the tendency of some French journals to focus on the literary as opposed to cultural commentary, and also to offer a synthesis of different art forms.8 It is typical of twentieth-century journal production in 5 Forsdick and Stafford, ‘Introduction’, p. 10. 6 Forsdick and Stafford, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. Anna Boschetti argues that a review is always based on internal struggle, alongside faith and conviction: ‘Des revues et des hommes’, La Revue des revues, 18 (1994), 51-65. 7 ‘Prière d’insérer’ reproduced inside the cover of Mascarou, Cahiers. Mascarou devotes sections to it (Cahiers, pp. 101-06; 125-27) and critics refer to it in the absence of any other guiding theoretical material, as I have done here. 8 See, for instance, the chapters in Forsdick’s and Stafford’s La Revue devoted to La Revue blanche by Alexandre Gefen (pp. 47-56) and SIC by Debra Kelly (pp. 237-48).

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that it acts as a ‘distribution channel for […] less commercially viable literary forms’:9 l’Éphémère published poetry and poetic prose, and writing in translation, alongside drawings and engravings. Moreover, the editors’ allocation of space to little known or unpublished poets gave some of those writers a platform for the first time. On the other hand, there are ways in which l’Éphémère was out of line with trends in twentieth-century French journal publishing. Most significantly, the argument that twentieth-century reviews resembled manifestos in their pursuit of an agenda based on a statement of intent10 only applies partially to l’Éphémère. The ‘prière d’insérer’ emphasises the ‘approche du réel’ that will guide its editors and states that criticism, understood as judgment, description or analysis, will have no place in its pages. Its agenda is a refusal to take a position on debates of the day and a claim to follow instead the interests of its editors. Editorial comment was indeed absent from the entire run of the review, and where there was criticism, it took the form of poésie critique (poetic criticism), notwithstanding the fact that that genre, in which a literary text responds to a literary or artistic source without offering a critique of that source, is also typical of French poetry of the twentieth century.11 For example, Du Bouchet’s texts on Alberto Giacometti can be defined as poésie critique; several first appeared in l’Éphémère, and they were subsequently published together as Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous (Which is not turned towards us).12 The review was far removed, therefore, from an editorial approach that would require authors to respond to contemporary events, although its insistence on complete freedom for its contributors meant that it did not prevent them from doing so either.13 Its inclusion of older texts alongside contemporary ones challenges the function of a journal as promoter of new or recent creative work, not least because l’Éphémère also deliberately juxtaposes contemporary and older work. They are presented side-by-side: for instance, issue 15 (Autumn 1970) opens with a text by classical author Lycophron, followed immediately by poems by a young poet published for the first time in l’Éphémère, Alain Suied. The inclusion in issue 4, edited by Du Bouchet, of Dutch engraver Hercules Seghers alongside visual responses to his work by 9 10 11

Forsdick and Stafford, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. Forsdick and Stafford, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. Robert W. Greene remarks that few poets did not engage in poésie critique: ‘When Apollinaire, Malraux and Bonnefoy Write about Art’, L’Esprit créateur, 36, 3 (1996), 94-105 (94). 12 André du Bouchet, Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972) (hence­ forth QNPTVN). 13 Mascarou, Cahiers, p. 22.

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Nicolas de Staël, and a letter by De Staël commenting on a text on Seghers by book producer Pierre Lecuire, is a further example as works from the seventeenth and twentieth centuries are placed side by side.14 Nevertheless, l’Éphémère is less fragmented than is the norm for a journal, with close attention paid to the light thrown on certain pieces by other inclusions, as would be the case for an edited volume. Mascarou discusses at some length the best designation for l’Éphémère, concluding that its later numbers should be described as ‘cahiers’, not least owing to the attention paid to its material production.15  L’Éphémère and 1968 There is little overt political content in l’Éphémère. Its editors were not, however, entirely cut off from political concerns. In January 1968, Louis-René des Fôrets and Michel Leiris attended the ‘Congrès des Intellectuels du Monde entier de La Havane’ (Havana World Congress of Intellectuals), which was devoted to discussion of problems in developing countries. The following year, issue 10 of l’Éphémère reprinted from Le Monde extracts from the Manifesto of Czechoslovakian writers of 22 May 1969, adopted following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact countries (Été 1969, 284-85). Number 18, of autumn 1971, includes a response by Jacques Dupin, in the form of the verse poem ‘SANG’, to the assassination of African-American activist George Jackson (pp. 190-201). The best known exception to the lack of political content in l’Éphémère is the material devoted to the events of May ’68 in issue 6, and the disagreement between the editors. Texts by Du Bouchet, Dupin and Des Forêts were published, but they, along with Bonnefoy, rejected the contribution by Gaëton Picon, who had recently returned from Czechoslovakia and published an article in Le Monde. His proposed text, ‘Les Jardins du Luxembourg’ (The Luxembourg Gardens), argued that the rejection of cultural values that characterised the events was made possible by those very values, and therefore that the events merely represented a brief interruption in the cultural order. His view ran counter to that of Du Bouchet, who had participated with his son in May ‘68, and who viewed the occasion as opening up a fundamental breach in the established order. Although Dupin had asked Picon to write a piece for the 14

I have discussed the connection between Seghers, De Staël and Lecuire in an article co-authored with Nina Parish on the work of Lecuire: ‘Pierre Lecuire: assessing the coexistence of the material and the virtual in his Modernist publishing project’, Word&Image, 32, 2 (2016), 143-53. 15 Mascarou, Cahiers, pp. 21-22.

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review, he too thought the text unsuitable. Bonnefoy wrote apologetically to Picon explaining that he did not believe it should be included, asking, ‘N’avonsnous pas à détruire, au nom de la parole, l’idée même de la culture ?’16 (Should we not destroy, in the name of speech, the very idea of culture?). Mascarou published letters by Du Bouchet and Bonnefoy, the latter writing in a conciliatory and prolix manner, and the former more curtly. The philosophy of the editorial board had been that items to be included in the journal should be selected unanimously based on their quality of being ‘vivant’ (vivid, or alive), not their contribution to intellectual debate or because they represented the latest writing.17 Picon withdrew his contribution and the rift led eventually to his departure from the board. Mascarou describes the responses by Du Bouchet, Dupin and Des Forêts that did appear in issue 6 as ‘le point fort’ (the strongest part) of that number.18 Du Bouchet’s own piece will be discussed in the following section. The opening text, by Des Forêts, offers the clearest statement of a political position, admiring the protesters, arguing that they had carried out a form of rupture, and that they had done so with vivacity and a welcome naïveté.19 He expresses common cause with them through his use of ‘nous’. The placing of his text in first position in the review implies, but does not state, that it expresses the point of view of l’Éphémère. Jacques Dupin’s contribution is less discursive.20 It plunges into the thick of the events, offering a powerful, evocative picture of what took place, but without naming people, places or particular incidents. This is achieved through the inclusion of a great number of nouns: 147 different nouns over four pages. He offers echoes of the 1789 Revolution, with ‘barricades’, ‘barrières’, ‘terreur’ (barricades, barriers, terror), and a reference to ‘deux siècles’ (two centuries), as well as warfare: ‘ennemi’, ‘alliés’, ‘projectiles’, ‘lame’, ‘battement’, ‘armes’, ‘état’, ‘sang’, ‘violence’, ‘territoire’ (enemy, allies, projectiles, blade, beating, weapons, state, blood, violence, territory). Two other lexical fields also dominate: that of destruction (‘écroulement’, ‘éparpillement’, ‘lambeaux’, ‘fragments’, ‘fissures’, ‘embrasement’, ‘rupture’, ‘secousse’) (crumbling, dispersal, shards, fragments, fissures, blaze, rupture, jolt); and of the unsettled elements, nature or weather 16 17

Letter reprinted in Mascarou, Cahiers, p. 76. Clément Layet ‘« La question du soleil »: André du Bouchet et la question politique’, in La Poésie à l’œuvre : Poetry, Philosophy, Politics, ed. by Hugues Azérad and Michael G. Kelly (=spec. iss. of L’Esprit créateur, 55, 1 (2015)), pp. 99-109 (104). 18 Mascarou, Cahiers, p. 39. 19 Louis-René des Forêts, ‘Notes éparses en mai’ (Sparse notes in May), l’Éphémère, 6 (1968), 3-4. 20 Jacques Dupin, ‘L’Irréversible’ (Irreversible), l’Éphémère, 6 (1968), 12-16.

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(‘nuage’, ‘ciel’, ‘flamme’, ‘feu’, ‘vent’, ‘rafales’, ‘terre’, ‘minérai’, ‘éclair’, ‘souffle’, ‘humus’, ‘germination’ – recalling Zola’s Germinal (1885) – ‘pierres’, ‘cendres’, ‘saison’, ‘levain’, ‘naufrage’, ‘tempête’, ‘crépuscules’, ‘fleuves’, ‘eaux’, ‘pente’, ‘soulèvement’, ‘lointain’, ‘vol’, ‘obscurité’, ‘rayonnement’, ‘lumière’, ‘volcan’, ‘scories’, ‘lave’, ‘souffre’, ‘naissances’) (cloud, sky, flame, fire, wind, squalls, earth, mineral, lightning, breath, moist ground, germination, stones, ashes, season, yeast, storm, tempest, dusks, rivers, water, slope, rising, distance, flight, obscurity, shining, light, volcano, craters, lava, sulphur, births). He rejects analysis, asserting that what remains is: le non-sens de l’événement. Son obscurité nous lie. Son devenir et son rayonnement qui nous questionnent, révoquent une part de nousmêmes, confirment une part de nous-mêmes, nous engagent dans une entreprise d’élucidation, entrecoupée de rires et de violences. the non-sensical nature of the event. Its obscurity connects us. Its future and its reach, which interrogate us, claim a part of us, confirm a part of us, engage us in the business of clarity, interspersed with laughter and with violence. Dupin states that it does not matter if the volcano goes dormant, because it will lie grumbling, and it renders the land fertile. Like Des Forêts and Du Bouchet, he employs the pronoun ‘nous’, and he ends the text with the words ‘A SUIVRE’ (TO BE CONTINUED). The layout and punctuation of his text resemble the techniques that Du Bouchet was developing, although the blocks of text Dupin produces are denser. He employs some gaps within the sections and uses suspension marks on occasion, but his punctuation and syntax are otherwise much clearer than Du Bouchet’s were becoming. A poetic response rather than an analytical one, this nevertheless takes a position in favour of the protests, arguing that their very meaninglessness acts to challenge accepted beliefs and world-views and provoke a strong emotional response rather than a rational one. By publishing these texts in the aftermath of the events (the issue appeared in September 1968), Dupin, Des Forêts and Du Bouchet were part of an extensive critical response that appeared in newspapers and journals, and which has been the subject of analysis distinct from discussion of delayed accounts incorporating reflection over a longer period. Nevertheless, l’Éphémère’s response has not been widely studied. Caroline Hoctan published an anthology of articles that responded in ‘cultural reviews’ to the events, but she does not include l’Éphémère. She argues in her introduction that reviews are of interest

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because they are sites of interactivity, they are contemporary, and they represent the ‘patrimoine’ (heritage).21 L’Éphémère corresponds to some degree to those categories, but, as we have seen, its editors’ resistance to including contemporary intellectual debate, their decision to publish older as well as contemporary material, and their deliberate branching out from the French context all complicate her assessment. Patrick Combes published a valuable investigation into literary responses to May ’68 in 1984. He refers to poetic texts, which he describes as numerous, without mentioning Du Bouchet, Des Forêts or Dupin.22 He also considers some of the reviews that engaged with the events including, for example, L’Esprit, whose editorial of 2 June tried to think through their significance, Les Temps modernes, which expressed solidarity with the movement from 7 May, and La Nouvelle critique, which devoted three special issues to the events from its theoretical standpoint.23 He pays particular attention to the grouping Tel Quel and its associated journal. Its members’ criticism of literature as a category would seem to correspond well to the students’ demands, as would its promotion of democratic, collective possession of language. It aligned itself with the Parti communiste français, however, which historians deem to have missed the opportunity offered by May ’68 to produce change, and to have propped up De Gaulle. As such, Combes argues that Tel Quel’s action did not match its principles, and it was silent on the events until the end of 1970.24 Tel Quel positioned itself in opposition to the activities of the Union des écrivains, which was founded on 21 May. The Union published its ‘Dix thèses’ (Ten Theses) in October 1968, and André du Bouchet and Louis-René des Forêts were both signatories.25 Although the Union des écrivains did not produce collective theoretical or literary publications corresponding to its aim of contributing to a new socialist society, Combes points out that its members did produce such works individually, and argues that criticism of it tends to ignore the practical activities it undertook in the wake of 1968, such as negotiating fair

21

Caroline Hoctan (ed.), Mai 68 en revues (Saint-Germain La Blanche-Herbe: IMEC, 2008), p. 9. The anthology includes extracts from twenty-nine reviews, with more than one example from the following: Défense de l’homme, Les Temps modernes, La Nouvelle Critique, Opus international, Tel Quel, and Les Lettres nouvelles. 22 Patrick Combes, La Littérature et le mouvement de mai 68. Écriture, mythes, critique, écri­ vains 1968-1981 (Paris: Seghers, 1984), p. 113. 23 Combes, La Littérature et le mouvement de mai 68, pp. 49; 51; 63; and 64. 24 Combes, La Littérature et le mouvement de mai 68, pp. 229-32. 25 Lists of adherents to the Union des écrivains and its ‘Dix thèses’ are appended in Combes’s La Littérature et le mouvement de mai 68, pp. 268, 270-72, 279.

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contracts for writers.26 André du Bouchet, then, played a quiet but active part in working towards longer-term change as a result of the events of May. At first sight, the texts by Du Bouchet, Dupin and Des Forêts in l’Éphémère issue 6 might seem to fall into the category designated by Keith Reader as ‘works that appeared to be little more than ephemeral accounts of the events (of which a great many were produced immediately afterwards)’.27 Kristen Ross writes: ‘Only days after the events subsided in June 1968, an astounding proliferation of verbiage began to be published.’ She adds, however: The suspended moment of the general strike, the vast expanse of possibility that opened up when the strike disrupted and transformed everyday life – only a small number of the texts and documents about May convey, or choose to convey, something about the nature of that experience.28 The reason for the ephemerality of the publications Reader mentions is either that they were intended only rapidly to explain what happened to those who were not present, or that they were ill-considered, perhaps necessarily so, given their authors’ proximity to the events. His use of ‘ephemeral’ appears pejorative; ‘verbiage’ suggests more forcefully a judgment on the quality of writing of little interest produced unnecessarily. Ross values instead those accounts that convey something of the breach in everyday experience expressed by those who were there. She goes on to contrast such directness with the attraction of ‘poetic graffiti’; an example of such graffiti was the basis for the essay by André du Bouchet to be examined here.29 I shall argue that he uses it not to approve of a heart-warming but ultimately baseless ideal, but rather as a written, anonymous expression of an experience that he values. His text does not offer personalising detail, in contrast to the testimony approvingly cited by Ross.30 He prefers to transform his writing from personal anecdote into an 26 Combes, La Littérature et le mouvement de mai 68, pp. 225-27. 27 Keith A. Reader, The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations (Basing­ stoke: Macmillan Press, 1993), p. 49. 28 Kristen Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 3-4. 29 Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, p. 10. Several other writers wrote about the slogans of the movement. See, for instance, Michel Butor’s comments in the Magazine Littéraire, 19 (1968). Gilbert Cesbron published a text also called ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’ in Le Monde of 4 April 1973, five years after Du Bouchet. Details taken from Combes, La Littéra­ ture et le mouvement de mai 68, p. 116, n. 43. 30 She mentions in particular the vivid recollections by Canadian novelist Mavis Gallant: May ’68 and its Afterlives, p. 3.

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impersonal and poetic reflection that generates the experience of openness for the reader. The 1970 analysis of interpretations of May ’68 by Philippe Bénéton and Jean Touchard, itself still close to the events themselves, identifies eight ways in which they were interpreted in the following months: as an enterprise of subversion; a crisis of the university; a youthful revolt; a spiritual revolt or crisis of civilisation; a class conflict; a traditional social conflict; a political crisis; and a chance combination of circumstances.31 The texts published in l’Éphémère do not correspond well to any of those categories. They are perhaps closest to the designation of spiritual crisis or crisis in civilisation, which, incidentally, Bénéton and Touchard reject as implausible, arguing that any spiritual deficiency experienced was unexpressed by the students and would have had to have been largely unconscious, and that a rejection of ‘civilisation’ is too vague to be meaningful.32 The real distinction between the categories outlined by Bénéton and Touchard and the texts by Des Forêts, Dupin and Du Bouchet is that the latter are precisely not ‘interpretations’; they offer poetic reflections. It was possible to produce accounts in the immediate aftermath of the events that neither claimed to explain them nor offered personalised, situated anecdote, but that nevertheless proposed a valuable response. Ross outlines two broad tendencies in the years following 1968: biographical, in which the views of people deemed to have played a key role were solicited; and sociological, which, she argues, predominated over historical analy­sis.33 She suggests that the story of the events was handed down as ‘one of a family or generational drama, stripped of any violence, asperity, or overt political dimensions’.34 As a result, her book aims to analyse the texts by philosophers who have been committed to interrogating what it is that makes politics possible, to ‘thinking historical action’, and for whom the moment of 1968 has been pivotal: Sartre, Badiou, Rancière, Blanchot, Bensaïd, as well as activist and editor François Maspero, and writers and activists Martine Storti and Guy Hocquenghem. This is politics understood separately from party politics, and from the distinctions between Trotskyism, Maoism, and Socialism, for instance, that can dominate discussion of the French Left. Du Bouchet is more loosely connected with debates over the events than the writers whom Ross 31

Philippe Bénéton and Jean Touchard, ‘The Interpretations of the Crisis of May/June 1968’, first published in the Revue française des sciences politiques (Summer 1970), trans. by Keith A. Reader and repr. in The May 1968 Events in France, pp. 20-47 (20). 32 Bénéton and Touchard, ‘The Interpretations of the Crisis of May/June 1968’, p. 35 and p. 37. 33 Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, pp. 4-5. She is writing in 2002 and acknowledges an emerging younger generation of historians (p. 19). 34 Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, pp. 5-6.

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discusses. This chapter contends nevertheless that ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’ illustrates an approach that can also be found throughout his creative work and that is political in a non-party political sense, owing to the ways in which it can propose openness and communal action through its form as well as its content.

‘« Sous les pavés, la plage » [Notes du mai 1968]’                    … maintenir la place    découverte vide (ouverte) (SLPLP, 5)

This opening phrase of André du Bouchet’s text in number 6 of l’Éphémère, subsequently revised and reprinted in 1979, encapsulates the relationship between his writing and politics: it makes no reference to the events, yet is key to an understanding of the way in which his writing is political.35 The title of the piece, ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’, would have suggested to the readers of its first publication in l’Éphémère in September 1968 the events of May, because it is one of the best known slogans written on walls in Paris during the events. Coined by Bernard Cousin, it has become associated with the Situationists and the notion of dérive (drifting).36 The first phrase of the text, though, is abstract enough to constitute much more than support for the protesters, and it emphasises openness. Petterson writes, of Du Bouchet’s text: ‘The poet’s words merge with the event(s) of May 1968 to the extent that he adheres to words that are not his own, to the extent that the words are not those of a poet.’37 But contrary to what might be expected of a journal piece produced in the wake of the events, Du Bouchet writes of the importance of not writing, of leaving a gap:            Cesser d’écrire, un temps et réserver l’emplacement de ce vide – de l’écart ( pour que le vent continue de souffler ) dans la mise en cause générale. (SLPLP, 11)            stop writing, for a while and reserve the placing of that void – of the gap (so that the wind might continue to blow) in the general questioning. 35

The revised version appeared in I, n.p., in 1979. References in the text are to the 1968 version unless otherwise indicated. 36 Bernard Cousin, Pourquoi j’ai écrit : « Sous les pavés, la plage » (Paris: Éditions Rive Droite, 2008). 37 Petterson, Postwar Figures of L’Éphémère, p. 167.

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This will allow new voices to emerge, he asserts, voices that will not be concerned with status, including the status of ‘writer’ (6). Momentarily, it will be possible to take ownership of another’s words; he is doing this in his use of graffiti, but refuses to appropriate it permanently. What he values in the fragment of graffiti is the expression of the sense of space to breathe, and he goes on to produce variations on that theme throughout the essay. He sees in May ’68 a breach in the expected order, and that is why he stops short of trying to secure the appropriate language to write about it: that action would close off the openness achieved. His term ‘brèche’ (9, breach) echoes the title of the well-known volume by Claude Lefort, Edgar Morin and Jean-Marc Coudray (and subsequently taken up by Daniel Cohn-Bendit): Mai 68, la brèche: premières refléxions sur les événements. Lefort and, later, Cornelius Castoriadis, presented a breach as an opening capable of questioning an entire system.38 Du Bouchet’s terminology is also mirrored by that of historian Daniel Poitras, who argues in his essay on time in relation to the militant student group ‘Le mouvement du 22 mars’, that the group successfully motivated students by emphasising a ‘highly charged present with an unpredictable future’.39 He cites the expression ‘brèche d’historicité’, used by François Hartog in his theoretical work Régimes d’historicité : présentisme et expériences du temps, and writes that ‘what characterises the years of 1967-69 is, on the one hand, an experience of openness in time and space, and, on the other hand, a blocked, mildly repressive, and stagnant society restrained by old rules’.40 For Du Bouchet, it is essential that openness is temporary: otherwise it would by definition be lost again:               Que demeure vacante, dans le nouveau déplacement commun, la place de qui, à nouveau, peut-être écrira… (SLPLP, 6) 38

39 40

Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, and Jean-Marc Coudray, Mai 68, la brèche : premières réflexions sur les événements (Paris: Fayard, 1968). See also Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, and Cornelius Castoriades, Mai 68 : la brèche ; suivi de Vingt ans après (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1988). Castoriades notes that the publisher’s completion date of the first volume was 21 June 1968, so Du Bouchet might well have seen it: Cornelius Castoriades, Political and Social Writings, vol 3: Recommencing the Revolution 1961-79: From Socialism to the Autonomous Society, ed. and trans. by David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 124. Daniel Poitras, ‘Time Matters: The Mouvement du 22 mars and the Dawn of May ’68’ in Matters of Time, ed. by Lisa Jeschka and Adrian May (Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 63-83 (82), emphasis original. Poitras, ‘Time Matters’, p. 80. François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité : présentisme et expé­ riences du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003).

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               May the place remain empty, in the new common displacement, the place of the one who, once more, will perhaps write … Du Bouchet cites Proust – ‘ce / qu’on sait n’est pas à soi’ (5, 7) (what / one knows one does not possess) – a key reference in Modernist writing, in order to reject knowledge as commodity, and he implicitly compares Proust’s impersonal ‘on’ to the anonymous graffiti: this is a time for letting go of ownership. In addition, though, he makes reference to Boris Pasternak, author of exile whom he greatly admired. Pasternak insisted that the poet’s place should be empty; using the terminology of political protest, André du Bouchet asserts that it must not be ‘occupée’ (8).41 That term, in conjunction with his repeated use of the French noun ‘place’ (8), invokes the geography of the protests, including the Place de la Sorbonne (the graffiti was written at various points around the Left Bank, among them the Carrefour de l’Odéon). He relates the metaphorical sense of a breach to physical occupation. Du Bouchet’s quoted title was, he tells us, spotted on a barricade that had disappeared on the morning he was writing (he uses the deictic ‘ce matin’(9) (this morning)). He has, therefore, chosen to base his text on a call for openness, written anonymously on a physical entity that had recently been removed: that combination of anchoring and impermanence is a direct inversion of the abstract permanence to which claims of knowledge aspire. The sense of potential liberated by the events is presented as ‘élargi sans mesure’ (immeasurably expanded). Its very openness is a form of excess, but not one that is out of human hands. Rather, it is ‘reconnue pour nôtre aussi’ [sic] (9) (recognised also as ours); while the individual writer may not possess this new freedom, it can and does belong to the uncircumscribed collective indicated by ‘nous’. Petterson argues that Du Bouchet sets present and past selves against one another, such that they resist a synthesis that would produce a ‘we’.42 While past and present do not coincide in his work, the community represented by ‘nous’ brings in others sharing a perspective with the writing subject. Du Bouchet associates that community with potential. He ends with a further paradox: in moving on, we are dispossessed of this gap, ‘[m]ais ceci, déjà, est objet de la parole’ (11) (but this, already, is the object of words). Du Bouchet does not conceive of ‘langue’ in the Saussurean or Barthesian senses of a system of signs. He uses the word ‘langue’ in evocations of languages in his 41

Du Bouchet translated fragments of text by Pasternak from which this phrase is taken under the title ‘Haute maladie’, Cahiers G. L. M. (1954), repr. in AB, pp. 82-85. 42 Petterson, Postwar Figures of L’Éphémère, p. 168.

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work more generally, even to designate idioms associated with particular people, and often with the intention of stressing foreignness. Occasionally he employs ‘langue’ for instances of speaking in which the physical tongue of the speaker is emphasised, in such phrases as the following, from the poem ‘Cette surface’, which evokes harsh physical sensation: ‘ce mur élimé / comme une langue qui râpe’ (DLCV, p. 185). (this wall worn thin, like a tongue that grates). ‘Parole’ is used, as in ‘[m]ais ceci, déjà, est objet de la parole’, for individual utterances that are also accorded a material dimension. Victor Martinez writes that the ‘parole’ for Du Bouchet is ‘unique, historique, événementielle’ (unique, historical, event-based), and opens up a relationship to language that is also a relationship to the world.43 A ‘parole’ can be written on a barricade, disappear just as quickly, take flight when a space of potential is opened up, and be left behind as that space moves on. But the following section will argue that, through the workings of form, Du Bouchet rejects language as unique and event-based.

…

                … maintenir la place découverte vide ( ouverte ) (SLPLP, 5) The opening phrase of Du Bouchet’s essay expresses this command in its form as well as its content. The impersonal, infinitive form of the imperative is both a description of what should happen and an injunction to the self to remember, and that command is figured in the line break, the parentheses, and the extra spaces between parentheses and adjective that draw attention to the spacing. Similarly, the subtitle of the 1968 version is ‘[Notes du mai 1968]’ ([Notes from May 1968]). Form, far from being a series of choices made to clarify the content, is integral to Du Bouchet’s endeavour. The empty brackets that might normally contain a date begin to suggest an unmooring from the ‘event’ that prompted the piece. In his short opening sentence he makes use of three devices that characterise his work more broadly, before and after Summer 1968. It begins with suspension marks, which suggest that the utterance emerges from the page or is excerpted from a longer discourse or conversation. They also feature heavily in his text on Giacometti that appeared in the first issue of l’Éphémère, and suggest a thickness or multidimensionality to the text. Second, enjambement emphasises ‘place’ and ‘découverte’, now both in the strong positions at the end and start of poetic ‘lines’ respectively. Separated 43 Martinez, André du Bouchet, p. 15.

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from the noun that it qualifies, ‘découverte’ itself takes on the status of a noun suggesting discovery, while the lexical field of emptiness leads towards the literal reading ‘dé’+‘couverte’ that proposes the act of uncovering. Finally, the parentheses could be expected to offer an addition or explanation, but ‘ouverte’ reinforces the sense by acting as a synonym that could be considered a tautology. Du Bouchet’s text is divided into sections with large white spaces in between; there are two, three or four such spaces on each page. Punctuation consists principally of commas, with minimal use of full stops and capital letters. Du Bouchet includes a notable number of parentheses, em-dashes and suspension marks, which produce a sense that utterances are incomplete and do not offer clear messages. The structuring, clarifying device of the sentence is thus largely disrupted, and with it, it is implied, a hierarchy of knowledge or progressive argument. He writes:                           Maintenir, alors que cette parole en excès rejointe subitement nous entoure – la place vide. Susciter – comme en réponse, et au cœur de cette parole – avec elle – le lieu de nulle part, qui se déplace et ne se prête // [page break] à rien.  Place du bouleversement où le sommet à tout instant apparaît comme le creux de la vague – sommet à venir – véloce encore…( SLPLP, 9-10)                          Keep, although these excess words suddenly encountered surround us – the place empty. Incite –     as if in response,     and at the heart of these words  – with them  –  the site of nowhere, which shifts and does not lend itself // [page break] to anything.    Place of upset whose summit at every moment resembles the crest of a wave – summit to come – quickly again…

When Du Bouchet employs em-dashes in the conventional manner to surround an addition, this is rarely for the purpose of explanation. In this instance, ‘avec elle’ adds to ‘au cœur de cette parole’, in reference to ‘parole’ without explaining how ‘with’ relates to ‘at the heart of’ or whether the addition clarifies or changes the first utterance. He exploits line and page breaks to emphasise an opening up or a potential change: ‘susciter’; ‘se prête // à’; ‘appa-/raît’. In

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each case, what is called upon, ‘suscité’, is either nothing, ‘le lieu de nulle part’, ‘rien’, or compared to something else that by definition cannot last: the crest of a wave. Openness does not mean a lack or stasis. Quite the reverse: it means a repeated, endless process of inciting that is enacted through punctuation and layout as well as being evoked. Indeed, it is possible to see it represented visually through his use of the letter ‘v’ on a significant number of occasions throughout this text. In addition to beginning ‘vide’ and ‘vacant’, ‘v’ visibly indicates a breach.44 Increasingly, Du Bouchet employed reflexive verbs to attribute the impetus for that process to things and words rather than to human action. For example, in the 1968 essay he wrote: Le vide qui s’élargit… Hiatus ( lieu du possible ) première brèche ( qui, autour de nous, aura hautement répondu à une effraction de toujours dans la parole ) où le « lieu du possible » apparaît élargi sans mesure… (SLPLP, 9) The void that expands…   Hiatus ( site of the possible ) first breach ( that, around us, will have openly responded to an everlasting fracture in words ) where the “site of the possible” appears immeasurably expanded… Several of the formal structures already discussed are visible here: suspension marks that mimic the process of enlargement, ‘élargit…’, ‘sans mesure…’; the inclusion of spaces that illustrate the ‘[h]iatus’ and ‘brèche’ evoked; the use of parentheses to add a layer of meaning without offering additional clarity or detail. In addition, the pronominal ‘s’élargit’ grants the agency to the void rather than to any thing or person that would act upon it. When Du Bouchet revised the text for publication eleven years later, he chose another pronominal verb, transforming ‘apparaît’, cited above, into ‘se révèle’ (reveals itself). Although the verb does not have a reflexive sense, the presence of the personal pronoun grants the ‘lieu du possible’ an additional power not only to appear, but to do so deliberately. The same device occurs when he changes ‘devient’ (1968, p. 8) into ‘se révèle’ (1979, n. p.), and he also transforms ‘si elle [une œuvre] a eu lieu’ (1968, 8) (if it [a work] took place) into ‘comme elle [une œuvre] s’inscrira’ (1979, n. p.) (as it [a work] will inscribe itself). Although the verbs employed in the earlier text are already in the active rather than the passive voice, their sense is less overtly active than that implied by the reflexive 44

I am grateful to Oliver Davis for this insight.

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pronoun. In each case, moreover, the change has been made when the opening of a breach is at stake. Other notable changes in the revised version of the essay include his removal of guillemets (inverted commas) around the word ‘écrivain’: ‘Que la place d’un « écrivain », par exemple, ici soit marquée par ce vide’ (1968, 6, emphasis added throughout) (That the place of a ‘writer’, for instance, be marked here by this emptiness) is rewritten as: ‘Que la place d’un écrivain soit marquée par le vide’ (1979, n. p.) (That the place of a writer be marked by emptiness). In the following section, the guillemets are moved to a different word: ‘Qui écrira sans souci d’aucun statut – à commencer par le sien. / Contre tout statut (statut d’« écrivain », entre autres)’ (1968, 6) (Whoever writes without care for any status – beginning with his own. / Against all status (status of ‘writer’, among others) is shortened to: ‘… qui écrira sans le souci d’aucun « statut » – à commencer par le sien…’ (1979, n. p.) (… whoever writes without care for any ‘status’ – beginning with his own). On the same page, ‘Mais, aurai-je écrit pour autre instant ( que celui où, « écrivain », je n’ai pas / lieu)?’ (1968, 6) (But, will I have written for any other moment (than the one where, as a ‘writer’, I don’t take place)?; italics original for ‘pour’, but added for ‘écrivain’) is, in the later text, ‘Mais, aurai-je écrit pour autre instant (que celui où, écrivant, je n’ai pas / encore lieu?’ (1979, n. p.). (But, will I have written for any other moment (than the one where, writing, I don’t yet take place?) Clément Layet describes Du Bouchet’s essay as questioning the status of the writer.45 In this respect, Du Bouchet is responding to the pronouncements of the Union des écrivains of which he was a member, and which argued for the writer to be accorded a different status in the new social order. The Union was open to anyone who considered writing to be inseparable from revolutionary progress.46 A corollary of that position is that Du Bouchet calls into question those who would describe themselves primarily as ‘writers’, while also valuing the activity of writing itself. Whereas Des Forêts emphasises the oral side of the protests, Du Bouchet privileges writing such as graffiti, his use of ‘paroles’ linking speech and writing and suggesting that language is shared. Again, the specificity of the event is diminished. Nevertheless, the revised version of his text seems to have moved on to suggest that the writer’s position has become a less self-conscious, more humble one, slightly shifting the emphasis to those actions and words that operate the breach that is the focus of the essay. In this way, his thinking has changed from the stated aims of the Union des écrivains to a subtler engagement with the 45 46

Layet ‘« La question du soleil »: André du Bouchet et la question politique’, p. 103. See Combes, La Littérature et le mouvement de mai 68, p. 54.

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broader objectives of the May ’68 movement according to which the possession of power through language, understood perhaps in terms of cultural capital, is more democratically distributed. Du Bouchet’s revision appears to imply that this result of May ’68, at least, has had an impact on his text and, in his view, on the balance of power as determined by linguistic agency. A further grammatical development between the two versions is the increasing use of the future perfect tense. ‘Un refus sur lequel / écrivant, j’ai fait porter une raison d’être’ (1968, 5, emphasis added throughout) (A refusal to which / writing, I have brought a raison d’être) becomes the grammatically uncertain: ‘Un refus sur / lequel aura porté, pour qui écrit, une raison d’être’ (1979, n. p.) (A refusal to / to which will have applied, for whoever writes, a raison d’être). Near the end of the essay, his original phrasing ‘ ( … à soi : achèvement sur le retour à un lieu de départ, mais le lieu / s’est déplacé ).’ (1968, 10) ( … to itself: completion on the return to a place of departure, but the place / has moved) is changed into: ‘ ( … à soi : achèvement sur le retour à un lieu de départ, mais le lieu se sera / déplacé...’ (1979, n. p.) (… to itself: completion on the return to a place of departure, but the place will have / moved). Had he been concerned simply to update the text to reflect the fact that he was looking back at the events, he could have used the pluperfect tense. Du Bouchet’s use of the future perfect tense has been discussed by Victor Martinez and Elke De Rijcke, the latter seeing it as a means for him to liberate language from its relationship to the past and to the future, allowing it to emerge in the present instant.47 For Martinez, it demonstrates that an event takes place twice: first in its brute perception and then again when writing produces a sign that is a return to perception.48 I would argue instead that the highly particular projection forward to a future past time is key to the temporality that Du Bouchet sets up. It is not the case that his revisions to this text mark a definite move towards the employment of the future perfect because it was used before and in the 1968 essay too (indeed, there is one instance when he takes it out during a revision: ‘( le temps qu’il aura cessé d’écrire )’ (1968, 6) (the time that he will have stopped writing) is rewritten as ‘( instant où il a cessé d’écrire…’ (1979, n. p.) (moment when he stopped writing), the future perfect here having been replaced by the more precise marking of a moment with ‘instant’). Nevertheless, the revisions do demonstrate a more pronounced use of that tense that combines abstract forward projection with concrete past action. Its importance lies, therefore, in its incorporation of the gap between the present and an 47

De Rijcke, L’Expérience poétique dans l’œuvre d’André du Bouchet, vol. II : pp. 97-109 (10809). 48 Martinez, André du Bouchet. Poésie, langue, événement, p. 121.

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anticipated moment of looking back, and it contributes to producing the openness that he advocates. A similar structure appears to be in operation when he replaces a conditional tense with a future conditional: he writes in the first version that the phrase quoted from À la recherche du temps perdu, ‘ce qu’on sait n’est pas à soi’, ‘pourrait être de celles qui journellement s’aperçoivent sur les murs…’ (1968, p. 3, emphasis added throughout) (could be one of those [slogans] that are visible every day on the walls). On revision, that becomes: ‘le fait / obtus d’être soi qui, communiqué ou non, se partage, j’aurais pu la [la phrase] retrouver parmi celles qui sont tracées sur / les murs…’(1979, n.p.) (the dull / fact of being oneself that, communicated or not, is shared / I could have found it [the sentence] among those that are traced on / the walls), in this instance reintroducing the first person voice. The change here, though, is subtly different in that a possibility is replaced by a conditional perfect: something might have happened, but did not, even when it has become existential (‘le fait / obtus d’être soi’). Instead of focusing on the graffiti written during the events, he is now emphasising the community of feeling that could have been expressed by Proust’s phrase. Moreover, the paragraph about Proust is halved in length in the revised versions. The position of the great writer is reduced, and shared feeling is emphasised. There is an increased use of suspension marks in the revised text (nine instances), which contributes both to the apparent ‘thickness’ of the text – the sense that it emerges or is excerpted from a longer or deeper set of remarks or thoughts – and to its apparently unfinished status. Moreover, in the later version Du Bouchet does the opposite of what might be expected from a ‘revised version’: he leaves open parentheses that were previously closed. This gesture towards carelessness is actually a carefully calibrated exercise in uncertainty that can be attributed to his encounter with the poetry of Philippe Denis, whose work was first published in l’Éphémère 11 (Autumn 1969).49 As a technique it corresponds well to his approach that uses form not to support or even illustrate content, but to act to produce what it says. It is also a clear example of the influence on his later writing of his editorial activities at the journal.

The Form of l’Éphémère

The contrast between the title of the journal and its format is immediately obvious. As would be expected of a Maeght publication, and one directed by Du Bouchet, Dupin and their co-editors, careful attention is paid to layout, and 49

See Mascarou, Cahiers, pp. 44-45.

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the review, despite its name, was produced on high-quality paper. Each cover, in addition to the name of the review in italics in Garamond font, and the number of the issue, carried a drawing of a standing nude by Giacometti, whose recent death permeated the first issue. From number 5 onwards a list of authors and artists featured was also included on the front cover. On the back of each issue was a different quotation from a range of writers from Plotinus to Bataille. Limited paratextual elements also contribute to the impression it produces of resembling more closely a collaborative book than a review with a contemporary focus.50 There is a contents page, but this, and the prière d’insérer, are striking in that they call into relief the absence of other paratextual elements such as prefaces and notes, whose presence would not have been overly surprising in a series of volumes that resemble books, and the lack of editorial comment or introduction, usually central to a journal. These are texts without obvious contextualisation, annotation or editorial overview. As a result, the context and editorial input emerge, in a deliberately understated, indefinite way, through the juxtaposition of texts, and form operates on the level of a volume as a whole, contributing an essential element to the function of the work. If the definition of poetry is that which cannot be paraphrased, l’Éphémère and Du Bouchet’s books all qualify on this measure.51 There are two striking formal features of l’Éphémère. First, there is a lack of distinction between contributions that together form a dossier, or ‘special issue’ element of a number and the remainder of the texts included. Second, illustrations tend to take the form of several images by the same artist, interspersed within the pages of another text without there always being an explicit connection between the two, just as echoes between texts from different authors, periods, and languages are left implicit. Images are not labelled with figure numbers or even the name of the artist: readers must look at the contents page for those details. As a result, visual contributions have a more direct, less illustrative function. Mascarou devotes a section to the influence of Du Bouchet on the layout of l’Éphémère, and argues that ‘[c]’est précisément ce rapport d’interlocution qu’à notre sens établissent les principes de mise en page tels qu’on peut les dégager de l’intervention de Du Bouchet dans l’impression de l’Éphémère’52 (in my view, the principles of mise en page that can be discerned from Du Bouchet’s influence on the printing of l’Éphémère are what 50

‘Paratextual’ was coined by Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 2002). Genette discusses book-length volumes rather than reviews. Mascarou gives details of the paper and printing techniques used in Cahiers, pp. 135-38. 51 Jacques Roubaud, Poésie, etcetera : ménage (Paris: Stock, 1995), p. 77. 52 Mascarou, Cahiers, pp. 138-42 (138).

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establish this relationship between interlocutors.) Mascarou particularly emphasises the double-page spread, which converts the open volume into a series of visual images and counters the typical hierarchy that would accord evennumbered pages only secondary importance. The attention paid to typography is equally significant, especially when it retains aspects of the manuscript text. For instance, in issue 4, the dossier on the Seghers / De Staël axis is followed by an unconnected piece by Michel Leiris, but the change is not signalled in the layout or even contents page, which simply lists all texts by title. Du Bouchet’s influence is visible also in the inclusion of translations of ‘L’Inter­ locuteur’ (The Interlocutor) by Mandelstam, of ‘Strette’ (Stretto) by Celan, and of some drawings by Miklos Bokor, which are placed before and after the pages of Du Bouchet’s own ‘Ou le soleil’ (Or the sun).53 The wartime suffering and experience of exile that unite Mandelstam, Celan and Bokor are not made evident, but they constitute a further focus of this issue. Du Bouchet would publish texts over the following twenty years in response to each of them. Most particular to l’Éphémère, as it is to Du Bouchet’s own published volumes, is the refusal to assign images an illustrative function: they might illuminate an impression given by the text placed alongside, though a text might also be thought to augment the associated image, but equally each can counter, or complicate, an interpretation of the other. The review’s distinctive combination of the verbal and the visual, juxtaposed and interposed without commentary, would also become a key feature of Du Bouchet’s subsequent single-authored texts (he had already published livres d’artistes before 1967). In particular, he pursued collaborations with Pierre Tal Coat, Wifredo Lam and Miklos Bokor. In issue 14, Du Bouchet brings together Hölderlin and Celan, a connection that would become central to his thinking on translation, as will be discussed in chapter four. Among other contributions to this volume are etchings by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, which are interspersed with Paul Celan’s handwritten texts in German that have the title ‘Holzgesichtiger…’ (a neologism constructed from ‘Holz’, meaning ‘wood’, and ‘Gesicht’, which is ‘face’). This is followed by Celan’s ‘Entretien dans la montagne’ (Interview in the mountains), translated by Du Bouchet and John E. Jackson. Finally, a single handwritten page carries a note by Celan: ‘La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose’54 (Poetry is no longer imposed; it’s exposed). This statement can be interpreted in various ways, including as a guiding principle for the interrelationship of 53

54

Du Bouchet later published a volume entitled Matière de l’interlocuteur (Saint-Clémentde-Ri­vière: Fata Morgana, 1992) (henceforth MDI). All citations from Matière de l’inter­ locuteur © Editions Fata Morgana 1992. The text is inspired by Pierre Reverdy, but he takes the term from Mandelstam. Dated 26 March 1969: l’Éphémère, 14, p. 184.

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contemporary poetry and art, where poetry focuses on the visual and art increasingly takes linguistic form. It accords well with the emphasis in l’Éphémère on ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’. A series of ink drawings by Henri Michaux then follows, reproduced one after another and not interspersed with any text. While connections between work by Paul Celan and his wife Gisèle CelanLestrange are clear, the reader is also invited to consider further links with Michaux’s drawings, whose dense complexity is non-figurative, but could be thought to suggest the mental turmoil that also characterised much of Michaux’s own written production, and, in a different way, that of Paul Celan. The long final volume returns to the practice of including contributions by the editors, a strong feature in the early issues that had reduced somewhat in the second half of the life of l’Éphémère. Two texts by Du Bouchet, ‘Laisses’ (Leads) and ‘…sur un coin éclaté’ (… exploded at a corner), Dupin’s ‘Soleil substitué’ (Substituted Sun), and a piece by Bonnefoy called ‘Dans le leurre du seuil’ (In the Lure of the Threshold), are all works that would go on to be key to their writers’ œuvres. Leiris contributed ‘Pour Wifredo’ (For Wifredo), that followed the reproduction of drawings by Wifredo Lam. Works by Miró (included under Dupin’s influence) and the incorporation of Wols ensured that the visual was well represented. Du Bouchet chose again to publish two texts by Mandelstam and one by Celan. German literature is further represented by Achim von Arnim and Kleist, along with a text on Kleist by Robert Walser. In addition, number 19-20 published several pieces by young poets, so it can be considered a summation of Du Bouchet’s influence.55 Finally, his interest in ethnology is visible in the pieces by Robert Jaulin (who also published in number 15 (Autumn 1970)), and Pierre Clastres (also in issue 10, in Summer 1969). His friendship with Jaulin developed, and in 1981 he acted as producer and interviewer on the France Culture series Promenades ethnologiques en France.56 As ever, these different aspects of Du Bouchet’s contribution to the journal’s ethos are juxtaposed with one another, suggesting a rounded picture of what 55

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Among those poets whose work appeared early on in l’Éphémère are Daniel Blanchard (first published in number 2 (April 1967)), Alain Veinstein and Anne de Staël (first published number 3, September 1967), Jean-Pierre Burgart (number 4, September 1967 [sic]), Bernard Collin (first published in number 5, Spring 1968), Philippe Denis (number 11, Autumn 1969), Pascal Quignard, invited by Des Forêts originally but subsequently by Du Bouchet and Celan for number 11 (Autumn 1969), and Alain Suied, aged only eighteen when published thanks to Du Bouchet, in number 12 (Winter 1969). Numbers 19-20 included the work of Quignard and Collin again, as well as ink drawings by Louis Bruzon (= Gilles du Bouchet). See the biographical chronology developed by Martinez, André du Bouchet, pp. 169-76 (173-75).

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this editor considered important without categorisation into genre, medium, language or discipline. Du Bouchet had also been responsible for the inclusion of works by Francis Ponge, such as ‘Nioque de l’avant-printemps’ (Nioque of the Early-Spring), another part of which appeared in Tel Quel. Ponge subsequently considered his text, published in advance of the events of 1968, to be prescient.57 That Ponge should be invited twice to contribute to l’Éphémère (the second time for issue 5 (Spring 1968)) suggests that both he and the review were more catholic in approach than might be expected, just as André du Bouchet is a figure whose writing problematises the distinction between poets of the text, associated with Tel Quel, and poets deemed to be of the ‘unsayable’ and close to l’Éphémère. In this regard, his promotion of Ponge, as well as of younger poets, is a concrete indication of his lack of regard for groupings and boundaries, and contributes to the juxtaposition at the heart of l’Éphémère. Careful placing of texts is not only exemplary of l’Éphémère’s approach, but also reveals a central feature of the projects espoused by poets of Du Bouchet’s generation. They believed that juxtaposition can open up the boundaries between times, places, genres and media, as well as ways of looking at the world, and thereby resist the received wisdom of an era. Moreover, their work implies that such opening can be achieved through form rather than content, by placing works in dialogue with one another instead of arguing for connections between them. This is distinct from Surrealist practices of juxtaposition, and closer to the position adopted by Pierre Reverdy, whereby connections should be ‘lointains’ (distant) but perceived to be ‘justes’ (right).58 Reverdy was concerned with the illuminating effects of such perceptions, which required the active involvement of the reader’s or viewer’s mind. His writing was also Du Bouchet’s first significant influence. That does not mean, though, that the latter’s work on layout in l’Éphémère can be categorised simply as Modernist. He deemed form vital to the effect of a creative work, but that is always bound up with engagement with the wider world. Du Bouchet’s contribution as editor points to the later directions taken by his individual work. The editing of l’Éphémère was clearly a communal experience, leading at times to disagreement, and this provides a counterweight to the apparently solitary nature of its editors’ poetic outputs. Moreover, the gradually emerging priorities of the journal, from the opening shared enthusiasm 57 58

Francis Ponge, ‘Nioque de l’avant-printemps’, l’Éphémère, 2 (April 1967), pp. 49-59. His remark is cited by Mascarou (Les Cahiers de « l’Éphémère », p. 34); Nioque de l’avant-prin­ temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1983, pp. 7-8). Pierre Reverdy, Nord-Sud, p. 73.

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for Giacometti to the range of interests represented by double issue 19-20, testify to a community of ideas developed through reflection on figures from different cultural backgrounds, places and times. Some of these will be explored in later chapters of this volume on visual art and translation. More broadly, they reveal an approach that directly links a community of thinkers and artists to the openness that Du Bouchet found in the events of May. How should the commonality that emerges in the pages of l’Éphémère be defined? ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’ is indicative in that it describes, promotes and enacts an opening up to new voices and writers. By making the ephemeral graffiti into the title of his essay, Du Bouchet gives centre stage to the anonymous voices of the protests. Des Forêts writes that a common voice has risen up against those who have power, and that this ‘traduit l’effervescence de la vie’ (translates life’s effervescence).59 This is voice construed neither as authority nor as song, but as asserting participation in a shared endeavour. On the other hand, the graffiti on which Du Bouchet bases his essay is a written form; those voices have been allowed to emerge in written letters, and it is as a challenge to writing from within writing that his text can be read, a challenge where the figure of the breach is central, as opposed to a conflict between the oral and the written. ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’ could be seen to correspond to the definition of political art proposed by Jacques Rancière in Le Partage du sensible.60 Rancière rejected Leftist ideology following May 1968, condemning in particular the notion that the philosopher could speak in place of working people.61 The point of Du Bouchet’s essay, though, is precisely not to speak in place of others: his repeated use of the word ‘place’ refers both to a space that must be left open rather than filled with rhetoric or ideas, and to the literal places that were occupied during the events. Rancière refutes the definition of politics as a jostling for position between different political ideas, or discussion of how best to run a society, characterising those as management or policing because they are essentially debates taking place between people who already have a political voice and agency. Rather, at the core of politics is the necessity of equality, not as agreed philosophical position by a civilised society, but as the only way in which society can possibly be run because people have to understand it in order for it to function effectively. The dual meaning of ‘le partage’ is key: a shared perspective that is essentially material or bodily, and the equal division 59 Des Forêts, ‘Notes éparses en mai’, p. 3. 60 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000). 61 In La Nuit des prolétaires (Paris: Fayard, 2012), for instance, Rancière presented the writings of unknown working men, which he had uncovered through archival work.

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of a place in the world. The existence of inequality thus renders the political and social order unstable. The world can only be experienced through a common horizon of perception: ‘C’est un découpage des temps et des espaces, du visible et de l’invisible, de la parole et du bruit qui définit à la fois le lieu et l’enjeu de la politique comme forme d’expérience.’62 (It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the space and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.)63 He has been criticised for positing as universal what is a male subject position, seemingly unaware of relationality and other positions such as gendered ones.64 Nevertheless, his work elsewhere on ‘dissensus’ suggests that he is open to alternative perspectives because they challenge the norms posited by those occupying positions of power.65 Difference and inequality come from differ­entiated positioning in the world, and varying opportunities to express and communicate one’s perceptions. For Rancière, ‘politics is the process by which, within any given police order, those voices which hitherto cannot be heard suddenly make themselves heard’.66 What art can do, according to Rancière, is assist democracy, ensure that new voices are given space: L’important, c’est que c’est [au niveau] du découpage sensible du commun de la communauté, des formes de sa visibilité et de son aménagement, que se pose la question du rapport esthétique / politique. C’est à partir de là qu’on peut penser les interventions politiques des artistes […]. The important thing is that the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics be raised at this level, the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and its organization. It is from this perspective that it is possible to reflect on artists’ political interventions […].67

62 Rancière, Le Partage du sensible, pp. 13-14. 63 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Blooms­ bury, 2013), p. 8. 64 Bettina Lerner, ‘Rancière’s Nineteenth Century. Equality and Recognition in Nights of Labor’, in Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism, ed. by Patrick M. Bray (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 33-49 (49). 65 Tina Chanter, ‘Feminist Art: Disrupting and Consolidating the Police Order’, in Under­ standing Rancière, Understanding Modernism, ed. by Bray, pp. 147-60 (159). 66 Ian James, The New French Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), p. 123. 67 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible, pp. 24-25 / The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 13.

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If art is political, then, it is so in this broad sense rather than through direct engagement with theoretical or institutional debates of the day. Du Bouchet’s writing corresponds to this definition of politics in two ways. First, as exemplified by ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’, he both evokes and enacts the opening of breaches in the world and in writing, and this approach is the core of his writing for the subsequent thirty years. Second, and inseparable from those breaches, he achieves this in texts that tend to avoid the first-person singular perspective in order to posit a shared, first-person plural view of the world. The pronoun ‘nous’ is important in ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’, and this continues to be a feature of his work. ‘Nous’ are not defined as specific individuals to be grouped together in opposition to those who might adopt alternative points of view, but constitute, rather, the fellow human beings, readers included, whom Du Bouchet presents as a non-exclusive collective. While his writing might be perceived as ‘difficult’ owing to its lack of anecdote, in fact it is precisely this refusal to specify whose particular experience is being evoked that enables it to posit and pursue equality. In his introduction to a 2015 volume of essays on French poetry, philosophy and politics, Michael G. Kelly surveys a range of reflections by philosophers and poets on the link between those domains. He argues that much recent poetic practice goes far beyond a self-reflexive examination of the processes of poetic production, and demonstrates the ‘potential of the idea of poetry or the imaginary of the poetic as antidote to the ills of the contemporary period as they are described’. He goes on to suggest that such an approach does not: ascribe any discursive mastery or epistemological pre-eminence to poetry but that [it] mirrors and amplifies the central theoretical importance of the faculty of creative speech – of poiein and its consequences within, and without, language – for an analysis of human reality in its ineradicable complexity.68 This is where particular poetic texts can offer a valid and urgent response to the contemporary world, without claiming special status for the genre of poetry, and without even setting out political arguments or standpoints. They can tell us about – and show us – what language can do to cut through ways of speaking that have determined ways of thinking and, in the case of Du Bouchet, those breaches in perception are literally and figuratively present. They emerge in all his poetic writing, but are discussed in relation to tumultuous political 68

Michael G. Kelly, ‘Introduction’, La Poésie à l’œuvre: Poetry, Philosophy, Politics, ed. by Azérad and Kelly, 1-10 (pp. 6-7, emphasis original).

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events in ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’. The importance of the breach is maintained in his subsequent work, even though it does not have explicit political content; indeed, it resists association with events. Du Bouchet does not posit a point of view tied to anecdote, despite the emphasis in his poetic texts on perception. Rather, he offers a renewed means of engaging with the world that he considers as potentially shared in the manner of the ‘partage du sensible’ presented by Rancière, and in line with Rancière’s argument that equality in that sharing is a necessity rather than an ethical goal. It is in this way, more than in the other influences on Du Bouchet’s work exercised by his time editing l’Éphémere, significant as they are, that his contribution to the journal can be seen to matter, both to his personal trajectory as a writer and to those readers who see in his writing an enactment of the change that poetry can hope to effect. Having established the importance of gaps and openness to Du Bouchet’s writing, the subsequent chapters will consider in more detail how those take temporal form, as pauses, tension, and slowness. It is not enough just to see his writing as enacting a breach in the established order or ways of seeing. The temporal forms that incite in readers the openness and attentiveness that Du Bouchet so values must also be explored.

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Chapter 3

Poetry and Pauses dans les sillons de la parole rouverte1 in the furrows of speech reopened

⸪ In the circumstantial poetic prose text examined in the previous chapter, gaps were identified as essential to a writing practice that privileged vacating places, resisting stasis, and enabling new voices to be heard and juxtaposed. This chapter will investigate how attentiveness manifests itself in Du Bouchet’s poetry, both in terms of the phenomena to which the self is attentive and how attentiveness is performed. I shall argue, first, that the material world is at the heart of his writing. In particular, the relationship between the body and the environment in which it lives emerges through an impersonal subject who interacts with the world through the senses without grasping or mastering it. All Du Bouchet’s work grapples with the disjuncture between the mute world of the elements, nature, and the body, and the human capacity for language and thought. Speech and breath are the point where they meet. Du Bouchet probes the material resistance of words, and the difficulty of reading his work stems from his insistent destabilising of potential meaning rather than from his being wilfully abstruse. Du Bouchet’s reflection on the importance of keeping language on the move can be traced back to his early academic research on the poetic image, which included reference to Henri Bergson, and the second section of this chapter will examine how his understanding of time emerges in figures of change and his particular engagement with the everyday. It will be followed by discussion of the formal structures he sets up to produce change, with a focus on repetition with variation, anticipation, and pauses. His pauses are unmeasurable and therefore outside the abstract categorizing of thought: they are breaches in time whose power, in this body of work, comes from Du Bouchet’s refusal to pin them down in spatial terms. The discussion will conclude with an analysis

1 André du Bouchet, Axiales (Paris: Mercure de France, 1992), p. 11 (henceforth Ax).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432888_005

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of ‘Soutiré à un futur’ (1992) that examines semantic references to time and formal temporal features at work in a single text.2 The chapter will therefore pursue a line that is slightly different from the argument proposed by Yves Peyré in his detailed, reflective essay on Du Bouchet as a poet of time. Peyré writes that time is not duration in Du Bouchet’s work, but rather a ‘point de lumière’3 (spot of light), and that language in his work is ‘virtualité absolue irradiant une temporalité avide de se fixer’.4 (absolute virtuality radiating a temporality yearning to be fixed.) Du Bouchet does evoke duration, however. For example, he writes in Aujourd’hui c’est: pour accoudoir une dureté provisoire de l’os. (AC, p. 36) for arm rest a provisional hardness of bone. The assonance that links ‘accoudoir’ and ‘provisoire’ sets up a contrast between the solid and the provisional, the material presence of arm and an object providing an armrest versus the temporary nature of all human life. Bone may be the strongest part of us, but its physical endurance does not prevent mortality. The word ‘dureté’ suggests both hardness and duration, which might seem to contradict the focus on maintaining open breaches and gaps. Nevertheless, ‘la dureté’ is important to him in its combining of the material and the temporal. By shifting the focus away from the ‘point’ proposed by Peyré, therefore, and arguing instead for a reading of Du Bouchet’s poetry as producing a conjunction of pauses, this chapter will aim to show that the temporality of 2 André du Bouchet, ‘Soutiré à un futur’, Ax, pp. 63-71. 3 Yves Peyré, ‘La coïncidence des temps’, p. 42. 4 Peyré, ‘La coïncidence des temps’, p. 41.

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Du Bouchet’s writing is essentially one of being attentive to the present while accepting processes of change.

The Material World

Although Du Bouchet evokes the elemental world and an impersonal landscape, he shows that the mind cannot be abstracted from the world in which its body lives. He does so while refusing to attribute experiences to an individual. In the following example, from Dans la chaleur vacante, the acts of walking and breathing are given centre stage: Comme par les routes le genou

 plie,  l’air – plus lent, plus loin – soleil après le jour, qui rompt le souffle. (DLCV, p. 195) As on the road the knee  bends,  the air – slower, farther – sun after the day that breaks the breath. (OW, p. 203) The body and actions are dissociated from an individual subject while bodily sensation is privileged, but temporality remains crucial. Even when a subject is marked as ‘je’, however, he can write: … si

je suis dans l’espace

c’est qu’il arrache comme passant j’ai pu faire en avant de moi le pas. (Ici, p. 55) … if it’s

I am in space

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that it uproots just as passing by I’ve been able to take a step forward. Utterances such as these suggest movement through space, but Du Bouchet is careful never to make the human subject the master of the world around. Rather, ‘c’est qu’il [l’espace] arrache’. At times, indeed, he is at pains to point out that the insignificance of the human should mean that the subject leaves little impression on the world after passing through it. Attentiveness here goes beyond the human, and, understood in ecological terms, involves attending to the world while attempting not to alter it. He writes, in the opening lines of Axiomes (Axioms): À grands pas mes pas dans ceux du bleu de façon à ce qu’ils soient sans vestige. (Ici, p. 159) With big steps my steps in those of the blue so that they should be without trace. While such lines invite an ecocritical reading of Du Bouchet’s poetry, that would be a complex task. At first sight, the association between Du Bouchet’s generation of poets and Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin seems to encourage ‘ecopoetic’ interpretations. In particular, the notion of dwelling has been taken up by critics including Jonathan Bate, whose analysis of the Romantic poets rejects what he names ‘enframing’, or reading a poem as part of a system: ‘To read ecopoetically is, by contrast, to find “clearings” or “unconcealments”. In

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the activity of poeisis, things disclose or unconceal themselves.’5 The Heideggerian vocabulary is self-consciously adopted, and, he argues, reveals how poets can attend to the things of the world around them.6 Michel Deguy, poet and theorist, appears to take a similar Heideggerian line in Écologiques despite distancing himself from the Romantics: Par écologie, on cherchera à entendre une tentative sérieuse pour demeurer au monde. […] Qu’est-ce que rester? Non plus « demeurer » à la façon romantique, dans le monde des belles demeures et de la masure des forestiers et des penseurs […] mais dans un « nouveau monde », tout différent de ce que furent les nouveaux mondes des quatre siècles précédents.7 By ecology, I am trying to suggest a serious attempt to dwell in the world. […] What is staying? No longer ‘dwelling’ in the Romantic sense, in the world of beautiful dwellings and of the dilapidated houses of forestdwellers and thinkers […] but in a ‘new world’, very different from those new worlds of the four previous centuries. In his preference for the word ‘monde’ (‘Welt’; world) over ‘environnement’ (‘Umwelt’; environment), however, he acknowledges the specifically human capacity to understand living in time. He proposes a way of seeing that is able to take account of phenomena: L’écologie est une vision. Non qu’elle « ait des visions », exaltées ou dépressives, parapsychiques ou spirituelles – mais elle est une clairvoyance. Et quoi voit la vision ? Des voyants.  Le voyant est objectif, lumineux. Il s’allume en alerte. […] Les voyants sont les phénomènes, « les choses mêmes », qui en appellent à notre clairvoyance. (p. 103). Ecology is a vision. Not that it ‘has visions’, exalted or depressing, parapsychological or spiritual – but it is a kind of clairvoyance. And what does the vision see? Voyants. 5 Jonathan Bate, Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), p. 268. 6 Bate, Song of the Earth, p. 273. As Trevor Norris puts it: ‘For Heidegger, poetry is a kind of clearing that allows attention to aspects of being normally covered over by everyday demands.’ Trevor Norris, ‘Martin Heidegger, D. H. Lawrence, and Poetic Attention to Being’, in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), ed. by Axel Goodbody, pp. 113-125 (116). 7 Michel Deguy, Écologiques (Paris: Hermann, 2012), p. 23.

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 The voyant is objective, luminous. It lights up with agility. […] Voyants are phenomena, ‘things in themselves’, which appeal to our clairvoyance. The ecological approach of Deguy is perhaps closer to Du Bouchet’s attempt to work through the relationship between the human subject and the world than would be a Romantic account of dwelling. Nevertheless, where Deguy proposes a Rimbaldian vision, and, as Emily McLaughlin argues, has faith in the power of figurative language to enable humans to see difference and map the world around,8 Du Bouchet, despite his acute awareness of human linguistic capabilities and limitations, resists notions of successfully seeing phenomena. He privileges awareness of brute sensations, frequently contact between parts of the body and the ground and the air, though this tends to be more complex than an evocation of a coherent self meeting the external world. For instance, in ‘Face de la chaleur’ (Heat Face), he attributes the word ‘front’ to the stones encountered by the subject; it means ‘forehead’ as well as the face of rock: ‘je bute contre la chaleur qui / monte au front des pierres’ (DLCV, p. 90; ‘I stumble on this heat rising flush with / stones’ brow’, WHL, p. 88). He probes the connections and disjuncture between the body and the world, and between selfhood and body, without claiming to achieve a settled understanding of their relationship. Awareness of the complex tension between abstract and concrete is also present in Heidegger’s reflections on unconcealment, in which he emphasises ‘the thingly aspect of the work’.9 In Du Bouchet’s hands, the consequence of such awareness is not merely a reflection on the difficulties of reconciling the material and the abstract, but also formal work on the verbal as matter. In his 1996 text Pourquoi si calmes (Why So Calm), Du Bouchet reports an incident that occurred during a talk given by Henri Maldiney in the town hall of Tarascon: a siren sounded as part of the regular testing that always occurs at midday on a particular day of the week, an event of no consequence to his French listeners who were used to it and knew that it did not signal an emergency. Maldiney broke off his talk in order to remind the audience not to be so indifferent: in ancient times, he told them, ‘ce bruit vous eût déchiré le cœur comme le sifflement de l’arc de l’Ulysse celui des prétendants’.10 (that noise 8

Emily McLaughlin, ‘The Practice of Writing and the Practice of Living: Michel Deguy’s and Philippe Jaccottet’s Ecopoetics’, Fixxions, 11 (2015), 38-48. I am grateful to Emily McLaughlin for discussions of this and many other aspects of poetry by writers of Du Bouchet’s generation. 9 Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, p. 181. 10 André du Bouchet, ‘Pourquoi si calmes …’, Pourquoi si calmes (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1996), pp. 23-33 (24) (henceforth PSC). All citations from Pourquoi si calmes

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would have pierced your heart as the whistling of Ulysses’ bow did that of the suitors.) Du Bouchet notes that in the transcription of Maldiney’s presentation, his aside has been replaced by a line of dots, and that even that visual evidence is removed in the published version.11 Du Bouchet reinstates the remarks and uses them as the basis for the remainder of his text. He suggests that Maldiney is really exhorting his listeners: ‘rappelez-vous ce sur / quoi, ordinairement, silence est fait aussitôt’ (PSC, p. 25) (remember that which, ordinarily, is passed over in silence). When it is ignored, the appeal of the siren is out of time. Du Bouchet, though, chooses to see the rupture the sound causes in the air, in Maldiney’s talk, and in the transcript, as taking place in time. matière – chair, parole encore, ou papier – silence, et fracas – matière active du muet dans laquelle l’esprit en retour, l’esprit inquiet, découvre, lorsque butant contre elle il se prononce, ce qui l’aura surpassé. (PSC, p. 33, emphasis original) matter – flesh, speech again, or paper – silence, and roar – active mute matter in which the returning  mind, the anxious mind, discovers, when, coming up against matter it makes itself known, what will have surpassed it. For all that Du Bouchet is a poet whose interest in the detail of language is vital, he is motivated first of all by ‘[la] matière active du muet’, which can include sound. The incident recounted in Pourquoi si calmes allows him to investigate what happens when the mind, or abstract thought, is forcibly confronted with the material rather than concepts: ‘butant contre elle’. Du Bouchet’s characteristic use of the future perfect demonstrates that abstraction can never overcome or even encompass material existence. It forces the mind to ‘se prononce[r]’, though Du Bouchet’s use of personal pronouns means that the reader has to check carefully which of the masculine nouns ‘il’ is likely to refer to. Pronunciation in this instance is not a matter of conveying an utterance accurately, but rather of making itself known and visible, in the English sense of being pronounced, although with the active French pronominal structure. His use of italics makes his message more pronounced, linking together the mind, and that which has surpassed it.12 Du Bouchet often employs inde11 12

© Editions Fata Morgana 1996. Henri Maldiney, L’Art, éclair de l’être (Paris: Cerf, 2012 [1993]). ‘L’esprit’ can be translated as ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’. Given the importance of Reverdy to Du Bouchet, I interpret his use of ‘l’esprit’ as analogous to that of Reverdy in his definition of the image, and suggest that it is likely to carry the sense of ‘mind’: ‘Chacun d’eux [des

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terminate structures such as the ‘ce qui’ used here. They are, paradoxically, a precise vehicle for conveying that the material is what escapes definition because it precedes, exceeds, and succeeds not language as such, but the powers of human abstraction.13 One of the techniques through which he performs this in poetry is by making nouns from other parts of speech. For example, in Axiales (Axials), as in most of Du Bouchet’s later collections, nouns are formed from adjectives, frequently terms suggesting stasis or impossibility: ‘l’inaccessible’ (Ax, p. 16, the inaccessible), ‘l’immobile’ (Ax, p. 67, the immobile), and ‘l’irrespirable’ (Ax, p. 48, the unbreathable). It is important for Du Bouchet to show the irreducible materiality of things, but that does not necessarily signify a lack of movement. ‘La ré/incrustation’ (Ax, p. 36, re-hardening), in fact, combines a process – described but also enacted through the line break – with a sense of solidity that is similarly expressed by ‘la crudité’ (Ax, p. 55, rawness). ‘Le froncement’ (Ax, p. 57, frowning) comes from a verb, while ‘le raccourci’ (Ax, p. 8, shortcut) is derived from a past participle. ‘Le Surcroît’ (Ax, p. 25, an added amount), which Du Bouchet employed as a title of a text published independently, is from a verb no longer in common usage (the medieval French ‘surcroître’).14 Like ‘une hauteur’ (Ax, p. 21, a height), ‘l’étendue’ (Ax, pp. 43 and 55, span) appears to be primarily spatial, but it also carries the temporal sense of a span or duration.15 Such a preponderance of nouns might seem surprising in the work of a writer primarily interested in process, but in Du Bouchet’s hands these nouns take us out of what he perceives as the restrictive patterns of abstract thought, and enable us to connect instead with the physical surroundings of the speaker. Layet argues that Du Bouchet takes up a challenge regarded as impossible by Plato: to use language to reach a truth without relying on the conceptual; that

13

14 15

poèmes] est une chambre close où le premier indiscret venu ne peut entrer. Il faudra prendre la peine et le soin d’allumer sa lampe avant de pénétrer. Ici, c’est l’esprit du lecteur qui sert de lampe.’ [Every poem] is a room where the first person who just happens to come by may not enter. You need to take the time to light your lamp before going inside. In this case, it’s the reader’s mind that acts as a lamp. Nord-Sud, p. 206. Layet writes: ‘la poésie naît dans l’attention portée aux choses les plus banales, mais cette attention n’assure aucune prise, aucune stabilité’ (poetry is born in the attention accorded to the most banal things, but that attention gives no anchor or stability). Layet, ‘Temps apparent’, p. 233. André du Bouchet, Le Surcroît, ill. by Albert Ràfols-Casamada (Paris: Clivages, 1989); text published subsequently as Le Surcroît (Paris: Fourbis, 1990) (henceforth S). Among the definitions given by Larousse are ‘espace, considéré du point de vue de ce qui l’occupe’, ‘portée dans le temps ; durée’, ‘développement plus ou moins important ; longueur’, and, in philosophy, ‘propriété fondamentale d’un corps d’être situé dans l’espace et d’en occuper une portion’.

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is, to show perceptible reality without basing that on a notion of ‘being’: ‘dire le sensible et le mouvement en explorant la généralité non conceptuelle du langage’16 (to say what can be sensed and to say movement by exploring the nonconceptual generality of language). In Du Bouchet’s view, we are constantly encountering the world around without grasping it. That is where his understanding of attention that combines focus and distraction is so important: the failure to fix the world through attention is to be welcomed rather than regretted, because it produces an ongoing process of movement between world and language. The figure of the mountain in his work often represents the intractability of the landscape to our human dimensions, and that intractability constitutes its power for him. He writes in the first of the texts entitled ‘Fraîchir’ (Freshen): deux fois j’ai démêlé.      puis, cela est redevenu inintelligible : la montagne.    deux fois l’épaisseur inintelligible. (Ici, p. 77) twice I untangled.    then, it became unintelligible again: the mountain.     twice     unintelligible thickness. Unintelligible thickness is the opposite of the untangling that the human senses and mind attempt to achieve. It seems that without it, we are bereft of secure moorings in the world, and yet, for Du Bouchet acceptance of those human limits is both necessary and what allows for the possibility of a fulfilled life: it demonstrates mortality as well as presenting the world as acting independently of our control. ‘Cela’, a deictic designation of the material world that necessarily posits an observer positioned in relation to a scene, takes on the quality of matter itself. It is a way of bridging the gap between the human capacity for abstract expression and mute materiality. ‘Deux fois / l’épaisseur inintelligible’ demonstrates Du Bouchet’s approach to the world around. In the most literal sense, he approaches it, goes towards its material thickness only to find that it will not yield to being understood for more than a brief instant. The approach therefore necessarily becomes a repeated one. He aims to produce writing that gives a sense of that unintelligibility. The supposed difficulty of Du Bouchet’s texts resides here. He wishes not to be hermetic, deliberately obstructing the comprehension of his texts. Rather, he must show that the world eludes the grasp of language by producing that impossibility. More than ‘performance’ for the sake of showing what 16

Layet, ‘Temps apparent’, p. 241 (emphasis original).

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language can do, it constitutes an ethical stance: the writer refuses to occupy space or appropriate it in language, choosing instead to give an account of the process of encountering it. That, in turn, is in line with an ecological approach that aims not to damage the landscape as we move through it. The questions of difficulty and of unreadability increasingly preoccupy poets and their critics, although Malcolm Bowie had already addressed them in relation to Mallarmé in 1978. Bowie argued that, while the study of difficulty in Mallarmé’s circumstantial verse might be that of ‘an art of teasing, a dispensable elegance’,17 the difficulty of reading the poet’s longer works results from a much more significant endeavour. Bowie enumerates poetic devices which include ‘leav[ing] a syntactic pattern incomplete’, ‘plac[ing] a smaller complete sentence as an unannounced parenthesis within a larger sentence’, ‘allow[ing] subordinate material to develop an emotional weight equal to that of the main proposition on which it depends’ or ‘encourag[ing] open conflict between the metrical and semantic patterns of a poem’.18 Such instances are, he argues ‘the essence of Mallarmé’, and an effort is required of the reader ‘to allow Mallarmé’s gaps their full disjunctive and destructive power, yet at the same time remain attentive to the multitude of invisible currents which pass back and forth between the separated segments’.19 While Du Bouchet’s texts have a more restricted vocabulary than do Mallarmé’s, the syntactical techniques outlined by Bowie can also all be identified in Du Bouchet’s writing, with the result that it is these, rather than the exploded layout of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard and Du Bouchet’s experimentation with the space of the page, that constitute the most significant point of connection between them. More recently, debate has focused on ‘l’illisible’, which conflates the senses of illegible and unreadable, and poets are discussed on the basis of the shared characteristic of difficulty with which they confront the reader.20 Deguy, one of the objects of study in this regard, has also identified various different ways in which a body of poetic work might be considered ‘illisible’.21 For example, he argues that poetry constantly points out the difference between understanding words on a page and feeling one has grasped the meaning of a text; popular 17

Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 150. 18 Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, pp. 5-7. 19 Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, p. 8. 20 Bénédicte Gorrillot and Alain Lescart, ‘Pour ouvrir’ in L’Illisibilité en questions: avec Michel Deguy, Jean-Marie Gleize, Christian Prigent, Nathalie Quintane, ed. by Bénédicte Gorrillot and Alain Lescart (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du septentrion, 2014), pp. 1416 (15). 21 Michel Deguy, ‘De l’illisibilité’, L’Illisibilité en questions, ed. by Gorrillot and Lescart, pp. 1929.

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critique of much modern and contemporary poetry stems from the sense that its meaning is unreadable. He demonstrates that factors that inhibit comprehension might come from the use of new techniques such as typographical experimentation, or from the incorporation of a body of knowledge such as philosophical traditions with which the reader might not be familiar. Deguy argues that a page that might be unreadable out of context can gain its sense from its broader textual or imaginative context, and he includes the tendency of poetry to make use of multiple or undecidable meanings of words or structures.22 Other poets invited to participate in this collection present poetry as difficult because it grapples with the unreadability of the world (Prigent)23 or counters stereotype: language that has become dangerous in its unreadability.24 Alternatively, the designation ‘illisible’ might reveal the reader’s unwillingness to venture beyond his or her own ‘idiolecte’.25 Du Bouchet’s work might be deemed to correspond to any of the categories outlined above, owing in particular to the ambiguity and uncertainty he creates through layout and shifting subject positions, and his examination of the difficulty and undecidable relationship between language and the material world. Indeed, in a chapter on the supposed illisibilité in Du Bouchet’s work, Serge Linarès focuses on the poet’s use of blank space, arguing that it is ‘interprétable comme une catégorie de l’illisible : matériau de l’écrit à l’égal du langage, il entre avec lui dans un cercle ininterrompu de relations qui le confrontent au lisible, comme à son envers’26 (interpretable as a part of what’s unreadable: written material on a par with language, [blank space and language] enter together an uninterrupted circle of relations that confront the former with the readable, construed as its reverse side). Linarès posits that Du Bouchet’s writing encourages the reader to engage with it physically (he cites Du Bouchet’s translation of a phrase by Mandelstam, ‘physiologie de la lecture’27 (physiology of reading)) and that it appeals to emotion rather than reason. I would argue that the word ‘illisible’ is therefore inappropriate in its suggestion that such language is somehow lacking or at fault, and that it also fails to take into account the multiple manifestations and motivations of language use. The term 22 23 24 25 26 27

Deguy, ‘De l’illisibilité’, pp. 20-22. Christian Prigent, ‘Du sens de l’absence de sens’, in L’Illisibilité en questions, ed. by Gorrillot and Lescart, pp. 31-36 (36). Bénédicte Gorrillot, ‘Pour conclure’, in Gorrillot and Lescart, L’Illisibilité en questions, pp. 305-08 (306). Prigent, ‘Du sens de l’absence de sens’, p. 15. Serge Linarès, ‘Suspens du lisible chez André du Bouchet’, in L’Illisibilité en questions, ed. by Gorrillot and Lescart, pp. 213-21 (218). Linarès, ‘Suspens du lisible chez André du Bouchet’, p. 221.

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‘alterlisible’, or ‘otherwise readable’, suggested by poet Alessandro De Francesco, is preferable for designating the work of writers such as André Du Bouchet, whose ‘meaning’ is not limpidly present.28 The features that make Du Bouchet’s writing ‘otherwise readable’ are inseparable from its temporal complexity, and do not constitute the uninterrupted circle of relations posited by Linarès. Particular to Du Bouchet is the rigorous determination to avoid deceptive simplification while at the same time employing words and phrases that cannot in themselves be considered unreadable. For example, he writes in Aujourd’hui, c’est:   l’appui, lorsqu’il manque,    écrire pour cet instant. mais l’appui a traversé. (AC, p. 17.) the support, when it’s missing, write for that moment. but the support has crossed through. None of the vocabulary is hard to understand and the text does not make reference to poetic or philosophical sources without knowledge of which the reader would be excluded. The word ‘l’appui’ introduces difficulty because it is both a noun that designates a physical support such as a sill, and also takes on a more conceptual sense of something that offers support. More problematic is its introduction at the start of the utterance, followed immediately by the suggestion that it might be taken away: ‘lorsqu’il manque’. The ‘appui’ may or may not be there, but it forms the basis of writing, in both the infinitive and the imperative senses: ‘écrire / pour cet instant’. Then the support returns, but its action has taken place in the perfect tense, and also involved a shift from one position to another without either of those positions being identified: the reader would expect ‘a traversé’ to be followed by an object. The extract exemplifies Du Bouchet’s ability to use simple language to require the reader to question the meaning and situation of every word and, in particular, to become aware of the unstable relationship between the writing and reading of the text and temporal positioning.

28

Alessandro De Francesco, Continuum (The Hague: Uitgeverij, 2016), p. 179.

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Time in the Texts

Du Bouchet’s reflections on time to some extent resemble Henri Bergson’s presentation of time as integral to existence in the material world rather than an abstract notion. In Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1888), Bergson rejects measurement as a lens through which to view experience. That is to say that he separates out quantity (he gives the example of a certain amount of light) from quality (the experience of brightness, which is subjective and cannot be understood by measuring how much light there is).29 The way in which we experience things depends on the flow of time, or our successive states of consciousness. When considered abstractly, time appears to present as a series of points on a line, but Bergson argues that this is a spatial construction, whereas time as experienced, which he calls ‘pure duration’, cannot be expressed.30 As Glenn Fetzer argues, both Du Bouchet and Bergson engage with perceptible reality as duration, understood as ‘the multiplicity of states of consciousness.’31 That insight allows Bergson to reject Kantian and Positivist understandings of the relative knowledge of appearances, and, as Suzanne Guerlac proposes, to anticipate many of the arguments of Quantum Physics that would dominate scientific discussion at the start of the twentieth century.32 In a report on his research submitted to the C.N.R.S. in 1955, and published posthumously, Du Bouchet mentions Bergson without citing a source. His project is to study what he calls the transparency of poetic images, with particular reference to Maurice Scève, and he writes: Si le retour peut également être un aller, selon la formule de Bergson, l’aller, en revanche, peut se composer d’une somme globale de retours, peut être un retour, mais un retour alors modifié : c’est dans cette modification, cette « correction » que se situe l’interférence poétique. Je m’efforce donc de cerner une image située au nœud de deux impulsions 29

30 31 32

Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1888), un document produit en version numérique par Jean-Marie Tremblay, dans le cadre de la collection ‘Les classiques des sciences sociales’ fondée et dirigée par Jean-Marie Tremblay, available as an e-book , p. 10 (last accessed 09/11/18). Bergson, ‘Chapitre II: De la multiplicité des états de conscience’, in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, pp. 38-63. Glenn W. Fetzer, Palimpsests of the Real in Recent French Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), p. 132. Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 19-38.

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contradictoires, oscillant entre l’aller et le retour, en laquelle se concilient momentanément ce qui se trouve en avant et ce qui est déjà franchi. (AB, p. 181, emphasis original) If going back can also be a going forward, according to Bergson’s formulation, then going forward, on the other hand, can be composed of a total number of returns; perhaps going back, but going back changed: poetic action is situated in this modification, this ‘correction’. I therefore try to discern an image as situated at the crux of two contradictory impulses, oscillating between going forward and going back, where what is ahead and what has already been crossed is briefly reconciled. Du Bouchet argues, as Bergson did, that there is no such thing as identical repetition, because past experience will always modify future actions. The poetic, according to Du Bouchet in this early text, resides at the point where something that has happened before happens again, but differently. In the poetic image, therefore, he attempts to produce a sense of the present as the brief instant when past meets future. This can be seen in action in subsequent texts such as Dans leur voix les eaux (1980), where the second occurrence of listening will differ from the first: j’écoute et j’écoute (Ici, p. 63) I listen and I listen Most significant in Du Bouchet’s proposal is his use of ‘interférence’ to describe the active role of poetry, and it accords also with the forceful ‘franchi’. Although he uses spatial terminology of which Bergson might have disapproved – ‘se trouve’, ‘en avant’, ‘est […] franchi’ – Du Bouchet privileges the active force of poetry; it eschews a passive stance that would see time ‘passing by’. The young poet and critic decided to focus on the image in his study of poetry, although he never completed his doctorate. He used his research to work theoretically, via the study of other writers, to refine the particular exploration of the image that would also inform his creative writing, though it would change over time and, Paul Auster argues, he increasingly works to remove the

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image altogether.33 Even in this very early text, however, the image for Du Bouchet appears to be something that must avoid fixity in order to do justice to experience. Similarly, Bergson questions our use of language to understand time, because language, like science, also tends to divide things up and fix them. When we try to reconstruct past events in words, that leads to their delineation, so we must aim to find ways, in language, to account for experience as it happens, in the present. If the world is in constant flux, then any naming or description of it becomes immediately out of date, and if we stop being aware of this and accept the fixed impressions produced by language, we are likely also to give in to the sense of time as spatial. Bergson writes: Nous tendons instinctivement à solidifier nos impressions, pour les exprimer par le langage. De là vient que nous confondons le sentiment même, qui est dans un perpétuel devenir, avec son objet extérieur permanent, et surtout avec le mot qui exprime cet objet. De même que la durée fuyante de notre moi se fixe par sa projection dans l’espace homogène, ainsi nos impressions sans cesse changeantes, s’enroulant autour de l’objet extérieur qui est en cause, en adoptant les contours précis et l’immobilité.34 We instinctively tend to solidify our impressions in order to express them in language. Hence we confuse feeling itself, which is in a perpetual state of becoming, with its permanent external object, and especially with the word that expresses this object. In the same way as the fleeting duration of our ego is fixed by its projection in homogenous space, our constantly changing impressions, wrapping themselves round the external object which is their cause, take on its definite outlines and its immobility.35 Du Bouchet’s early understanding of forward movement can be seen in the title of another essay he devoted to poetry, ‘Baudelaire irrémédiable’, which, 33

Paul Auster, ‘Preface to The Uninhabited’ [1973], in André du Bouchet, OW, pp. 307-09 (308). Koch argues that Du Bouchet’s conception of the image develops from an early understanding of it as akin to the ‘typos’ that relates to an ‘archetypos’, to a later focus on the visual image of the page (‘Effigies or Imaginary Affinities?). Fetzer also identifies a shift over the course of Du Bouchet’s writings, suggesting that, while in his later work the image is construed as emerging through the effort of writing, notions of the image are multiple in Du Bouchet’s œuvre and none should be considered definitive (‘Du Bouchet et la dynamique de l’image’, p. 41.). 34 Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, p. 60. 35 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. by F. L. Pogson (London and New York, 2013 [1910]), p. 130.

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unlike other early material recently published, appeared in various forms during his lifetime, and finally in L’Emportement du muet.36 ‘Irrémédiable’ evokes the impossibility of going back, in what Michael Bishop calls the fusion of loss and reparation when he stresses the complementary, simultaneous acts of creation and destruction that Du Bouchet finds in Baudelaire, instead of a tension between failure and fulfilment.37 The essay explores what is also conveyed by the title ‘l’emportement du muet’ where movement is explicitly divorced from the powers of language. Du Bouchet writes of Baudelaire: ‘Le travail poétique […] est pour lui dilapidation, avancée en pure perte’ (EM, p. 19, poetic work is, for him, a crumbling, moving ahead as pure loss) and, in terms that recall Bergson: ‘La durée réelle de Baudelaire se scande dans l’étendue des Fleurs du Mal sans être mesurée, distance où à chaque pas le progrès est à la fois perte et réparation’ (ibid.). (Baudelaire’s real duration is scanned throughout Les Fleurs du Mal without being measured, a distance where with every step progress is both loss and reparation.) Like Bergson, Du Bouchet insists on what is not measurable, and he complicates the notion of progression by arguing for the combination of loss and repairing. As time moves forward, space is not traversed in any way that can be visualised. Crossing space might appear to be a defining feature of Du Bouchet’s poetry, owing to his exploration of the verb ‘traverser’ (to cross, or go through) and to recurring images of fissure and the act of stepping across, related, of course, to poetic enjambement. Among the variants of ‘traverser’ in his work are the noun ‘un travers’ (a fault), expressions constructed with prepositions, among which are ‘en travers’ (across), including the sense ‘in the way of’, ‘au travers’ and ‘à travers’, which mean ‘through’, and ‘de travers’ (askew).38 Although ‘traverser’ usually denotes passing through space in some way, it can also mean ‘to live through’ a time or experience. Du Bouchet chooses variants of this word to connect movement ‘through’, in space or in time, with that sense of something having gone awry. It produces a powerful impression of purposeful action taking place that does not skim the surface but goes into things and through them, and he combines this with reference to the danger of speaking at cross purposes, or of speaking despite the impossibility of ever being able to transfer meaning in transparent fashion. 36

37 38

André du Bouchet, ‘Baudelaire irrémédiable’, in EM, pp. 15-35. The text began as a lecture at the Collège philosophique in 1955 and was published the following year in the Courrier international d’Études Poétiques. Much later it was published by Deyrolle in 1993 and, after Du Bouchet’s death, in AB. Information taken from André du Bouchet, Entretiens, p. 15. Michael Bishop, Altérités d’André du Bouchet, p. 21. ‘Un travers’ is also a spare rib of pork, perhaps the only variant that Du Bouchet does not obviously employ.

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In his preface to the Gallimard ‘poésie’ edition of Ici en deux, a title that incorporates a fissure without naming it (or, rather, via the omission of its name), Michel Collot writes: ‘l’écriture est intimement liée, pour André du Bouchet, à l’existence d’une faille, et la poésie se présente comme une tentative pour la franchir.’39 (writing for Du Bouchet is intimately connected to the existence of a faultline, and poetry presents itself as an attempt to straddle that.) Such valid and instructive arguments can lead to the assumption that Du Bouchet’s work is primarily about space, that it is about walking in the landscape and crossing breached surfaces that reveal depths: in the earth, in the space of the page, in our ways of seeing. Indeed, it can even be seen to be the conclusion of Du Bouchet’s essay responding to May ’68, as he celebrates an opening up in space that allows new voices to be heard. It is not even sufficient to argue that space and time are interconnected, though this is also legitimate: a traversal of the landscape and revelation of fissures in its surface is a temporal process. It is not sufficient because such a formulation implies the coincidence of space and time, with time experienced through movement in space, which, as Bergson argued, leads to the tendency to see time in spatial terms, as something that can be measured. Instead, what we find in collections such as Ici en deux are formulations that complicate any simple correlation between movement in time and movement in space. A recurring image (in Du Bouchet’s early sense of finding the point where past becomes future) is that of melting snow and ice, which demonstrates both the passing of time and the changing of the seasons while occupying a gradually reduced amount of space, and moving without changing position. In the lines that end the last text of Ici en deux, ‘parce que j’avais voulu…’ (because I had wanted…), he writes: … plus haut, neige analogue à un homme qui court. mais la neige en fuite disparaît sur place. (Ici, p. 189) … higher up snow like a man running. but the fleeing snow disappears on the spot. This serves to disrupt the assumption that movement takes places across space and through time. Rather, it must always take time, but this is dissociated from progress and from crossing a measurable distance. Other phrases in the 39

Michel Collot, ‘Inscrire la faille’, in André du Bouchet, Ici, pp. 7-22 (p. 7).

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collection that resemble aphorisms reinforce this rejection of progress: ‘je ne ­travaille pas / mais // travaille.’ (p. 69, I don’t work / but // work); ‘choses froides qui se fendent, lorsque j’ai rejoint les deux / instants.’ (p. 83, cold things that crack, when I joined the two / moments); ‘là // ou / est-ce moi qui / friable // ai marché.’ (p. 161, (there // or / is it I who / flaking // have walked.); ‘… partir, alors, comme la neige.   sans voir et / sans bruit.’ (p. 169, leave, then, like the snow.   without seeing and / without a sound.) Melting snow also embodies the change from a solid to a liquid state, which will lead subsequently to evaporation. Its use in texts such as those of Ici en deux, which explicitly connects snow to the white of the writer’s page, allows Du Bouchet to associate his writing materials with impermanence through the counterintuitive linking of paper with disappearance. The final poem begins: … parce que je ne voudrais pas que le langage se referme sur soi. je ne voudrais pas que le langage se referme sur moi. (p. 181) … because  I wouldn’t like language to close over itself. I wouldn’t like language to close over me. He expresses here the concern Bergson sets out: that language, which by its nature uses convention in order to communicate, risks fixing experience that is always changing owing to the onward progression of time. By presenting the white page in terms of snow that contains within its nature its future retreat, Du Bouchet makes not the written or typed word, but rather its material support, into something shifting that will prevent the stasis he would otherwise fear. He achieves the same effect in the quotation above by almost repeating the phrase. He alters it by replacing ‘soi’ with ‘moi’, thereby linking and separating the writing self and his language, and by using a different layout for the two phrases; it enacts the change over time that he seeks. As he puts it on the following page, ‘… parole aussi / rapide – et seule à l’être, que la face de son support quand / il a été retiré.’ (p. 182, … speech as / rapid – the only thing that is, as the surface of its support when / that has been withdrawn.) As a semantic trope, attentiveness to the passing of time occurs in various ways in Du Bouchet’s work. Throughout his writing, the insistent presence of heat and cold produces the sense of different seasons without indication that the years are moving irrevocably forward. The subject experiences a kind of exemplary winter and summer that, while present, appear overpowering, but

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the potential for change is always there, as in the suggestions of melting snow cited above, or on this page: et le jour        telle une férocité des étoiles la réincrustation de la neige pour peu qu’elle ait fondu cela broyant là       où cela n’a pas brillé.40 and the day       like a ferocity of stars the rehardening of the snow should it have melted crushing there     where it has not shone. 40

André du Bouchet, L’ajour (Paris: Gallimard, 1998) (henceforth A), p. 114. In using the lower case ‘a’ I am following Du Bouchet’s own preference.

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This passage works on the basis of apparent contradictions. The day is evoked by fierce starlight, snow seems to have melted and then refrozen, and the brightness of the stars is replaced by the absence of shining light at the end. But the first lines are a simile which reverses our assumption that daylight is brighter than starlight, and the light is linked to the snow in that its powdery texture remains where it has been sheltered from the melting power of the sun. The pronouns that would have identified the subjects in the last four lines have been replaced by the deictic ‘cela’ that reinforces the agency and the materiality of the warming sun and the snow whose texture produces sound and physical sensation: the presence of the walker is suggested without being named. In the early poetry of Dans la chaleur vacante, attention is devoted to moments of transition in the repeated cycles of the seasons and the days, and the involvement of the poetic subject is explicit. For instance, in the following lines the closing day is represented as physically enveloping: J’ignore la route sur laquelle notre souffle se retire. Le jour, en tombant, m’entoure. (DLCV, p. 27) I’m unaware of the road on which our breath withdraws. The daylight, falling, surrounds me.41 In the later example from L’ajour (openwork) that forms the preceding quotation, the human subject and its anecdotal implications have been placed backstage, which gives full force to the physical, temporal existence of the world beyond the subject. In other words, his writing does not suggest that twilight is important because it evokes certain emotions in the (Romantic) subject; it presents moments of change through the active power of the natural and elemental world, and the poet’s attentiveness to those transitions is present on the page rather than represented. Du Bouchet’s writing appears to answer Guerlac’s proposition that, ‘[p]erhaps for the everyday to have a future – to come into view – it must receive attention as something other than an exclusively human precinct.’42 Again, it offers an ecological perspective not predicated on dwelling in a place. 41 42

Mus translates these lines as follows: ‘Setting out not knowing / along what roads our breath is, / again, to be withdrawn. Daylight, falling even, all / about, attends us.’ WHL, p. 25. Suzanne Guerlac, ‘Little Cuts in Time: Photography and the Everyday’ in The Made and the Found: Essays, Prose and Poetry in Honour of Michael Sheringham, ed. by Patrick McGuiness and Emily McLaughlin (Oxford: Legenda, 2017), pp. 19-32 (31).

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We saw that Du Bouchet reinstated reflection on the intrusion of the siren into Maldiney’s talk. But whereas Maldiney insisted on the urgency of the siren, for Du Bouchet its banality is what counts. In his view the banal is not what is beneath consideration, but rather all that exceeds our ability to grasp and express it, and yet determines our lives. It is the everyday, but not in the sense of the minutiae of quotidian human concerns or our attempts to fit the physical world into structures and timetables. In this sense, it can be considered in the light of recent literary critical studies of the everyday, but does not fit easily into their categories. Michael Sheringham, for instance, studies attentiveness to the everyday in French literary and theoretical works of the twentieth century, including Breton, Perec, De Certeau and Lefebvre. He not only connects everyday objects and the repetition of daily rhythms, but also insists that attention to these reveals the commonality of experience on which they are based and which they produce. The leitmotif in his discussion of different movements and writers ‘is the question of forms of attention, and of transformations of awareness wrought by paying attention to the quotidien’.43 Du Bouchet deliberately removes the anecdotal from his work despite engaging in the everyday practice of carrying a notebook, as will be discussed in chapter six. The enumeration and exhaustion that characterise texts such as those by Georges Perec are entirely absent. In Pourquoi si calmes, Du Bouchet is less interested in the specificity of the event in Tarascon, though the text could be called circumstantial, than he is in the reminder of the everyday experience of time that he perceives in Maldiney’s breaking off his talk for the siren. The experiences on which Du Bouchet focuses in his own work are those common to all: walking, breathing, feeling hot and cold, for instance.44 Far from being elevated, and reserved for those with superior sensibility, the existence that he evokes is quotidian without being situated in a particular place. He suggests that attention be accorded to the most basic of sensations, and, above all, that we be attentive to time. This places his poetry once again at the intersection of a Heideggerian approach, interested in revelations of the poetic that break through the surfaces of experience and writing, and the current in poetry inspired by Wittgenstein in which it is precisely those surfaces and everyday language that are of interest. In Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life, Bryony Randall distinguishes between two interpretations of attention: concentrating on higher matters of 43 44

Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 15 (emphasis original). There is an implicit privileging of the able-bodied in Du Bouchet’s evocation of engaging with the rugged landscape through walking.

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the mind, achieved through blocking out banal everyday concerns, and, on the other hand, creative inattentiveness, which allows the mind to wander; daydreams are central to many Modernist works, and Randall argues that they allow us to perceive what we habitually take for granted.45 Du Bouchet’s writing enables a further distinction: it focuses neither on quotidian objects, nor on the creative potential of daydream. While elements of dream or daydream do occasionally occur, Du Bouchet demonstrates the opposite of the wandering mind, giving the impression rather of precise focus on minute changes.46 This is attention as concentration and distraction combined, for the purpose of better seeing what we habitually overlook. It therefore corresponds to what Mark Currie describes as ‘a certain mid-century notion of art as defamiliarization, a form of attention that defines itself against automatized perception and habit’, but it takes that tendency further in its investigation of perception and action as habitual.47 Neither Randall nor Sheringham devotes extensive attention to poetry (Randall discusses only Stein’s Tender Buttons),48 but Sheringham does consider Du Bouchet’s contemporaries Philippe Jaccottet and Yves Bonnefoy, and in particular Bonnefoy’s interest in times of the day. He cites Jean Starobinski, who considers poetry’s evocation of daily rhythms to be a secular equivalent of religious Books of Hours and regular Offices, a remark that runs counter to Walter Benjamin’s contrasting of devout contemplation with secular self-absorption, discussed in the Introduction to the present study. For Bonnefoy, such rhythms can bring the text, and by implication the poet and reader, closer to the presence that is the goal of his poetic quest.49 A key difference between Bonnefoy and Du Bouchet, and one that is somewhat overlooked by the critical grouping together of them as poets ‘de l’Éphémère’, is that Du Bouchet does not make explicit reference to a search for presence. Nevertheless, repeated natural rhythms of the day and the seasons are key to much of his poetry, and particularly to Dans la chaleur vacante. Attentiveness for Du Bouchet is temporal in an analogous way, but rather than being conceived in almost spatial 45

Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time Everyday Life, p. 39. She considers key Modernist texts including Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and steers a careful path between discussion of everyday objects in the novel and examination of its own temporal structures. 46 A dream appears to be recounted by Du Bouchet in one of his texts on Giacometti, ‘Poussière sculptée’, A, pp. 35-67, but this is an exception in his work. 47 Mark Currie, ‘The Daily and the Everyday. Review of Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 44, 1 (2011), 115-20 (p. 116). 48 Tender Buttons (1914) is also considered by John C. Stout in his book, Objects Observed, which explicitly connects the French and American twentieth-century poetic traditions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 49 Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 371.

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terms, as a vessel through which time is perceived to pass, it is itself on the move, combining attention and distraction, the linguistic domain of the poetic subject and the mute external world, and is better classed as a process of being attentive than as a noun; it is figured formally as well as being presented semantically.

Forms of Temporal Attention

Instances of repetition with variation, or what Pierre Chappuis describes as ‘la réiteration dynamique’,50 will be seen throughout this study as Du Bouchet uses the layout of the text, rhyme or assonance, and variations on words through different parts of speech to produce the effect of experience that changes and develops while recalling and adjusting previous experience. Subtle examples of repetition are visible in sections of text such as the following, from Aujourd’hui c’est:  la masse terreuse, comme le bleu l’a foudroyée – le bleu  excessif, tu l’avises dans l’instant qui précède. terre soulevée, et ciel qui ramasse, tout sera  devenu plus épais. (AC, p. 18)   earthy mass as if the blue struck it – the excessive blue, you notice it,   the moment before. raised earth, and gathering sky, everything will have become thicker. ‘Bleu’ occurs twice, and is recalled by ‘ciel’ in line five; ‘terreuse’ (l. 1) is a transformed version of ‘terre’ (l. 5), though the adjectival form precedes the noun, and that reversal could, arguably, be seen as indicated in the use of ‘précède’ just before ‘terre’. There are two past participles in the feminine form, ‘foudroyée’ (l. 2) and ‘soulevée’ (l. 5), the latter occurring as an adjective. The noun 50

Chappuis concludes: ‘sans alourdir, sans encombrer, chaque réitération, chaque reprise, chaque instant vécu, comme chaque poème ou chaque texte, est à la fois apport et rajeunissement.’ (p. 145) (without weighing down or encumbering the words, each reite­ ration, repetition and lived instant, like each poem or text, is both supply and renewal): Chappuis, ‘La réiteration dynamique’, p. 145.

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‘masse’ (l. 1) is echoed in the verb ‘ramasse’ (l. 5) in a further transformation from one part of speech to another, and one that grants the action of the sky an earthy solidity it would otherwise lack. The double ‘s’ appears also in ‘excessif’, this time an adjective describing ‘le bleu’, which would not normally be considered to have limits that could be exceeded. The extract produces an impression of mass, combined with the introduction of gaps suggested semantically by ‘foudroyée’, ‘soulevée’ and the gap that precedes ‘terre’, as well as by the attention to layout that the line breaks and mobile margin create. That contradiction is summed up in the final ‘tout sera / devenu plus épais’, a use of the future perfect tense typical of Du Bouchet that destabilises any putative temporal point of view. In conveying the sense that progression through a text is not a straightforward unfolding, but rather a process of repetition with variation, Du Bouchet’s approach corresponds to the cyclical patterns of everyday life, which, as Sheringham argues, themselves occur not through identical repetition, but rather repetition with variation.51 This structure is not restricted to particular poems or collections, but rather is present throughout his work. In ‘Fraîchir’, for example, a text that is predicated from its title on novelty, repetition is present in various ways. Phrases are repeated in close proximity: cela est toi.     volet disparu, l’autre est là.  cela est toi. (Ici, p. 77) that is you.   one wing gone, the other there.   that is you.52 The phrase sets up reflective patterns between ‘toi’ and ‘l’autre’ and appearance and disappearance (‘est là’ / ‘disparu’). It presents the expected pattern of two ‘volets’ visually with the repeated phrases on either side of the central one, as well as showing the disappearance of one of the pair by the asymmetrical second line. ‘Cela est toi’ is repeated, but with the intervention of the line break in the second instance, the formal structure introducing variation in emphasis through visual form as well as the practice of repetition. This long text is also representative of Du Bouchet’s writing in that single words recur, producing the sense of a concise lexical field, in which nouns are 51 Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 391. 52 ‘Volet’ can mean ‘wing’ in the sense of a section of a work of visual art such as a tryptich, as well as ‘shutter’. It is not clear from the context whether an artwork or a window is suggested, although the collection Ici en deux does include two texts entitled ‘Peinture’, one of which follows this text, ‘Fraîchir’.

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present without the contextualising that adjectives would provide. ‘Volet’ and ‘sol’ are two particular examples, and ‘air’, ‘froid’, ‘vent’, ‘ciel’ and ‘bleu’ run through not only ‘Fraîchir’ but also much of his poetic output; they are among those words whose placement in his work draws together form and content. He again produces the sense of repetition with variation by reusing the same word, but in different parts of speech or various forms. For instance, ‘choses froides’ is followed by ‘ce froid’, and ‘je n’ai jamais eu aussi froid’ (Ici, p. 83). On the same page, ‘l’ombre qui tire’ is transformed into ‘que tu te retires’. Central to the effect of repetition on the poetic subject, as it is on the readers, is not only the ability to recall previous instances but also to anticipate future ones. In the following text where a ‘je’ and a ‘tu’ are nevertheless still present, movement is combined with a sense of anticipation: Avant que la blancheur du soleil soit aussi proche que ta main, j’ai couru sans m’éteindre. (DLCV p. 26) Before the whiteness of the sun is as close as your hand, I ran unquenched.53 The self ran to escape the increasing heat of the day, that heat being suggested even though it is not yet in evidence: ‘avant que’. Daily rhythms are often present in his poetry via the imaginative powers of the speaking subject, who is capable of projecting forwards in time as well as remembering. Imagining the future or alternative scenarios is a distinctively human ability. In addition to his use of the future perfect tense, Du Bouchet refers to the idea ‘as if’ in a variety of circumstances. In the earlier poems published together in Dans la chaleur vacante, the expression ‘comme si’ is employed in several instances. He writes, for example: ‘Je sors / dans la chambre // comme si j’étais dehors’ (DLCV, p. 64, I go out / into the bedroom // as if I was outside),54 or ‘Je regarde l’air animé comme si, avant l’horizon lisse, / j’étais embarrassé de cette étendue que j’embrasse.’ (DLCV, p. 97, I watch the animated air as if, in front of the smooth horizon, / I was embarrassed by that distance that I embrace).55 In both cases, the structure denoting the human capacity to imagine is used in order to make a link between the writing self and the exter53 54 55

Mus’s translation: ‘Until sun’s blank tint white, come as close as your own / hand, I / rush on unquenched.’ WHL, p. 24. Mus’s translation: ‘I let myself out / into the room as if / already outside’ (WHL, p. 62). ‘embarrasser de’ can mean being ‘at a loss to’ or ‘confused by’, both meanings that perhaps fit better into the context than ‘embarrassed’. Nevertheless, the connection with ‘em­ brasser’ is so strong that I decided to give that precedence. Mus writes: ‘I look on this vivid

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nal world. Du Bouchet connects the hypothetical experience of being encumbered with that of embracing. The self is not joined seamlessly to the world, owing to the simultaneously valuable and frustrating capacity for abstraction that Du Bouchet sets out; ironically, that ability means that Du Bouchet can note the linguistic similarity between ‘embarrasser’ and ‘embrasser’ and allows him to posit a reciprocal movement between self and physical surroundings. In subsequent collections, the expression ‘comme si’ is largely absent. It has not disappeared, though, because it has been replaced by the ambiguous use of ‘comme’ in the sense of ‘comme si’. In Aujourd’hui c’est he writes:                sur terre déjà comme inhumés.  et comme, aujourd’hui, si jamais n’avoir                 pu aller par ces terres-là. (AC, p. 13)                    landed already as if buried.   and as, today, if never having           been able to go by those lands there. The subject is absent from this section of text, and a look back over the previous pages suggests more than one possible subject: it could be the ‘pas’ of the previous section (AC, p. 12) or it could just refer to human subjects in general. The passage is constructed from contradictions: on the earth as if in it; proceeding already, today and never. The capacity to imagine alternative scenarios is performed rather than described. In other examples, Du Bouchet’s use of ‘comme’ is such that it is unclear whether it means ‘like/as’, ‘as if’, or occasionally ‘how’. This can be deemed a deliberate eliding of simile and hypothesis, as discussed by Terence Cave in his application of Relevance Theory to poetry. He argues that literary language – poetry in particular – is not a separate kind of language use, but rather one end of a spectrum incorporating everyday language use in which people have adjusted words to their contexts and gradually developed conceptual thought: ‘catachresis and metaphor are not rhetorical flourishes, but cognitive instruments for the construction and extension of language.’56 Du Bouchet’s sentences do not, of course, tend to conform to conventional grammatical structures and in that sense differ from everyday language as they draw the reader’s attention to the strangeness of words that

56

air as if up to the smooth sky-/line rail encumbered by the entire spread before / me, spanned’ (WHL, p. 95). Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 105.

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would otherwise appear familiar. By refusing the distinction between ‘like’ and ‘as if’, he upsets, in addition, the grammatical distinction between the nouns and verbs that would be expected, respectively, to follow them. But he is also eliding the mental processes of imagining something that is not there (the basis of a comparison) and of imagining hypothetical scenarios. Instead, with the implied phrase ‘comme si’, a hypothetical alternative takes the place of a comparison. He imagines that language ends up as a lack of communication – it becomes physical – and that is what allows the material world to emerge all of a sudden. Perhaps, paradoxically, it is through the hypothetical that the mortal subject can come closer to the material world. Du Bouchet’s particular use of ‘comme’, as a channel to both the hypothetical and the concrete, also contrasts with Deguy’s focus on figurative language as a distinctly human capacity that allows us to imagine difference. Du Bouchet emphasises that any apparently stable moment of experience or perception will quickly be set on the move again, and he also refuses straightforward movement from past to present to future. But he does this without rejecting those multiple brief instants where it is possible to stop. In texts such as Aujourd’hui, c’est, Du Bouchet writes, in an extract too complex to analyse in detail: couper – mais coulé, c’est encore

coulé, ou, par là, ayant dû 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 depart. là    je m’arrête, là, longuement. (AC, p. 22)   sunk, or, over there, having had to cut – but sunk is, again having joined by the

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[page break] depth. there itself  the open stitch from which, leaving, I’ve had to separate myself today.   it’s, again as the line stretches out for a long time, the starting point.    there I stop there, for a long time. So while movement and transformation constitute the core of Du Bouchet’s poetic writing, that is not at the expense of pauses. Rather, those moments of rest are what make the movement possible. The self stops, there, at length, in order to ‘be’ fully in the present place and time because that is what enables attentiveness. He does not claim successfully to have attained presence out of time, but rather to have incorporated attentiveness into the passing of time: indeed, as an ongoing movement between focus and distraction, Du Bouchet’s attentiveness always takes place within time. A pause takes time, but it also reveals human temporal existence: that is why Du Bouchet can write, as cited at the start of this chapter: pour   accoudoir une dureté provisoire de l’os Physical, material existence, with its necessary provisional status, is also what allows the self to rest and contemplate. Without the awareness of mortality and the passing of time, being present in the moment would have no meaning. In her commentary on Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Guerlac writes: ‘Paradoxically, the only way to appreciate the power of temporal flow – the force of duration – is to be here now, as they used to say in the sixties, to engage completely with the feelings of the present moment in all their contingency.’57 Du Bouchet’s writing in Aujourd’hui c’est illustrates that point without setting out in an explicit, metapoetic commentary that it is what poetry should do. 57 Guerlac, Thinking in Time, p. 91.

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Du Bouchet succeeds in this and numerous other instances in showing that while the elements of the world around are not in themselves hard to perceive or note, any attempt fully to understand one’s place in it is bound to provide only temporary security. As we have seen, that is not something to be regretted: such moments are valuable because they allow us pause to apprehend the present. That is what could be happening while ‘j’écoute / et // j’écoute’: listening occurs in instances, not constantly. If those could be retained, we would lose our awareness of them because they would have been removed from the flux of time and spatialised. Nevertheless, there is a danger in insisting on the passage of time and on the provisional nature of any pause in Du Bouchet’s work, because it does not proceed by constant, unstructured forward movement. Rather, we have seen that it is determined according to formal structures such as awareness of cyclical change, repetition with variation, and anticipation. This study situates the ‘alterlisibilité’ of Du Bouchet’s work as based first on form, although semantic meaning always works in tandem with forms. The following close analysis of ‘Soutiré à un futur’ from Axiales will therefore itself be structured according to the forms on which it is based. In each instance, we shall see that apparently spatial structures are intertwined with temporal ones and challenged by them.

‘Soutiré à un futur’

The most immediately striking aspect of this text is its combination of what appears to be verse with pages that hover between poetry and prose. Three pages of text have short lines and wide margins, and this produces the impression of rapid succinct utterances. Du Bouchet writes, for instance: admirable le bleu

le bleu

comme violent et     l’asphalte. (Ax, p. 69) blue blue as violent

admirable

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and    asphalt. ‘le bleu / admirable’ is a reference to the phrase attributed to Hölderlin that so fascinated Heidegger, ‘in lieblicher Bläue’, which Du Bouchet translated as ‘en bleu adorable’58 (in adorable blue), while the evocation of asphalt also occurs in ‘Notes sur la traduction’ (to be examined in chapter four). Blue can be the colour of unboundedness and forgetting, but it is brought down to earth here with violence and asphalt, the latter naming a man-made ground surface without contextualisation or description. That contrasts with the value that seems to be attached to the abstract in ‘le bleu’: human beings are constantly negotiating between the two. On the final page, the lines ‘sans fracas la parole – avec sa parure / de ciment, sous la paume’ (noiselessly speech – with its cement / decoration, under the halved joint) evoke another man-made solid material as well as the crafting of both buildings and writing. The juxtaposition of ‘parure’ and ‘ciment’ forms a striking contrast between fundamental structuring material and decorative additions and suggests that language is what is capable of bringing the two together. The dual meaning of ‘la paume’ as the palm of the hand and a carpentry joint literally links the human and the material. There is a formal contrast between the three pages of vertical texts and the four pages that precede them and the two that follow. They are, perhaps, connected by the joints of the pages. In the pages before and after, the full width of the page is used, but with mobile margins and gaps within the text. Du Bouchet therefore refuses both linear progression and vertical ordering, preferring instead to combine aspects of verse and prose writing to demonstrate repetition, movement back and forth in time, and momentary pauses:     et, dans le froid de l’air, comme on s’immobilise, pourvoir à une face de nouveau.   dans cette face, la montagne sera rentrée.            de nouveau j’appose à la face de la montagne. (Ax, p. 65) and, in the chill of air, how we stop in our tracks, divining yet another face.  into         this face, the mountain will have gone back. again I affix

58

André du Bouchet, ‘Hölderlin Aujourd’hui’, in I, n.p.

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the mountain to the face.59

The section opens with ‘et’ to indicate continuity, but it is not clear that the utterance completes a previous one. Deliberate immobility is figured in the space in the second line, and the poet uses repeatedly the spatial indicator ‘dans’ (in, or into). That is destabilised, though, because ‘in the cold’ is followed by ‘in this face’, an impossible concept if ‘face’ is understood to mean ‘surface’. ‘Comme’ implies a simile that is thwarted because it does not compare two like terms, but also, as discussed above, a hypothesis; in addition, it may include the sense of ‘how’. The solidity of the impenetrable mountain is emphasised, and yet the future perfect projects forwards and back. There is novelty, through the repeated ‘de nouveau’ (again), but it has to happen repeatedly or it would no longer be novel. In tandem with the mountain, whose rugged solidity makes it hard to scale, Du Bouchet develops the image of the glacier in these lines that open the text:          déjà toi qui à tes pieds a pu porter la terre, tu sais – avant de te voir, glacier retractile, en sens inverse vaporisé, qu’ici, et plus avant, de nouveau elle s’aggravera. (Ax, p. 63)          already         you who were able to carry at your feet the earth, you know – before seeing yourself, retractile glacier, in the other direction vaporised, that here, and further forward, again it will be aggravated.60

It is indicated visually by spatial positioning of text that produces a diagonal outline across the double-page spread. Moreover, the shifting margins and complex use of gaps within sections of text suggest the movement of a glacier in increments. Not only can a glacier move downwards, but ice as it melts appears to retreat. The image demonstrates changes between states of matter (solid, liquid, and gas), and also allows for the presentation of time in space without that being a simple traversal of space over time. Rather, forward time means backward movement in the case of melting ice: ‘rétrécir’ (shrink), or ‘soutiré [au] futur’ (extracted from the future). 59 60

Du Bouchet, OW, p. 249, except for the italicised phrase. Rogers writes ‘the mountain has pulled back’, which omits the future perfect sense. This passage is particularly hard to render in English without altering the word order and hindering a parallel reading. It was translated more elegantly by Hoyt Rogers in Openwork, and his translation will be discussed in the Conclusion (Du Bouchet, OW, pp. 242-43).

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The expression ‘soutiré à un futur’ combines a past participle and the future. Humans are able to hold in mind the past and the future, a hypothetical future and a hypothetical point in the future when something will have happened. We can also produce solid materials as well as engaging with solid natural structures. Past participles at the start and end of sections complicate any understanding of how events fit together in time: ‘soutiré’ (extracted) in the title, ‘éventé’ (p. 63, flattened), ‘inscrit’ (p. 64, inscribed), ‘soudé’ (p. 64, soldered), ‘perdu’ (p. 68, lost). Du Bouchet also achieves this with prepositions, spatial indicators that, when they open sections of text, do the opposite of contextualising or anchoring: rather, they frustrate our wish to understand things in relation to one another spatially (‘sur’ (pp. 64, 66, and 67, on), ‘où’ (p. 67, where), ‘ici’ (p.67, here), ‘dans’ (p. 68, in), ‘sans’ (p. 71, without)). The whole text begins with ‘déjà’, and is addressed to a ‘tu’ figure who seems to be the glacier. It personalises the glacier by saying it carries the earth on its feet, and the punctuation complicates interpretation. We might expect ‘tu sais’ (you know) to follow or be followed by what is known; instead we are presented with a phrase in which time and space are intertwined and both complicated: ‘avant de te voir, glacier retractile, en sens inverse / vaporisé, qu’ici, et plus avant, de nouveau elle s’aggravera’. Forms here are interrelated, not ruptured. Where Du Bouchet writes ‘de nouveau j’appose / à la face de la montagne’ (Ax, p.65), he combines the action of fixing with repetition (‘de nouveau’). Apposition is key in this text and throughout Du Bouchet’s writing: words, things, the abstract and the concrete are not so much opposed – put in a binary system – as apposed, which places them, briefly, next to one another in time and in space without setting up a hierarchy between them. A clear example is the use of ‘comme’ for apposition rather than comparison. Apposition occurs through various formal strategies. A colon might be employed, sometimes in conjunction with a blank: ‘la passion / des hirondelles :  neige’ (p. 64, the passion / of swallows: snow’. Line breaks are often used to link and draw attention to contradictory terms: ‘sitôt comme / retard’ (p. 66, straight away as / delay). Actions are taken out of time, presented through infinitives or past participles lacking a conjugated verb, but connected through an apparent comparison such as ‘tel que’: briller      tel qu’

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   ici de nouveau et pour toujours      perdu. (Ax, p. 68) to shine      as if    here again and for ever       lost. True to a poetics of ‘alterlisibilité’, Du Bouchet refuses to allow the reader to organise utterances, and infuses the technique of apposition with temporal uncertainty, using it to create temporary pauses.  Axiales contains the lines: il a fallu pour la fraîcheur à nouveau – que je reste, un moment, dans l’air d’à côté (Ax, p. 22) for coolness again – to remain, a moment, in the air nearby

I needed

The staccato formulation, interspersed with frequent commas, a dash, and line breaks, produces the instances of stasis he deems necessary for the freshness he seeks. They could be conceived as a radical new kind of caesura, one which breaks up words rather than merely separating them: Francis Wybrands asks: ‘est-il possible d’envisager une parole qui laisserait entendre la césure même de ce qui la brise ?’ (is it possible to imagine speech that would make audible the very caesura that ruptures it?), and he suggests that Du Bouchet’s work might offer such a thing.61 The final words ‘d’à côté’ sit uneasily with the ‘dans’ of the 61

Francis Wybrands, ‘L’allure, le temps’, in Autour d’André du Bouchet, ed. by Collot, pp. 3740 (38). Discussing the meaning of ‘caesura’ for Hölderlin, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei defines it as the moment when ‘the poetic word is transformed into silence’, such that representation itself appears, rather than what is represented: Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 196. She argues that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe conflates Heidegger’s ‘event’ with Hölderlin’s caesura when he calls the Holocaust a ‘pure event’, Lacoue-Labarthe

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previous line: it means that brief pauses never constitute settled positioning in space; there is always an element that knocks off-centre an image that threatens to become stabilised, and this reflects our experience of living in time. Influenced by his early reading of Bergson, Du Bouchet was interested in showing that time is experienced not in a linear, measurable manner, but rather through the ways in which memories and the ability to project into the future affect our understanding of the present. Like Bergson, he believes that language is in danger of artificially fixing meaning and that is why he wants to keep it on the move, shifting sense by changes in parts of speech so that repetition with variation is properly representative of our changing understanding of our environment. Du Bouchet keeps open a process of being attentive: to the movement of the body in the landscape, to minute adjustments in linguistic expression, and to temporal cycles belonging to human life and the natural world. This kind of attentiveness is neither a detailed focus on quotidian objects – his texts are, rather, sparse and decontextualised – nor a rejection of the details of everyday life in favour of a higher attention to abstract matters. Instead, he is attentive to the most basic actions of normal life, such as sensing, breathing, and moving, in a way that rigorously pares down the world he represents to essential elements that are nevertheless multiple owing to the work of time. In addition, it is an attentiveness that seeks to leave no trace in the landscape it encounters. The formulations that result mean that his writing is considered difficult. Its comprehension does not require mastery of a body of historical, literary or philosophical knowledge; it does not employ obscure terminology. It does, however, construct temporal forms that frustrate the reader’s tendency to search for an overarching meaning to a text, and her or his wish to pin down intended meanings from a range of possible interpretations. Du Bouchet’s poetry makes impersonal poetic writing readable, albeit in a different way. He is an example of the poet of the impersonal subject, inherited from Modernism and in contradistinction to Surrealism, but far from being an elitist position, this a democratic one because it starts from common experiences. He uses forms to produce new structures, acknowledging that the various forms we encounter intersect, and sometimes conflict with one another, and that it is the job of poetry to show us how we live and think. He also thereby mirroring Heidegger’s own mistaken attempt to interpret Hölderlin in primarily historical rather than literary terms (p. 199): Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique. Heidegger, l’art et la politique (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1987). We have noted that the terms ‘event’ and ‘caesura’ also occur in Du Bouchet criticism; Wybrands’ definition of the caesura in the case of Du Bouchet rightly emphasises that speech and its interruption are closely imbricated, in contrast to Hölderlinian silence.

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advocates a way of perceiving, thinking and moving that lives time rather than taking it: slowly, with pauses, seeing through surface meanings, adjusting based on experience, and imagining possible futures. Pauses enable embodied encounters with the material world without reducing language to matter, paradoxically opening up ways of truly living time and accepting its passing. Pauses do not reveal depths, but the opposite of revelation is not concealment, it is apposition: being ‘à côté’ in order to accept the irreducibly mortal condition of the human subject.

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Tensions and Translation

Chapter 4

Tensions and Translation

la séparation (Ici, p. 98) separation

Traduire Translate

⸪ We have seen that Du Bouchet is attentive to the elemental world, to shared human experiences of time, and to the voices of others. This chapter considers in addition the relationships he explores between the poetic subject, the language of poetic expression, and other languages. Translation is often thought to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps. This chapter will argue, though, that Du Bouchet’s translation practice and reflection on translation nuance the idea of bridging gaps: languages and cultures are not separate entities that the linguistically and culturally able traveller can cross, and subsequently mediate for an audience on one side of the divide, but rather enmeshed through individuals’ complex ties and trajectories. After introducing Du Bouchet’s work as a translator, this chapter will examine the extent to which his approach to translation corresponds to an emphasis on foreignness in the native language following an encounter with the foreign tongue, as might be suggested by his interest in Hölderlin. It will suggest, more particularly, that translation is so important for Du Bouchet because it is a practice that enables him to present and perform his sense that the notions of ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ are untenable. The text analysed in chapter one, ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’, was built in part around the statement by Pasternak that the place of the poet must always remain empty; Du Bouchet’s work shows that living and writing by this maxim can render the poet a vital force in troubling notions of linguistic and cultural identities. He is attentive not so much to a particular foreign language, therefore, as to the intricate and shifting relations between languages.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432888_006

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Foreignness and Relation

Du Bouchet translated from English, which he knew well, having used it during his student years of exile in the USA as the language of scholarship and everyday life. Separated from his family after they fled France in 1940, he had come to associate French with the inner realm of reflection.1 His early essays and notebooks, which he began while he was still living in the USA, demonstrate the importance of that time in the formation of his perspective on poetry and on art, and also of the effect on him of moving back to France in 1948.2 Du Bouchet translated from languages he claimed to know less well too: German and Russian. He was not, therefore, working from the position of one secure in his native language who had learned other ‘second’, ‘third’ or ‘fourth’ languages in an educational setting. There has been disagreement over the extent to which his relationship with English was different from the one he had with German and Russian, and Du Bouchet’s translation choices and practice suggest that he himself questioned the distinction between languages he might claim to master and those he did not.3 The texts he chose to translate from English appear to reveal that not only was he willing to grapple with difficulty, but he actively embraced it; nor did he shy away from translating canonical authors. In addition to works by Shakespeare, he translated William Faulkner’s Knight’s Gambit, and works by John Donne, Laura Riding, James Joyce and Emily Dickinson.4 Du Bouchet translated Joyce’s Giacomo Joyce and extracts from Finnegans Wake, and wrote about the latter: […] C’est bien l’existence de cette « autre réalité, transparente sous la phrase » qui rend la traduction – une traduction littérale – concevable : nous pouvons concevoir de lui donner un nouveau corps, un autre corps… littéral – qui serait non moins valable – et excluerait toute approximation.

1 Clément Layet, ‘Préface’, in Du Bouchet, Lampe, pp. 7-18 (13). 2 Thomas Augais, ‘Préface’, in LPNJE, pp. 9-29 3 Yves Peyré suggests that the distinction is not clear-cut, in his contribution to a discussion recorded in Autour d’André du Bouchet, ed. by Collot, p. 181. 4 William Shakespeare, La Tempête, trans. by André du Bouchet (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963); Périclès, Henri VIII, Les plaintes d’une amante, Le Phénix et la colombe, trans. by André du Bouchet, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Le Club français du livre, 1961). William Faulkner, Le Gambit du cavalier (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). Details of other translations are given by Martinez in André du Bouchet, p. 180.

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Mais cette réalité en filigrane se trouve réduite, et inextricablement confondue, comme c’est le cas de Joyce, avec la trame du langage qui l’exprime, nous ne pouvons l’en détacher, nous ne pouvons pas traduire.5 […] It’s certainly the existence of this ‘other reality, transparent beneath the sentence’ [citing Proust] that makes translation – a literal translation – conceivable: we can conceive of giving it a new body, a different, literal, body… which would be no less valid – and which would exclude any approximation. But this reality between the lines turns out to be reduced, and inextricably conflated, as is the case with Joyce, with the weft of the language that expresses it; we cannot detach it, we cannot translate. Du Bouchet’s repetition of the word ‘littéral’, which in other circumstances might be associated with a somewhat unsophisticated distinction between ‘word-for-word’ and ‘sense-for-sense’ translation, here suggests that the only way for a translator to convey what is ‘behind’ the words of a text is to insist on the physicality of the words in the language of translation. That emphasis on materiality is evident in much of his own translation practice, as it is in his poetry, but he goes on to write that in the case of Joyce, the text is untranslatable because the words and the world they express are indissoluble. Nevertheless, far from concluding that, since it is untranslatable, he will not translate it, he chooses to engage precisely with that form. Untranslatability in this sense might seem to resemble the unreadability discussed in chapter three, where it is a matter of reading differently rather than trying to decipher meaning. Du Bouchet’s contention concerning Joyce, however, is that it is the encoding part of the translation process, rather than the decoding, that renders it untranslatable. He is concluding that language where form is indissociable from semantic meaning is an example of the foreignness of language per se, such that it can never be domesticated. From Russian he translated Ossip Mandelstam’s Voyage en Arménie (Journey to Armenia), first with his son Gilles, under the pseudonym Louis Bruzon 5 André du Bouchet, ‘Sur Joyce…’, L’Étrangère, 16-18 (2007), 65-67 (p. 66). As is noted in the journal, this preface appeared in the 1962 edition of Finnegans Wake published by Gallimard. The text was published in 2003 by Fata Morgana under the title Lire Finnegans Wake ?, and includes a different preface, though still one that discusses the ‘illisibilité’ of Joyce: André du Bouchet, Lire Finnegans Wake ? (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 2003), pp. 9-11. James Joyce, Giacomo Joyce, trans. by André du Bouchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).

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(Voyage 1973), before publishing a version under his own name (Voyage 1984). Michael Bishop argues that Mandelstam attempts to combine historicity and atemporality, and that the paradoxical fragmentation and construction in his work is both a refusal to think of his vulnerability and a way of establishing contact with a land and its history.6 Such emphases resonate with a reading of Du Bouchet as attempting to account for, and respond to, the destructiveness of history, and will be relevant also in chapter five in discussion of Miklos Bokor. Du Bouchet’s choice of interlocutors reveals a concern for writing and art that is historically embedded, even – or perhaps particularly – where historical circumstances are not explicitly discussed. The translations for which Du Bouchet is best known are those that he made from works in German by Friedrich Hölderlin and Paul Celan. He published a selection entitled Hölderlin, Poèmes.7 His translation of the hymn ‘L’Unique’ appeared with illustrations by Bram van Velde.8 He then included three versions of that poem in L’Incohérence, followed by the text of a lecture, ‘Hölderlin aujourd’hui’ (Hölderlin Today) (I, n. p.). He first wrote about Hölderlin for a piece in Preuves in 1961, and subsequently published …désaccordée comme par de la neige (… in discord as if by snow), in which a text of the same name (a quotation taken from his translation of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Colomb’ (Columbus)), is accompanied by that poem, as well as by the text of another lecture, ‘Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986’ (Tübingen, 22 May 1986).9 Hölderlin has been an important influence on French poets writing in the second half of the twentieth century, and it is frequently suggested that his work was mediated by Heidegger.10 According to Heidegger, Hölderlin shows that poetry is not ornamentation or exaltation, but rather the foundation of being through language; at the same time, it interprets the voice of the people

6 Bishop, Altérités d’André du Bouchet, pp. 120-22. 7 Friedrich Hölderlin, Poèmes, trans. by André du Bouchet, with engravings by Max Ernst (Paris: Jean Hugues, 1961); Friedrich Hölderlin, Poèmes, trans. by André du Bouchet (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963). 8 Friedrich Hölderlin, L’Unique, ill. by Bram van Velde (Paris: Maeght, 1963). 9 André du Bouchet, …  désaccordée comme par de la neige, et Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1989) (henceforth désaccordée / Tübingen). 10 Poetry is among the genres and disciplines discussed by Dominique Janicaud in his overarching study of the influence of Heidegger on French thought: Heidegger en France, 2 vols (Paris: Hachette, 2005). The relationship between Celan and Heidegger came to wider attention following discussion of it by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in La Poésie comme expérience (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1986).

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and is therefore situated between people and the gods.11 Heidegger sees poetry as a religious endeavour whose aim is to produce divine meaning, or to realise ‘Geist’ (spirit, or mind).12 ‘Gespräch’, or dialogue, is central to poetic writing, and it has been defined as a process of attentiveness that enables the brief eruption, or glimpse, of what a future divine state might resemble.13 Attentiveness and rupture draw Du Bouchet to Hölderlin’s writing:         […] Ce mot, dit ou écrit, qui est une lacune, un trou, et comme, dans la trame de notre langue, interstice aveuglant, percée à la fois du dehors et du dedans, je le vois – Hölderlin dit Bläue – où il éclaire, comme une blancheur…14     […] This word, written or spoken, which is a lacuna, a hole, and in the warp of our language as it were a blinding interstice, sign of outside and inside, I see it – Hölderlin says bläue – where it illumines, like a whiteness.15 In Heideggerian vein, Du Bouchet characterises gaps not as emptiness or pauses, but as both absence and presence, interstices expressed in spatial terms but producing the temporal phenomena of waiting and the transient presence of a word. Language is not just the ephemeral, though; it is also the material, the weft, that allows that lacuna to erupt in the first place. The term ‘weft’ is the same as Du Bouchet uses in discussion of Joyce, and it was also employed by Heidegger in his essay ‘The Way to Language’: ‘A weft compresses, tightens, and thus obstructs any straightforward view into its mesh. Yet at the same time the weft designated by our path’s formula is language, language for its own sake.’16 For Du Bouchet language is both the basis and the consequence of the movement that permits it to emerge. The discord of ‘…désaccordée comme par de la neige’ is the era of distress that Heidegger identified in Hölderlin’s work, after the gods have gone and 11

Martin Heidegger, Approche de Hölderlin, trans. by Corbin. David Constantine argues that Hölderlin’s poetry laments the loss of a sense of the divine and the consequent threat of meaninglessness: Hölderlin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 315. 12 Charlie Louth, Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation (Oxford: Legenda, 1998), p. 91. 13 Louth, Hölderlin, pp. 222-23. 14 André du Bouchet ‘Hölderlin aujourd’hui’, in I, n.p. I discuss Du Bouchet’s response to Hölderlin, comparing it to Philippe Jaccottet’s, in Provisionality and the Poem (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 165-87. 15 André du Bouchet, ‘Hölderlin Today’, trans. by Beatrice Cameron with the assistance of Madeleine Hage, Sub-Stance, 10 (1974), 5-13 (p. 11). 16 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, trans. by David Farrell Krell, in Basic Writings, pp. 393-426 (399).

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prior to their return,17 and also the gap that opens up between words’ material existence and the transparent understanding with which we normally expect to use language. This may include the distressing awareness of the difficulties of human communication, but Du Bouchet, in fact, values all that is resistant to understanding in language, and that becomes particularly evident when the encounter is with a text in a different language. Hölderlin was himself a translator from ancient Greek, principally Pindar, and the hallmarks of his translation approach resonated with Du Bouchet. Louth argues that Hölderlin draws attention to the foreign in his translations, using word-for-word techniques and translating his response to, or the gap between, languages. Moreover, Hölderlin’s own poems come to resemble translations, taking on the quality of strangeness relative to the expected use of German.18 While Hölderlin’s approach to translation could be seen to serve as a model for Du Bouchet, Hölderlin is also a link to Paul Celan, whose work is central to a second lecture Du Bouchet ostensibly devoted to Hölderlin: ‘Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986’. It concludes: ‘ayant parlé longuement d’un autre, je crois avoir parlé de Hölderlin / aussi’ (having spoken at length of another, I think I have spoken of Hölderlin too’ (désaccordée / Tübingen, p. 93). Du Bouchet reflects on temporal displacement at the start of the lecture: he refers back to ‘Hölderlin aujourd’hui’, the ‘today’ of the title now being ‘il y a quinze et même seize ans’ (fifteen or even sixteen years ago) (désaccordée / Tübingen, p. 53). The imprecision contrasts with his decision to specify the date in the title of the later lecture, which may be a reference to Celan’s poem ‘Tübingen, Jänner’ (Tübingen, January).19 Celan’s own lecture ‘Der Meridian’, which Du Bouchet translated for the first issue of l’Ephémère, mentions a journey made by Lenz on 20 January.20 ‘Quinze et même seize ans’ is disingenuous because he delivered the lecture in 1970, shortly before the probable suicide of Celan, so could have given a more precise date. The combination of contemporaneity and distance in time is central to this response to Celan, and it is reflected in his work as translator. He published translations of Celan’s work, and acted as mediator between the other contributors Jean-Pierre Burgart, Jean Daive and John E. Jackson, in the collection Strette. Du Bouchet published Celan’s Poèmes in 1978 17 Heidegger, Approche de Hölderlin, p. 60. 18 Louth, Hölderlin, p. 92. 19 Jean Bollack criticises Du Bouchet for not explaining that ‘Jänner’ is the date given for the Wannsee conference held in 1942 at which the policy to exterminate the Jews was established: Jean Bollack, ‘Entre Hölderlin et Celan’, Europe, 968-87, 193-207 (p. 195). 20 Paul Celan, ‘Le Méridien’, trans. by André du Bouchet, l’Éphémère, 1 (1967), 3-20. Du Bouchet later published a single-volume translation: Paul Celan, Le Méridien, trans. by André du Bouchet (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1995).

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and 1984, and Entretien dans la montagne (Interview in the Mountains), which had been included in l’Éphémère, in 1970, was published alone in 1996.21 Perhaps, then, the stated uncertainty with regard to the distance in time that separates his second lecture from his first is an acknowledgement that he must draw attention to the temporal hiatus with which he finds himself repeatedly engaging as he translates ‘aujourd’hui’. Celan, for his part, published translations of Du Bouchet’s Dans la chaleur vacante, Le Moteur blanc (The White Engine), and poems he called Vier Gedichte (Four Poems).22 It seems at first sight as though Du Bouchet’s approach to translation is squarely in the German Romantic tradition represented by Hölderlin. Antoine Berman outlined in 1984 what he presented as the previously overlooked German Romantic understanding of translation: Acte générateur d’identité, la traduction a été en Allemagne, de Luther jusqu’à nos jours, l’objet de réflexions dont on trouverait sans doute difficilement l’équivalent ailleurs. La pratique traductrice s’accompagne ici d’une réflexion, parfois culturelle et sociale, parfois franchement spéculative, sur le sens de l’acte de traduire, sur ses implications linguistiques, littéraires, métaphysiques, religieuses et historiques, sur le rapport entre les langues, entre le même et l’autre, le propre et l’étranger.23 In Germany, as an activity that has generated an identity, translation from Luther until the present has been the object of a reflection for which an equivalent could probably hardly be found. The translating practice here is accompanied by a reflection, sometimes purely empirical or methodological, sometimes cultural and social, sometimes outright speculative, on the meaning of the act of translation, on its linguistic, literary, metaphysical, religious and historical implications, on the relation among languages, between same and other, between what is one’s own and what is foreign.24

21 22 23 24

Entretien dans la montagne, trans. by André du Bouchet (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1996). André du Bouchet, Vakante Glut. Gedichte, trans. by Paul Celan (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968). Antoine Berman, L’Épreuve de l’étranger. Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne roman­ tique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 27. Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. by S. Heyvaert (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 12.

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Du Bouchet’s work corresponds to the approach set out by Berman in three ways. His translation practice is accompanied by a reflection on translation, in occasional texts such as his lectures and in ‘Notes sur la traduction’, which will be discussed below. He explores the relation between what is one’s own and what is foreign. Like Hölderlin and Celan, he renders the French of his translations foreign. Nevertheless, this chapter contends that Du Bouchet’s approach can be read as more than a modern French exemplar of the German Romantic tradition. That difference can be discerned on teasing out the implications of the idea of relations, which takes a particular form in his work.25 Du Bouchet’s practice of translation and reflection on it can be understood as cultural, in the sense that they question the treatment of ‘source’ and ‘target’ culture as categories. An approach that sees culture as itself in a process of translation, characterised by overlap and shifting differences, can also be applied to his work.26 Discussions of translation in those broader terms run the risk of minimising the importance of interlingual translation, however, and the notion of language being ‘other’ is important even in Du Bouchet’s writing that does not engage explicitly with foreign languages. More helpful is the proposition that individuals have multiple influences and perspectives, and cannot be assigned to a single culture.27 Édouard Glissant’s reflections on ‘relation’ have aided translation studies in that the term is premised on multilingualism, rhizomatic structures, and respect for others and difference: ‘ouverture et relativité’28 (openness and relativity). As Sandra Bermann writes, translation as ‘relation’ ‘would accept the “opacity” of the source text, while not overwhelming it or pretending to fully comprehend and transparently restate it in an equivalent semantic and syntactic structure’.29 ‘Opacité’, for Glissant, refers to the ‘irreducible singularity

25

26 27 28 29

Lawrence Venuti argues that Berman’s Heideggerian approach to translation is limited: by favouring a ‘foreign’ translation, Berman erroneously assumes that an unmediated ele­ ment of the source text remains: ‘The Poet’s Version; or, An ethics of translation’, Translation Studies, 4, 2 (2011), 230-47 (p. 241). See, for example, Doris Bachmann-Medick, ‘Meanings of Translation in Cultural Anthro­ pology’, in Translating Others, ed. by Theo Hermanns, vol. 1 (Manchester: St Jerome, 2006), pp. 33-42 (37). Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, ‘The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies’, in Con­ structing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed. by Susan Bassnett and André Lefe­ vere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), pp. 123-40. Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 107. Sandra Bermann, ‘Translation as Relation in Glissant’s work’, Comparative Literature and Culture, 16, 3 (2014) (last accessed 06/08/18).

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of a language or culture’;30 while relations between languages and cultures are prized, this should not be at the expense of individual distinctiveness, or else smaller languages and cultures would be overwhelmed. In its application to translation, ‘opacité’ and ‘relation’ together describe well Du Bouchet’s engagement with source texts and languages such as Celan’s.31 Glissant writes: ‘L’opaque n’est pas l’obsur, mais il peut l’être et être accepté comme tel. Il est le non-réductible, qui est la plus vivace des garanties de participation et de confluence.’32 (The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence.)33 Du Bouchet insists on what is intractable in language in both his poetry and his engagement with writing in other languages.34 In Glissant’s terms, the chaotic nature of the world and its relations sets off creative poetic energy, and Du Bouchet thrives on the ambiguities multiple relations produce.35 In a recent discussion of translation with respect to minority languages, Clive Scott argues for the importance of Edouard Glissant’s approach to translation, and then proposes his own term: ‘meshwork’: ‘meshwork’ encourages various kinds of promiscuity, lines bending or deviating to take account of associative mechanisms, variations and continuities, morphings from one language to another, fluid interactions, in short all the idiosyncratic paths of the individual wanderer.36 30 31

J. Michael Dash, Édouard Glissant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 180. Clémence O’Connor argues that Du Bouchet (and Heather Dohollau, the poet to whom she compares him) follow the Benjaminian line of seeing translation as relation: ‘Poetry as a Foreign Language in Heather Dohollau and André du Bouchet’, Nottingham French Studies, 56, 2 (2017), 188-200 (p. 191). 32 Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp. 205-06. 33 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 191. 34 Critics have grappled variously with the ‘opacité’ or the ‘intransitivité’ of the material world around. See, for instance, Seiji Marukawa, La Saisie de la matière dans la poésie d’André du Bouchet, Jacques Dupin et Philippe Jaccottet (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses univer­ sitaires du Septentrion, 1999). De Rijcke devotes considerable space to it, arguing that, in contrast to others who present matter as existing independently of language in Du Bouchet’s writing, in her view, ‘le moment de l’expérience de la matière du réel commence dès la rencontre dans le poème entre le sujet et le signe.’ (the moment of experience of real matter begins when the subject and the sign meet in the poem.’) De Rijcke, L’Expé­ rience poétique dans l’œuvre d’André du Bouchet, p. 11. 35 Dash, Édouard Glissant, p. 178. 36 Clive Scott, ‘Scots, Translation and Biolinguistic Diversity’, in The Made and the Found: Essays, Prose and Poetry in Honour of Michael Sheringham, ed. by Patrick McGuinness and Emily McLaughlin (Oxford: Legenda, 2017), pp. 95-108 (99).

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Contemporary cultures are interrelated in complex ways formed by the multiple allegiances and influences of individuals who, whether or not their personal biographies are multilingual, are often aware that their relationship to language is more than that of a native speaker of one language engaging with one or more ‘foreign’ languages. It could be suggested that Du Bouchet deliberately ‘foreignises’ the French he writes as part of a project of defamiliarisation that might be associated both with poetry and with Modernism, but such a process situates foreignness in the source. I would argue instead that the priority for Du Bouchet is to interrogate the notions of ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ more broadly. By stressing ‘meshwork’ in his essay, Scott nuances an understanding of translation that would advocate incorporating the foreign into a language or perspective that has an assumed integrity, acknowledging instead the porous boundaries between languages and cultures. He argues that this is the more sustainable approach, particularly in relation to minority languages. It can also apply to Du Bouchet’s writing on translation and to the foreignness of his French. His construction of novel forms and expressions is the result of careful attentiveness to the particularities of the languages encountered, combined with an awareness that these are in themselves hybrid and fluid. The relation that Antoine Berman describes becomes in Du Bouchet’s hands not a binary ‘own-foreign’ dynamic, however foreignised the ‘own’ might then be, but numerous, connected, delicate relations, dependent on the time they are in action rather than unchanging out of time, that take into account and reflect on the complex position of the self in relation to all that is other to it. The remainder of this chapter will consider two texts by Du Bouchet in order to demonstrate this process at work: his ‘Notes sur la traduction’ and his translation of Paul Celan’s poem ‘Schneebett’.37 It will argue that the notion of ‘tensions’ is helpful to see those complex relations in terms of temporal form as well as more-or-less theoretical pronouncements. Where the previous two chapters of the present volume presented gaps, subsequently nuanced as pauses, as the dominant temporal forms in Du Bouchet’s writing, this chapter reads those pauses in terms of tensions to show the active work necessary to prevent the pauses turning into stasis. That work enables the sustainable relationship between self and other that Scott sees as characteristic of translation, and it is why Du Bouchet’s interest in translation is not incidental to his concerns, but central to their development.

37

Paul Celan, ‘Schneebett’, Gesamte Werke, 5 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), vol. I: p. 168 © S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 1959. By courtesy of S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.

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‘Notes sur la traduction’

Du Bouchet’s ‘Notes sur la traduction’ were inspired by the experience of translating Mandelstam’s Voyage en Arménie: ‘la traduction’ suggests both ‘the act of translating’ and ‘the translation’. Originally forty-six pages long, the text was placed at the centre of Ici en deux in 1986. It appeared again in Poèmes et proses (Poems and Prose), a 1995 anthology composed by Du Bouchet, not simply revised, but cut to ten pages. Limited changes are made to the sections that have been retained; there are some minor modifications to layout, occasional substitutions of individual words, and a small number of sections appear in a different order in the later text. Much of what has been retained comes from the early and final pages of the text. The most significant change is an overall reduction in explanatory or theoretical pronouncements. Its theme appears to be the foreignness of French, and this comes across clearly in the longer initial version. Even in its later more concise form, he writes ‘traduire, je ne peux pas’ (translate, I cannot) (PP, p. 137), and, on the last page, ‘le français.   il me reste encore à traduire du français.’ (French    I still need to translate French.) (PP, p. 142). Then, after a gap of half a page, the text concludes: ‘on ne s’aperçoit pas que cela n’a pas été traduit’ (you don’t notice that it hasn’t been translated). The non-translation of French is deliberate if translation is understood as explicating, domesticating, making familiar. The final sentence is perhaps a play on the common expectation – from a domesticating perspective – that the ideal translation reads as if it were not one. Here Du Bouchet writes instead that one does not notice that it is not a translation. That is because the so-called ‘native’ language seems foreign – ‘langue étrangère, c’est la langue étrangère dans la langue’ (foreign language is the foreign language in the language) (PP, p. 142) – and Du Bouchet makes that one of the core aims of his poetic practice. He plays on the alliteration between ‘français’ and ‘fraîchir’ (freshen) to insist on the quality of freshness he seeks. The future sense, ‘il me reste à’ is juxtaposed with the perfect tense, ‘n’a pas été’ to remind readers that the process is a temporal one. If the positioning of ‘Notes sur la traduction’ at the centre of Ici en deux is significant, as argued by Michel Collot,38 so it is in Poèmes et proses : the last page of the previous text contains the word ‘fraîchir’ (PP, p. 132), and it is the title of the following text (PP, p. 143); both are visible because ‘Notes sur la traduction’ begins on an odd-numbered, right-hand page and ends on an evennumbered, left-hand page. Three languages are involved in Voyage en Arménie: .

38

Collot, ‘Inscrire la faille’, pp. 11-12.

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French, Mandelstam’s native Russian, and the Armenian he encountered on his travels there. All three languages are presented as foreign. ‘Notes sur la traduction’ opens with a quotation from Voyage en Arménie: Eau, en arménien, se dit djour. Village : ghyour.     (O. Mandelstam) (PP, p. 133) Water, in Armenian, is pronounced djour. Village: ghyour. It occurs in the first section of Voyage en Arménie, called ‘Sevan’ (Voyage 1984, p. 20). In the earlier translation by Du Bouchet and his son, they write the word for village as ‘g your’ (Voyage 1973, n. p.). As a transliteration, the spelling of the word is clearly flexible, and in his later translation into French, Christian Mouze chooses ‘gyouk’.39 Both words are necessarily foreign to Du Bouchet, as they were to Mandelstam, who here points out their similarity. Du Bouchet uses that similarity to structure the opening of his text. In the earlier version, this is followed by a section in which Du Bouchet adds the words ‘déjà’ (already) and ‘dès aujourd’hui’ (from today) to the mix, stating that he hears them in ‘djour’ (Voyage 1973, n. p.). It is useful, therefore, that he opted for the ‘r’ ending rather than ‘k’; there is no way of knowing whether the similarity with ‘aujourd’hui’ prompted that decision. ‘Déjà’ and ‘dès aujourd’hui’ both insist on the temporal positioning of the writer, distinct from, but connected to, Mandelstam’s time of writing. Du Bouchet’s ‘Notes’ are not in any sense a rewriting of Mandelstam’s text: the latter is a first-person account of a journey, including details of the places visited and people he met. Increasingly, though, Mandelstam ventures outside Armenia to bring in a multitude of other cultural references, largely to canonical figures in Western European literature, music, art, and science. A section is called ‘Les Français’ (The French), and in it he discusses Van Gogh, as well as mentioning Monet, Signac, and Cézanne (Voyage 1984, pp. 67-74). It seems that Mandelstam is as much a product of a European education and heritage as are his translators André and Gilles du Bouchet. In the opening section of Du Bouchet’s essay, the linguistic connection in the Armenian is made the basis of a link between two things, but not only through a play on sound and arbitrary meaning; Du Bouchet emphasises 39

Ossip Mandelstam, Arménie: Voyage en Arménie et Poèmes, trans. by Christian Mouze (Paris: La Barque, 2015), p. 16.

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Mandelstam’s point that a speaking subject’s relationship to the non-linguistic world is mediated via his or her language. He writes: village et eau.           et eau,          du glacier. (PP, p. 133) village and water.         and water,          of the glacier. The water and the village are placed in parallel, with a glacier added as a third term. Du Bouchet makes the connection between water, which ‘se boit’ (is drunk) and village, which ‘se prononcera’ (is pronounced) because words are to be experienced physically, through speech. His relationship to those two things is now determined by the words themselves. He said in an interview that: Si le mot apparaît vivant, comme quelquefois lorsqu’on lit de la poésie, il y a une matière de mots qui n’apparaît pas différente de la matière de tout ce qui nous touche et qui nous entoure, et de la nôtre elle-même. […] Il suffit de le prononcer sur ses arêtes, ses diphtongues, ses liquides pour que vous l’éprouviez…40 If a word appears alive, as is sometimes the case when one reads poetry, that is because there is word-matter that does not appear different from the matter of everything we touch and that surrounds us, or from the matter of us ourselves. […] It is enough to pronounce it in all its ridges, diphthongs and liquid consonants in order to experience it… While this is not a direct reference to Voyage en Arménie, it seems that Du Bouchet might have been struck by Mandelstam’s words towards the end of the book: La langue arménienne, elle, inusable : comme une botte de pierre. Oui, certainement, mot à paroi massive, interstice d’air dans les semi-voyelles. Est-ce à cela que tient son charme ? Non ! D’où provient donc l’attrait qu’elle peut exercer ? Comment l’expliquer ?  J’ai eu joie à proférer des sons interdits à la bouche russe, confidentiels, mis à l’écart, peut-être même, à une certaine profondeur, ignominieux. 40

Elke de Rijcke, ‘Entretien avec André du Bouchet’, L’Etrangère, 16-18 (2007), 277-98 (p. 284).

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 Dans une théière de fer-blanc, l’eau bouillait à gros bouillons, on y a jeté subitement une pincée d’un thé noir incomparable.  Me voilà dans le rapport qui est le mien avec la langue arménienne. (Voyage 1984, pp. 95-96)  The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are made of stone. And of course its word is thick-walled, its semivowels seamed with air. But is that all its charm? No! Then where does one’s craving for it come? How to explain it? Make sense of it?  I felt joy in pronouncing sounds forbidden to Russian lips, secret sounds, outcast – and perhaps, on some deep level, shameful.  There was some beautiful boiling water in a pewter teapot and suddenly a pinch of wonderful black tea was thrown into it.  That’s how I felt about the Armenian language.41 Mandelstam takes pleasure in the alien, elemental feel of the Armenian language. It is instructive that where Du Bouchet (and ‘Louis Bruzon’) use ‘interstice d’air dans les semi-voyelles’ (a gap of air in the semivowels), Mouze opts for ‘les semi-voyelles font une couche d’air’ (the semivowels make a layer of air); Du Bouchet and Bruzon stress ‘le rapport’ (the relationship) the subject has with the language (Voyage 1973, n.p.), whereas Mouze writes: ‘Ainsi était pour moi la langue Arménienne’ (such was the Armenian language for me).42 Not only does the word ‘interstice’ occur elsewhere in Du Bouchet’s writing,43 but both the notion of interstices and that of a ‘rapport’ emphasise the gap between the subject and the language in a way that is absent from Mouze’s translation. In ‘Notes sur la traduction’, Du Bouchet writes:                 alors je tiens à l’inanité des mots pareille à celle de la pierre qui a roulé par le travers de l’asphalte. .............................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (PP, p. 139)                 so I cling to the inanity of words like that of the 41

Ossip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, trans. by Clarence Brown, intr. by Bruce Chatwin and ill. by Hiang Kee (London: Next Editions, 1980), p. 57. 42 Mandelstam, Arménie: Voyage en Arménie et Poèmes, trans. by Christian Mouze, p. 58. 43 See, for instance, his text responding to Pierre Reverdy, ‘interstice élargi jusqu’au dehors toujours l’interstice’, in MDI, pp. 17-36.

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stone that has rolled across the asphalt. ............................................. ............................................. An echo of Mandelstam’s ‘botte de pierre’ can be heard here. Du Bouchet is promoting the opposite of what translation is supposed to do: to transmit meaning. Having no essential link to what they ‘mean’, words become things in the world alongside others, rather than allowing an abstract sense to emerge. The dots do not indicate an omission, but are present in the earlier version too, and they also have a material presence. A similar understanding of words as objects to encounter is visible in his insistence on the ‘intransitivity’ of words in discussion of Celan. In ‘Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986’ he writes:         […] un mot, voilà tout.   mot comme chose – c’est comme cela – qui n’est pas à expliquer.   inexpliquée. ouverte à sens et contresens, comme à tous les vents.   Compacte. intransitive. (désaccordée / Tübingen, p. 82)          […] a word, that’s all.   word like thing – it’s like that   –   not to be explained.   unexplained. open to sense and counter-sense, as it is to the winds.   Compact. intransitive. This sense does not only derive from his imperfect knowledge of German, although that does play its part in allowing him to focus on apparently meaningless sound. It accords with his own focus on the elemental world, and in particular its intransigent existence as ‘Krudes’ / ‘chose crue’ (a crude thing) (désaccordée / Tübingen, pp. 69-70). ‘Notes sur la traduction’ tends in parts towards an ‘intralingual’ as well as ‘interlingual’ definition of translation: as the conveying in words of the experience of that which is outside words, or ‘dehors’. As a result, critical discussion of this text also focuses on the writing of experience, taking proper account of the highly complex character of this body of work that refuses to distinguish clearly between language and the phenomenal world. De Rijcke, for instance, devotes considerable space to the ways in which Du Bouchet understands the ‘translation’ of experience.44 44

De Rijcke, L’Expérience poétique dans l’œuvre d’André du Bouchet, I: pp. 165-232.

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I would argue that du Bouchet’s treatment of words and things is more complex, however. When he states ‘dehors – non, ce qui est redevenu le dehors, je ne / peux pas le dire’ (PP, p. 136) (outside – no, what has become outside again, I can’t / express it), Du Bouchet expresses not so much a failure to account for the outside, but rather the importance of things becoming outside repeatedly (redevenu) and their necessary escape, through the workings of time, from the appropriating tendencies of language. He goes on: ‘garder un peu de cette montagne dans la langue’ (keep a bit of that mountain in the language); his task as a poet is paradoxically to ensure that the world remains ungraspable, to maintain the tension between speaking and things that prevents their elision.45 He produces, through forms, a tension that holds in a fine balance the wish to work on and with the other’s words, while also, in Glissant’s terms, allowing their ‘opacity’ to emerge in the target text. Language is like a mountain when it is rugged, hard to get a foothold on, and resolutely material. The gap between words and things separates the subject from the world, but his work is to maintain that gap because it allows him a new kind of access to things, a temporal one of contact through tension and attention that he characterises here, in a passage omitted in the revised version, as ‘attente’, which means ‘expectation’ while containing also the sense of waiting:          sur une attente interrompue, puisque la langue trouvera corps dans une attente, j’ai  –  sans le soutenir alors, atteint à ce qui est hors de la langue (Ici, p. 135)            on an interrupted expectation, since language will become embodied in an expectation, I have  –  without supporting it, reached what is beyond language

As was discussed in chapter three in relation to pauses enabling engagement with the natural world, Du Bouchet’s work proposes and performs repeated interruption. In this extract he looks ahead to the future (‘trouvera corps’) and links it to a past state (‘atteint à ce qui est hors de’) without conflating the two. The gap between times evoked is essential, and must be maintained as a tension whose borders do not meet, but are nevertheless flexible rather than rigid. 45

In an interview Du Bouchet explained that in his shorter texts ‘les intervalles ménagés ne font jamais tomber la tension du texte, au contraire, ils permettent une circulation du sens qui assure la continuité de la tension du texte.’ (the intervals never allow the tension of the text to slacken; on the contrary, they enable meaning to circulate, which ensures that the tension of the text is maintained.) De Rijcke, ‘Entretien avec André du Bouchet’, p. 288.

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Du Bouchet writes in this earlier, more explanatory version of ‘Notes sur la traduction’, ‘mais traduire est une séparation aussi.  traduire / la séparation’ (Ici, p. 98) (but translating is a separation too.  translate / the separation). His use of gaps ‘translates’ the separation described without constituting it. Most importantly, the gaps are temporal, a conception of translation very different from one where a translator brings a text from the recent or more distant past into the present. That is where his poetics differ from the German Romantic tradition of reflecting on the distinction between the native and the foreign, as well as from the Heideggerian notion of alētheia. For Du Bouchet, the multiple relations between languages and perspectives are kept in tension by writing itself. For instance, on the fourth page of the revised text, words including ‘monde’, ‘montagne’, ‘étrange’ and ‘langue’ are repeated in various formulations (PP, p. 136). The interruptions signalled by phrases such as ‘faisant brèche’ (making a breach) are performed by commas, hyphens, gaps and suspension marks, and Du Bouchet prevents the reader from grasping fully the conceptual meaning of his text by reducing utterances to a minimal form, such as the following:                      on comme ciel.               le point monde. (PP, p. 136)                      one like sky.               world point. He also finds ways of obstructing any single interpretation by devices including an opening ‘que’ with no previous object or main clause that it could reasonably follow:                que, pareille à l’air mouvementé, à l’air par moments lui-même inoccupé – l’air, largement  –  chose, comme montagne, s’attarde, plus rapide que moi, dans la langue. (PP, p. 135)            that, like stormy air,   at times itself unoccupied air     – air, considerably – thing, like mountain, lingers, quicker than me, in language.

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By preventing the clear interpretation of a sentence, he refuses to conclude. A delay in finding the verb is common in his texts, through the influence of German, perhaps, and here it occurs finally with ‘s’attarde’; the air was moving, but now it will rest, only for a moment. Just before the pronouncements of the final page, he writes that the ruptures that freshness carries are imprinted in language, each time, ‘comme du jour’ (PP, p. 141, like daylight). This return to the Armenian word – in his transliteration, djour – a rupture incorporated now through its splitting into two French words, insists finally that the elemental and the temporal are linked, via the openness that the text seeks to maintain, and the unspoken reference to ‘aujourd’hui’ (today). In summary, then, Du Bouchet chooses to translate texts that present difficulty, obscurity or rupture in various ways, be this simply through the unfamiliarity of the language in which they were written, the ‘difficult’ use of a language with which he is otherwise familiar, or the rupture and obstacles that he appears to experience during an encounter with their work. The intransitivity of language that he describes as being offered in Celan’s poetry, and which is evident in his encounter with Mandelstam’s text too, constitutes an obstacle within language as well as between languages. Contrary to what might be expected of a translator, he does not consider it to be a barrier that he must overcome. Rather the gap that occurs before understanding or translating is to be kept open by that translation; he must maintain a tension between languages, one that prevents the assimilation that comprehension would entail. It is clear from a letter Du Bouchet wrote to Celan in January 1969 that he uses intransitivity to establish a connection between writer and translator, and to insist on the unresolvable tension at the heart of that connection: ‘« Ce qui n’est pas tourné vers nous », nous le partageons du moins, et c’est par là que s’établit la vérité de notre rencontre.’ (‘That which is not turned towards us’, at least we share it, and it’s the means through which the truth of our encounter is established.)46 The following analysis of one of Du Bouchet’s translations will aim to show that he remains attentive to Celan’s language while not being ‘faithful’ to it; that is, he neither ‘domesticates’ the foreign text to the expectations of a French-speaking audience, nor simply ‘foreignises’ his translation in order to retain the difference of its source. That is because French and German – as was also the case with Russian, Armenian, and English – are not to be viewed 46

Letter from André du Bouchet to Paul Celan, cited in L’Étrangère, 16-18 (2007), p. 14 (empha­sis original). Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous is the title of a volume on Giacometti that Du Bouchet published in 1972 (QNPTVN).

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according to the binary familiar/alien. Rather, their interaction in these translations demonstrates the complex intertwining of native and strange that Du Bouchet finds in all language and interactions and which he wants to maintain in tension.

‘Lit de neige’

Du Bouchet was not a prolific translator, and given that his translations of Celan have not become standard texts in France owing to their unorthodox elements, it is striking that they have elicited a considerable amount of commentary. Wiebke Amthor devoted a monograph to the connections between Du Bouchet and Celan, including analysis of translations each made of the other’s work.47 That interest is likely to stem in part from knowledge of the friendship between Celan and Du Bouchet during the 1960s in Paris (in particular, Du Bouchet supported Celan when he was at the Hôpital Vaucluse), as well as from the divisive consequences of Du Bouchet’s lack of explicit discussion of the Holocaust in his writing on Celan. Bernard Böschenstein argues that Du Bouchet’s translations of Celan’s work differ from those he undertook of Hölderlin because they were more collaborative. Du Bouchet himself stressed that he worked from word-for-word French versions Celan produced of his own poems and then asked Celan to comment on his versions.48 Böschenstein lists changes that resulted from the collaboration, such as the substitution of the title ‘Parler, la grille’ (Speak, grill) for the initial ‘La parole, la grille’ (The word, the grill), and suggests that Celan’s language already offered such resistance that, unlike Du Bouchet’s approach to Hölderlin, he did not need to hold him at bay and could therefore follow his lead.49 Bertrand Badiou has argued that the collaborative relationship has been overplayed, referring to their correspondence and archives to show that Du Bouchet did not always take Celan’s advice, and that he never saw some of Celan’s comments on published versions of the translations.50 Nevertheless, their correspondence shows how much each values the other, and the 47

48 49 50

Wiebke Amthor, Schneegespräche am gastlichen Tischen : Wechselseitiges Übersetzen bei Paul Celan und André du Bouchet (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006). She analyses in particular detail Du Bouchet’s translation of ‘Mit wechselndem Schlüssel’ (pp. 224-44) and Celan’s translation of ‘Météore’ (pp. 244-59). Bernard Böschenstein, ‘André du Bouchet traducteur de Hölderlin et de Celan’, in Autour d’André du Bouchet, pp. 169-81 (174). Böschenstein, ‘André du Bouchet traducteur’, pp. 175-78. Bertrand Badiou, ‘« … vivant et redevable à la Poésie »’, Europe, 986-87 (2011), 208-31.

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importance they attach to their friendship when they encounter occasional difficulties in that relationship.51 Where critics tend to agree is that Du Bouchet moves some distance from Celan’s texts, although they draw different conclusions from that. Bishop, for instance, analyses Du Bouchet’s translation ‘Voix’, of ‘Stimmen’ (Voices), and argues that while the words are often translated ‘dans les traverses’, this allows him to produce glimpses of what he experienced when encountering the poems.52 The best known and most polemical response to Du Bouchet’s translations was that of Henri Meschonnic, who discussed the volume produced collaboratively with Daive, Burgart and Jackson, Strette. First published in the Cahiers du chemin in January 1972, his article was entitled ‘Et on appelle cela traduire Celan’ (And they call that translating Celan), and was subsequently incorporated into Pour la poétique II.53 He argues that the translators ‘massacre’ Celan’s poetry; they disrupt the order of the poems as they appeared and introduce, according to Meschonnic, omissions, additions, unexplained repositionings, non-concordance, inconsistency, changes between marked and unmarked elements, archaisms, calque and inversion, and they destroy metaphorical relationships that Celan set up. Michel Favriaud considers these claims by perhaps the most influential French commentator on translation of his age, and succeeds in nuancing them, proposing that the use of calque makes the translation into a dialogue, although he does admit to coming closer to Meschonnic’s point of view while preparing his article.54 Similarly, Evelyn Dueck examines Antoine Berman’s criticism of Du Bouchet’s translations as taking liberties under the pretext of poetic creativity; she concludes that Du Bouchet did not take liberties so much as break with standard French usage in order to privilege ‘le travail poétique sur la forme’ (poetic work on form).55 51

A letter from Celan to Du Bouchet from July 1968, for instance, which he began three times, discarding the first two attempts, insists that Du Bouchet must not put off the publi­cation of Celan’s poems in a journal that is, presumably, l’Éphémère. He protests that the reason Du Bouchet gave (that there was not enough space in the number) are ‘insuffisantes […] et, la vérité dans laquelle je situe notre amitié exige que je le dise aussi, ces raisons sont en contradiction avec ces poèmes mêmes, avec le Méridien aussi.’ (in­suf­ ficient […] and the truth I ascribe to our friendship means that I have to say it too, those reasons contradict the poems themselves, the Meridian too.) Letter from Paul Celan to André du Bouchet, 26/07/68, Chancellerie des Universités de Paris – Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet. Reproduced with the kind permission of Anne de Staël. 52 Bishop, Altérités d’André du Bouchet, pp. 110-12. 53 Meschonnic, Pour la poétique II, pp. 369-405. 54 Michel Favriaud, ‘Traduction. Poétique inachevée de la relation’, in Écritures contem­po­ raines 6. André du Bouchet et ses autres, ed. by Met, pp. 175-211. 55 Evelyn Dueck, L’Étranger intime. Les traductions françaises de l’œuvre de Paul Celan (19712010) (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), p. 438.

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Du Bouchet does indeed use techniques such as calque and inconsistencies, but these precisely bring forms to the fore. I shall consider the effects of his translation of ‘Schneebett’ from Sprachgitter (1959) for Strette, and what they reveal about his approach to translation, by comparing it to the translation prepared by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre for the Gallimard ‘poésie’ edition of Celan’s Choix de poèmes of 1998.56 The English translation by Michael Hamburger from the Penguin edition of his Selected Poems (1996) is also included for ­reference.57 SCHNEEBETT (Celan)

Lit de neige (Du Bouchet)

Augen, weltblind, im Sterbegeklüft : Ich  komm, Hartwuchs im Herzen. Ich komm.

Yeux, à ce monde aveugle, en la faille :  mourir – je viens, Une pousse rêche au cœur. Je viens.

Mondspiegel Steilwand. Hinab. Miroir-lune l’abrupt. En contrebas. (Atemgeflecktes Geleucht. Strichweise Blut. (Lueur entachée par le souffle. Sang par  strie. Wölkende Seele, noch einmal gestaltnah. Nuageuse l’âme, derechef trouvant corps. Zehnfinger schatten – verklammert.) Ombres des dix doigts – entreserrés.) Augen weltblind, Augen im Sterbegeklüft, Augen Augen :

Yeux à ce monde aveugles, yeux en la faille : mourir, yeux yeux :

Das Schneebett unter uns beiden, das  Schneebett. Kristall um Kristall, zeittief gegittert, wir fallen, wir fallen und liegen und fallen.

Le lit de neige dessous l’un et l’autre, le lit. Cristal après cristal, au temps profond réticulés, nous versons, nous versons et gisons et versons.

Und fallen : Et versons : Wir waren. Wir sind. Nous fûmes. Nous sommes. Wir sind ein Fleisch mit der Nacht. Nous sommes, chair et la nuit, d’un  tenant.

In den Gängen, den Gängen.

Dans les traverses, les traverses.

56 Celan, Strette, pp. 24-25; Choix de poèmes, trans. by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 140-43 © Éditions GALLIMARD. 57 Paul Celan, Selected Poems, trans. by Michael Hamburger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), pp. 122-23.

118 Lit de neige (Lefebvre) Les yeux1, aveugles au monde, dans le  mourir d’à-pics : je viens, dur plant au cœur. Je viens.

Chapter 4 Snow-bed (Hamburger) Eyes, world-blind, in the fissure of dying:  I come, callous growth in my heart. I come.

Falaise miroir de lune. Chute. Moon-mirror rock-face. Down. (Lueur tachée de souffle. Sang épars sur (Shine spotted with breath. Blood in  zones étroites2.  streaks. Âme se dissipant en formation nuageuse, Soul forming clouds, close to the true  une fois encore proche de la  shape once more.  configuration nette. Ombre décadigitale3 – position crispée4.) Ten-finger shadow, clamped.) Les yeux aveugles au monde, Les yeux dans le mouroir d’à-pics, Les yeux les yeux :

Eyes in the fissure of dying, Eyes world-blind, Eyes eyes:

Le lit de neige sous nous deux, le lit de neige. Cristal après cristal, Treillagés dans les grilles5 à profondeur de  temps, nous tombons, nous tombons et gisons et tombons.

The snow-bed under us both, the  snow-bed. Crystal on crystal, meshed deep as time, we fall,

Et tombons : Nous étions. Nous sommes. Nous ne faisons qu’une chair avec la nuit. Dans les couloirs, les couloirs.

And fall: We were. We are. We are one flesh with the night. In the passages, passages.

we fall and lie there and fall.

Jean-Pierre Lefebvre’s translation includes five notes, set out at the end of the volume, as follows: 1. Littéralement : Yeux (indéfini). (Literally: Eyes (indefinite).) 2. Strichweise : terme de météorologie qui désigne les précipitations intermittentes concernant des zones étroites. (Strichweise: meterological term designating intermittent precipitation in narrow bands.) 3. La Zehnfingerschreibmethode est une méthode d’apprentissage de l’écriture pour aveugles. (Zehnfingerschreibmethode is method for teaching blind people to write.) 4. Verklammert, juste avant la parenthèse (die Klammer), désigne aussi le procédé de suture des plaies ouvertes au moyen d’agrafes. (Verklammert, just before the parentheses (die Klammer), also designates a procedure for suturing open wounds using clamps.) 5. Gegittert : pris dans un réseau cristallin. (Gegittert: caught in a crystalline network.)

Du Bouchet’s choice of title is unexceptional since French requires the inversion of terms and insertion of ‘de’ to designate possession, except that

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elsewhere in his translations of Celan he chooses not to employ that structure; in line 4 of this poem he writes ‘miroir-lune’, for instance. In the first line of the poem, by contrast, he introduces into his translation of the first of the compound nouns a designation of ‘ce’, thereby indicating that the eyes are blind to this particular world here and now. The second compound noun is treated differently: a colon such as that employed by Celan later in his line introduces a pause and clear distinction between death and the fissure Celan conveys with ‘Sterbegeklüft’. Very quickly, then, Du Bouchet has emphasised the sense of rupture that he finds in Celan’s work, beyond that required by the translation of that particular noun; indeed, convention would suggest the use of a linking ‘de’ as Lefebvre has used. In place of Celan’s colon, he has inserted an em-dash, a common feature of his own poetic writing and one that works against the explanatory function of punctuation because it tends to remove the hierarchy between parts of an utterance and render ambiguous the relationship between them. Using an em-dash to translate a colon suggests that what follows the colon is an addition to what came before, rather than an extrapolation of it, especially when it follows the colon that itself separates rather than joins, and indeed Celan’s own use of the colon appears to have little clarifying function. Du Bouchet’s em-dash also serves to link ‘mourir’ and ‘je viens’ in an unclear way, implying that the self is moving towards death. Böschenstein has commented on Du Bouchet’s practice of translating omitted articles in Hölderlin’s poetry with omitted articles in French.58 The note in the Gallimard edition where ‘Les yeux’ is employed suggests that ‘Augen’ would literally translate as ‘Yeux’. These are neither eyes in general, ‘les yeux’, nor particular eyes, ‘des yeux’, and appear therefore disembodied, only to have their expected function denied by blindness. Omitting the article, which Lefebvre does not do, also allows him to retain the brevity and emphasis on ‘Augen’/’Yeux’ that emerges forcefully through repetition in the third stanza. Dueck notes that ‘Lit de neige’ is unusual in that Du Bouchet only omits one of Celan’s characteristic repetitions in this translation; she argues that omitting repetition allows Du Bouchet to emphasise halting movement.59 In the second line, Du Bouchet chooses ‘une pousse’, a term that emphasises growth as a concept (as opposed to Lefebvre’s ‘seedling’) and combines it with the intensely physical ‘rêche’, which is applied principally to the sensation of touch; Lefebvre’s ‘dur’ is closer to the more general ‘Hart-’. Du Bouchet’s outsider’s response to German is to see the physical within the abstract and to employ words in such a way as to produce that effect in French. It is true of his 58 Böschenstein, ‘André du Bouchet traducteur’, p. 171. 59 Dueck, L’Étranger intime, pp. 264-65.

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poetry beyond his work as a translator, and is akin to his practice of re-concretising nouns that have taken on metaphorical usage that will be discussed in the subsequent chapter. Although a focus on the concrete might be seen as one example of Celan’s influence on his writing, owing to Celan’s own tendency to create new compound nouns such as those in this poem (‘Schneebett’, ‘Sterbegeklüft’, ‘Hartwuchs’, ‘Mondspiegel’), it is likely to result from his encounter with German nouns more generally. A striking example of this is in his choice of ‘traverses’ at the end of the poem. Unlike the nominal ‘couloirs’ (corridors), it translates the process of going through that is also present in ‘Gängen’ (the plural of ‘Gang’, which comes from ‘gehen’, to go). Hamburger makes a similar decision with ‘passages’. ‘Traverser’ in various parts of speech is a central term in Du Bouchet’s œuvre, so while this may be an instance of his imposing his own preferences on Celan’s text, it could also be viewed as a response to the aspect of Celan’s word that he considers most important. ‘En contrebas’ (below) is an adverbial use that reflects the syntax of a phrase including ‘hinab’ better than the noun ‘chute’ (fall) does, and, although it is longer, it makes the line into a decasyllable. The first three lines of this second stanza are regular in Du Bouchet’s translation, including alexandrines in lines 2 and 3 (the first line of the fourth stanza can also be read as an alexandrine). Line 4 could be considered a decasyllable if the em-dash were the equivalent of a syllable in the pause that it introduces. It reflects a steady rhythm in the second and third lines of Celan’s stanza. Favriaud argues, contra Meschonnic, that Du Bouchet is sensitive to Celan’s rhythm.60 More broadly, he has ensured that the lines of his translation are visually very similar in length to Celan’s text. This constitutes the most noticeable difference from Lefebvre’s translation, particularly in the second stanza. Most obviously, Lefebvre privileges content over form when he translates ‘gestaltnah’ by ‘proche de la configuration nette’ (near to the clear form). Although attempting to express the concept accurately, this is lengthier than the source text. Du Bouchet, by contrast, emphasises the physical: ‘trouvant corps’ (taking shape; literally ‘finding body’). The lengthy ‘sang épars sur zones étroites’ (sparse blood in narrow bands) of Lefebvre’s translation accurately transposes the meteorological meaning explained in the endnote; while Du Bouchet’s ‘sang par strie’ (striated blood) is less precise, it, too, uses meteorological terms, and is sufficiently brief. The use of endnotes highlights the different skopos of the Gallimard edition, although both its Choix de poèmes and Mercure de France’s Strette are a selection from Celan’s work (the Gallimard selection was originally made by Celan himself and published as Ausgewählte Gedichte), and both volumes present parallel texts. The 60

Favriaud, ‘Traduction. Poétique inachevée de la relation’, p. 199.

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Gallimard ‘poésie’ series is more introductory and comprehensive than Mercure de France’s volumes, which focus to a greater extent on attractive layout and paper quality. Strette has no footnotes, no introduction or preface setting out the volume’s rationale, and it proposes a point of view through the texts alone, although it does state at the end which volumes the texts were taken from. The Gallimard edition includes an introduction by Lefebvre and a dossier showing Celan’s corrections to some translations of his work (not including Du Bouchet’s), as well as substantial notes. ‘En formation nuageuse’ (in cloudy formation) conforms to conventional French structures, whereas Du Bouchet’s ‘nuageuse l’âme’ (cloudy the soul) is a calque of German word order, one of the practices criticised by Meschonnic. Nevertheless it retains the emphasis on clouds of the start of the German line through inversion acceptable in poetic texts and is the same length as its source. Notes 3 and 4 in the Gallimard edition render explicit the importance of touch and damage to the skin through the references to a touch-based ­writing system and the suturing of wounds. While neither that translation nor Du Bouchet’s succeeds in conveying this through the line of poetry itself, the insistence on the corporeal that Du Bouchet has introduced earlier through ‘rêche’, ‘sang par strie’ and ‘trouvant corps’ compensates to a certain extent. Through his use of ‘réticulés’ (cross-linked), Du Bouchet retains brevity at the expense of a reference to the title of the collection from which the poem is taken, Parler, la grille. Most striking about this fourth stanza, however, is his choice of ‘versons’ (we overturn) instead of ‘tombons’ (we fall); ‘tomber’ has a meaning very close to the German ‘fallen’, including its various uses, and even the equivalent collocation ‘laisser tomber’ / ‘fallen lassen’ (to drop). Reasons for his choice might include the wish to incorporate the sense of ongoing movement that ‘verser’ as an intransitive verb contains, as well as the alliteration in ‘s’ with ‘gisons’, which allows the line to flow in a way that mirrors the rhythm of the German while not imitating its sounds; ‘tombons’ is weightier than ‘versons’. Both Du Bouchet and Lefebvre make use of the specific ‘gisons’ (lie recumbent), which can refer to sculpted figures lying on tombs (‘les gisants’) and the phrase ‘ci-gît’ (here lies). Moreover, ‘versons’ introduces a suggestion of ‘vers’ or ‘versifier’, rendering it somewhat self-reflexive. ‘Fallen’ does not have that connotation, but it does include the sense of ‘uttering’ when applied to a word. As a result, Du Bouchet’s ‘Et versons’ of the first line of the final stanza, followed by the colon, reads almost as an imperative. ‘Nous fûmes. Nous sommes’ (We were. We are) then takes on the quality of a schoolchild’s exercise in conjugating verbs. Du Bouchet chose ‘fûmes’ instead of ‘étions’, which would be the direct imperfect tense equivalent of ‘waren’, but its three syllables would lengthen the line, and German often employs the simple past

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in writing in place of what would be a perfect tense in speech, which would never be the case for the French imperfect. Finally, Du Bouchet’s translation of the penultimate line – a decasyllable – introduces pauses where there are none in the German (or in Lefebvre’s version, which is, nevertheless, an uneven eleven-syllable line). Du Bouchet’s version apparently contradicts the semantic meaning of the line, but the gaps introduced by the commas and word order exist in a relationship of tension with the ‘nous’, which here is made to refer to, and thereby to incorporate, both flesh and the night in a way that extends beyond what is achieved in Celan’s poem and in the translations by Lefebvre and Hamburger. A tension between rupture and continuity characterises Du Bouchet’s relationship with Celan’s work, to which he was close while forever remaining separate from it, and his translation emphasises the tensions in Celan’s text between his structures and standard German usage. This chapter has argued that while Du Bouchet is working in dialogue with the Hölderlinian tradition that conveys a writer’s encounter with the foreign language in his translations, his practice as translator and writer who reflects on translation goes beyond that tradition. Instead of demonstrating preoccupation with the native and the foreign, Du Bouchet questions the definition of both and the extent to which an individual can be secure in his or her relationship to either, and this lack of a settled position is presented as not only desirable but necessary. Although he published poetic texts exclusively in French, he was far from embodying the image of a native speaker of French encountering other European languages. Instead, his cultural influences and personal background were multiple and hybrid. His writing displays ‘meshwork’ between languages, cultural references, and shared historical circumstances across geographical boundaries. Paris was the site of his meeting and friendship with Celan, but it is striking that his reflections on translation take him away from Paris and from France. His lectures ‘Hölderlin aujourd’hui’, delivered in Stuttgart, and ‘Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986’ were given in Germany, and ‘Notes sur la traduction’ is based on Mandelstam’s travels in Armenia. These shifting places help remove Du Bouchet as writer and translator from a centre in Paris to which he is bringing foreign texts; instead, notions of centre and other or periphery become less meaningful, just as German or Armenian words intrude into his reflective pieces. Of course, both Celan and Mandelstam were marked by movement. Mandelstam was born in Warsaw in the Russian empire, travelled to Paris and Germany, and died in a transit camp in Russia. Celan, born in what is now Ukraine, survived forced labour, and after the war moved to Vienna, then Paris. Du Bouchet is an example of a writer who demonstrates the imbrication of languages and places in forming cultural identity, and his work reveals how

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that hybridity can play out at a very detailed level of form in the poetic text. He attends to the interstices that accompany connections between languages and people, and between the writer and language, and he shows that these exist and change over time. His texts then work to ensure that those gaps do not become ossified. The subject’s engagement with what he or she reads is bound to change over time, as will his or her relationship with the language(s) s/he speaks, so poetic writing that maintains tensions, rather than settling on fixed intervals between its elements, will better account for that process. The essay by Scott, cited above, also assumes an important role for time. He writes of ‘variations and continuities, morphings from one language to another, fluid interactions’. The tensions in Du Bouchet’s writing and translations offer a valuable contribution to our understanding of cultural and linguistic identities through the attentiveness to such morphings and interactions. Translation for Du Bouchet is presented as bodily shock by Paul Laborde, who argues, following Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, that translation is an encounter that never leads to possession.61 The role of the body in an encounter with creative works is even more noticeable in another form of reflective writing that Du Bouchet undertook: poetic responses to works of visual art. While some of his critical writing on poetry can be seen to perform a response as well as set out a judgment, it is in his poésie critique on art that the purely responsive approach was most developed. His writing on translation considers the translator’s relationship to foreign languages, including his own, and his art writing also starts from the basis of the writer’s relationship with the works of art, though this time he claims that it is one of turning away rather than becoming enmeshed. The study of those texts will enable us in the next chapter to see the consequences of the gaps, pauses, and tensions that construct Du Bouchet’s texts: a ‘slow’ engagement with the object of study that in turn invites the reader to embark on a process of slow reading. 61

Paul Laborde, ‘“Une sainte infidélité’. Proposition pour une politique de la traduction à partir d’André du Bouchet’, Intercâmbio, 3 (2010), 70-95 (p. 84).

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Chapter 5

Criticism and Slowness j’avais, allant au peintre, chaque fois à traverser la peinture1 I had, approaching the painter, to cross painting every time

⸪ The previous chapter argued that Du Bouchet’s relationship with translation was a particular form of attention that maintained tensions: between languages; between texts written in different times and places; and between the self and other voices. The same might be said of his critical writings, which are necessarily based on the distance between the object of attention and his own words, and also, in the case of visual art, on the difference between media. He responds to art creatively and is obliged by his encounter with something outside his own language and medium to reflect on his relationship to that medium. Moreover, critical writing and translation both involve bringing a source the writer has encountered to a new audience. The principal distinction between translation and writing on art is obvious: translation in the narrow sense that applies to Du Bouchet’s activities as translator (that is, not adaptation or rewriting) is conducted only through language, whereas art is – generally, and always in the case of the artists Du Bouchet writes about – an exclusively non-verbal medium. A further difference is particular to Du Bouchet, however. If translation is about maintaining a tension between himself as reader and the source text, his responses to art tend to involve moving away from the works in question: not attempting to depict them in words or offering a judgment on them, but turning away and creating a new work in response (Entretiens, p. 33). This chapter will examine publications by Du Bouchet that might be described as critical writing in order to determine what form that critique takes. It will be necessary to distinguish between his writing on other poets and on the plastic arts, though the two are connected through the sense Du Bouchet conveys of being transformed by the work he has encountered. A particular quality of attentiveness emerges in his texts, but it is surprising that, when he 1 André du Bouchet, ‘Cendre tirant sur le bleu’ (Ash Tinged with Blue) [1986], in EM, pp. 37-53 (37).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432888_007

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writes on visual art, Du Bouchet does not pay detailed attention to the work as a visual object. Attentiveness in this case is present instead in his verbal response, but also in the renewed engagement with the material world that the artwork inspires in him. Du Bouchet’s critical writing is innovative in its attentiveness, which, I shall argue, takes the form of ‘slow’ writing that encourages similarly slow, attentive, reading. Contemporary debates on new kinds of critique encompass a range of disciplines, though with an emphasis on literary criticism. In France, Marielle Macé is a leading thinker on ways of reading that allow for the transformative effects of reading and its imbrication with action in the lived environment. Rita Felski’s influential The Limits of Critique argues that the dominant theoretical models of critique either attempt to uncover hidden meanings or produce defamiliarisation.2 Neither, she argues, takes proper account of aesthetics or of the transformative effect of a work on the person who encounters it. Among those exploring what ‘creative writing and art history’ might mean in the field of art history,3 James Elkins regrets the speed with which academic criticism operates, arguing that it is at odds with the necessary slowness of the artist’s studio. He also practises novel forms of criticism by publishing his writings online and encouraging readers to contribute to them.4 Du Bouchet’s interest in art dates from his time in the United States when he was writing his earliest pieces in English. On his return to France in 1948, he worked for art historian Georges Duthuit, and was an editor of the review Transition, to which he also contributed.5 Artists were among those he met in Paris between 1949 and 1951, and included Tal-Coat, Jean Hélion, Alberto Giacometti, and Dora Maar.6 He worked for Duthuit again in 1958-60, and his first publications with artists were Sur le pas (On the Step), with Tal-Coat (SLP), and L’Ajournement (Adjournment), illustrated by Jacques Villon.7 I have discussed elsewhere Du Bouchet’s writings on Giacometti, and also the livres d’artistes he made with Tal-Coat.8 The present chapter will look at texts he published on less well-known artists than Giacometti, alongside 2 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 3 A volume of collected contributions to a research project with that title appeared in 2011: Catherine Grant and Patricia Rubin (eds), Creative Writing and Art History (= Art History 34, 2 (2011)). 4 (last accessed 04/10/18). 5 Details are included in the preface by Clément Layet to André du Bouchet, AB, p. 11, and the preface by Thomas Augais to LPNJE, pp. 9-29 (12-13). 6 See also the chronology in Martinez, André du Bouchet. 7 André du Bouchet and Jacques Villon, L’Ajournement (Paris: Le degré quarante et un, 1960). 8 Wagstaff, Writing Art; Provisionality and the Poem.

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extracts from his volume entitled Peinture (Painting).9 Those artists range from seventeenth-century Dutch engraver Hercules Seghers to Du Bouchet’s contemporary, Hungarian-French artist Miklos Bokor. Despite the differences between the artworks that inspired him, and despite the hallmarks of Du Bouchet’s creative prose writing that can be found in his texts devoted to art, his writing should not be judged on the extent to which he paints a portrait of the artworks or artist in question as opposed to using that stimulus to write pieces exploring his own concerns. It would be overly simplistic to suggest that in the art he looks at he finds what he wants to see, as has been argued in the case of Jacques Dupin’s response to Giacometti, described as a ‘wishful selfportrait’.10 Rather, by examining his texts through the lens of the transformative effect the works of art have had on Du Bouchet as a viewer and a writer, it is possible to study the results of the attention he accords them, and the kind of reading he incites on the part of the reader. The first section will briefly consider Du Bouchet’s critical writings on poetry, which, with the exception of his texts on Pierre Reverdy, follow critical conventions. Selected extracts from his writings on visual art will then be examined with reference to theoretical debates on critique, to discern the ways in which Du Bouchet’s texts combine the material and the temporal to produce a particular kind of critique based on form. Finally, a close reading of pages from De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture (Of Many Lacerations in the Vicinity of Painting) will explore how this plays out following his encounter with the work of Bokor.11

Du Bouchet critic

In one of his interviews with Du Bouchet, Alain Veinstein describes criticism as a hatred of poetry, and asks if criticism of poetry is incorporated into poetry itself. Du Bouchet replies:

9 10 11

André du Bouchet, Peinture (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1983) (henceforth P). All citations from Peinture © Editions Fata Morgana 1983. Roger Cardinal, ‘Approximating Giacometti: Notes on Jacques Dupin’s Textes pour une approche’, in From Rodin to Giacometti: Sculpture and Literature in France 1880-1950, ed. by Keith Apsley, Elizabeth Cowling and Peter Sharratt, pp.151-168 (166). André du Bouchet, De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture, ill. by Miklos Bokor (Le Muy: Unes, 1990) (henceforth DPD). Three aquatints by Bokor are included in a limited number of copies, and Bokor also provided illustrations for Verses (Torrents) (Le Muy: Unes, 1990). All citations © Editions Unes.

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Je crois que c’est la mesure du degré d’attention que chaque mot exige. Les mots n’étant pas à une place donnée, se requalifiant sans cesse, la conscience critique, qui déloge sans cesse les mots, va de pair avec la notion de poésie. Ça se construit et se défait. (Entretiens, p.18) I think that [it is,] because of the extent to which each word demands attention. Since words are not in a given place, and are constantly being redefined, then a critical frame of mind, which is always dislodging things, goes hand in hand with the notion of poetry. It constructs and undoes itself. Du Bouchet says that both poetry and criticism share the characteristic of dislodging words. Not only is this a temporal process, but Du Bouchet also departs from an understanding of criticism as dismantling its object so as better to understand it; instead, he suggests, both poetry and criticism are engaged in a process of building and deconstructing. As well as supporting the argument that Du Bouchet’s critical and poetic texts cannot be clearly distinguished from one another, his comment suggests that his own works might be a good lens through which to reflect on redefinitions of creative criticism. Critical reception of Du Bouchet’s own essays on poetry has noted that the œuvres he studied were close to his own in some ways, or influenced his poetic practice. Examination by Philippe Met of Du Bouchet’s relationship with the work of Francis Ponge, for instance, which covers both an essay of 1951 and Du Bouchet’s 1986 contribution to the Cahier de l’Herne devoted to Ponge, argues that there was ‘un échange de long cours, un regard réciproque porté sur les œuvres – chaleureux, attentif, bienveillant, mais parfois aussi désarçonné […]’ (a prolonged dialogue, a reciprocal consideration of their œuvres – warm, attentive, well-disposed, but sometimes also unsettling).12 He goes on to write that Ponge and Du Bouchet shared a sense of astonishment at the world, including in its most everyday particulars, accompanied by a feeling of ‘désarticulation d’un lien, et, pour corollaire, l’urgence d’une « poésie réparatrice ».’ (disarticulated connection, and, as a corollary, an urgent need for a ‘restorative poetry.’)13 12

13

Philippe Met, ‘Hors de l’usage et analogue à un lapsus », p. 59. André du Bouchet, ‘Francis Ponge, Le Verre d’eau’, in AB, pp. 43-46; ‘À côté de quelques mots relevés chez Francis Ponge’, in Francis Ponge, ed. by Jean-Marie Gleize (Paris: L’Herne ‘Cahiers de l’Herne’, 1986), pp. 54-67. Met, ‘« Hors de l’usage et analogue à un lapsus »’, p. 71 (Met’s emphasis). He is quoting from Du Bouchet’s Carnets, p. 6.

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The publication of Du Bouchet’s early essays in Aveuglante ou banale, including pieces on Hugo, Scève, Char, Ponge, and Pasternak, offer an invitation to trace Du Bouchet’s reactions to the work of poets he found engaging, and to consider the ways and extent to which he might have been influenced by them. There is evidence that reading those poets had a transformative effect on Du Bouchet and his writing. For example, he writes of Hugo: Ses textes avancent par secousses, vont de l’avant en franchissant des séries de coupures auxquelles rien ne prépare, des dénivellations brusques, des désastres inattendus déjà consommés, des failles qui sont comme les marges mêmes de ce mouvement d’expansion, de cette diffusion vague, qui, en effet, pourrait être interminable, à laquelle Hugo commence toujours par s’abandonner.14 His texts proceed by jolts, advance by crossing a series of breaks for which nothing prepares the reader, sudden slopes, unexpected disasters that have already taken place, faults that resemble the very edges of this expansive movement, of this vague diffuseness that, in fact, could be endless, and to which Hugo always begins by abandoning himself. Du Bouchet focuses on rhythm without discussing metre, emphasising the effect of Hugo’s texts in physical terms. He presents the reading process as an embodied one in which the reader is jolted, affected as much by the shocks produced in the time of encountering the text as by ideas or images that might be novel. Echoes of the ‘séries de coupures’ and ‘failles’ can be seen in Du Bouchet’s subsequent poetic writing, and the length of his sentence seems to mimic the ‘mouvement d’expansion’ evoked. Similarly, his essay on Pasternak opens by quoting a statement from Pasternak that also featured in ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’ in 1968: ‘Lorsque la place réservée au poète n’est pas vide, elle devient dangereuse’15 (when the place reserved for the poet is not empty, it becomes dangerous). Extrapolating the implications of this assertion, Du Bouchet writes a sentence that could sum up his own poetic writing: Par cette place vacante au cœur de son œuvre, Pasternak maintient envers et contre tout la chance d’une révélation presque chaque jour 14 15

AB, pp. 66-67. The essay, ‘L’Infini et l’inachevé’ (The Infinite and the Unfinished), was first published in Critique in November 1951. AB, p. 118. The essay first appeared in Critique in February 1959.

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différée. Et à travers un ajournement qui forme la trame même de l’existence réelle et vécue, affluent par instants les indices de cette autre réalité, de notre devenir qu’il ne nous est permis de connaître que de façon intermittente, et quasi illusoire, comme le bruit d’une cascade perçu de loin au hasard d’une halte, dans une gare. (AB, p. 122) By means of this empty place at the heart of his œuvre, Pasternak maintains, in spite of everything, the possibility of a revelation that is deferred almost every day. And through an adjournment that forms the very grid of real, lived existence, clues to this other reality flock momentarily, clues to our becoming that we can only know intermittently, and almost in an illusory fashion, like the noise of a waterfall in the distance noticed by chance when stopped at a railway station. As was the case with his reflection on Hugo, process and time are central. While the vocabulary of revelation and ‘une autre réalité’ suggests that he finds in Pasternak’s work a search for an infinitely deferred ‘presence’, the physical environment of the ‘existence réelle et vécue’ is insistently present. Du Bouchet would go on throughout all his poetic writing to explore the complex interplay of adjournment, becoming, and the immediate material present. Du Bouchet also reflected on criticism in his early essays. Among his unpublished ébauches (sketches) of this period are three short pieces about criticism, two referring to Hölderlin and the third to Baudelaire. Du Bouchet’s subject is ‘Le besoin assez mystérieux de la critique – qui nous pousse à commenter précisément le texte qui entre tous se suffit.’ (AB, p. 240: the rather mysterious need for criticism – which incites us to comment on precisely that text which is the most likely to be sufficient in itself.) He notes the paradox that such texts ask to be completed – his terms here reflecting those of reader-response theory – but that the reason we are drawn to them is that they appear to offer plenitude (ibid.). He writes that the desire for illumination becomes confused with poetic clarity: the metaphor of clarity recurs throughout the three essays, in this dual sense of the search for enlightened understanding and the light that is ‘aveuglante’ which poetry can bring. ‘Et c’est pourtant cette exégèse sensible qui fait corps avec le poème qui nous intrigue le plus. Que nous rencontrons, qui nous comble, et qui ne nous satisfait pas.’ (AB, p. 241: And yet it is such a sense-based exegesis that joins corporeally with the poem that intrigues us the most. One that we will meet, that completes us, and that still does not satisfy us.) This embodied account of the desire to critique posits a kind of criticism that is very different from the critic who would be distanced from a work, claiming the ability to see its meanings in a way that remains opaque to the

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text itself and to supposedly less discerning readers. Reading in a time and place, conscious that one is a body as well as a mind, is emphasised by Du Bouchet in his conversation with Veinstein: Le vrai lecteur serait peut-être celui qui fait confiance aux mots, qui se fait confiance à lui-même dans le temps de sa lecture, qui, ouvrant un livre, se trouvant face à une page de ce livre, n’oublie pas qu’il est là. Une page le ramène à l’instant où il lit, donc à lui-même, à ce qu’il apporte dans le temps de sa lecture, plutôt que de constituer un divertissement qui l’entraînerait ailleurs. En ce sens, le vrai lecteur n’est pas différent de celui qui se trouve impliqué dans un rapport avec quelqu’un d’autre. La différence, c’est que le lecteur est seul avec les mots qu’il a en face de lui. (Entretiens, pp. 38-39) The true reader might be the one who has confidence in words, who has confidence in himself during the time that he is reading, who, on opening a book, finding himself confronted with a page of that book, does not forget that he is there. A page brings him back to the moment when he is reading, to himself therefore, to what he is bringing in the time of his reading, rather than constituting entertainment that would take him elsewhere. In that sense, the real reader is no different from someone who finds himself imbricated in a relationship with someone else. The difference is that the reader is alone with the words in front of him.16 The essence of Du Bouchet’s tussle to understand his role as critic is that ‘[q] uand les images s’écartent, se sont précisées, c’est déjà le terme du poème.’ (AB, p. 242: when the images separate themselves out, have become clear, that’s already the end point of the poem.) The critic must seek illumination, but once that has been achieved the power of the text to produce the sense of plenitude is cut short. Deferral is therefore key, but deferral understood as central to the time-bound human condition rather than inherent in language (différance). Du Bouchet’s essay on Pierre Reverdy, ‘Envergure de Reverdy’ (Reverdy’s Breadth), was written in 1951 and published in Critique. Unlike much of his 16

‘Lui’ and ‘celui’ in the French source text refer to ‘le lecteur’. I have chosen to translate them by he/him in this instance to highlight the implicit positioning of the male reader in such a scenario. Du Bouchet made no statements on the assumed sex of writers and readers, but that absence at least suggests a male default that is more significant in state­ ments about embodied reading than in other circumstances. ‘Où’ is translated here by ‘when’, but the dual meaning of ‘où’ as ‘when’ and ‘where’ is particularly appropriate to the time and place of reading.

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poetry criticism (with the exception of ‘Baudelaire irrémédiable’ – Irremediable Baudelaire), it was also published subsequently: it appeared in Matière de l’interlocuteur, the title of which implies a focus on the material that is in line with Du Bouchet’s emphasis on embodied reading (MDI, pp. 39-45). The opening and closing pages are written in the relatively limpid style of his early essays, but the first paragraphs suggest that this might not be the most appropriate way of approaching Reverdy. In terms that recall Ponge’s L’Atelier contemporain and some of his poems of things,17 Du Bouchet begins: Comment aborder Reverdy ?  Quel poème detacher de l’œuvre en friche aussi éclairante que le jour où pour la première fois on l’aura entrevue ?  Elle pourrait, sans que l’essentiel en soit perdu, se trouver comme au hasard ramenée à un poème unique – jamais le même – interdit à la mémoire. (MDI, p. 39) How to approach Reverdy? Which poem to single out from an œuvre lying fallow,  as bright as the day you will have glimpsed it for the first time? An œuvre that, without losing its essential elements, could find itself as if by chance brought back to a single poem – never the same one – out of bounds to memory. It is difficult to know how to write about Reverdy because it makes little sense to analyse poems in isolation, he argues, and the same can be said about his own writing. Rather than discussing individual poems, the central section of the essay proceeds in a more fragmented manner, including brief statements as well as longer paragraphs, and incorporating unattributed quotations. Some sections also contain em-dashes, which would characterise Du Bouchet’s later poetic prose, and they enact the interruption that is a feature of engaging with a body of work not made up of discrete coherent elements, but rather forming a single, ongoing text with parts that appear at different times and in different places.  Matière de l’interlocuteur contains other more or less overt references to Reverdy: ‘Homère’ (pp. 9-12, Homer) includes mention of ‘Pierre’ (p. 11), and he is named in ‘un jour de dégel et de vent’ (pp. 49-50, a day of thawing and wind), dated 1962. Only ‘ordinaire’, undated (pp. 53-60, ordinary), includes no italicised quotations or direct references to Reverdy. Even that text, though, is connected to the others and to Reverdy through oblique references to aspects of his poetry, and in particular via numerous mentions of ‘matière’. ‘Interstice 17

Francis Ponge, L’Atelier contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1977).

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élargi jusqu’au dehors toujours l’interstice’ (pp. 17-36, interstice expanded as far as the outside still the interstice) is preceded by a quotation from Reverdy, attributed to him this time, but with no source referenced (p. 14). It incorporates Reverdy’s name and italicised quotations, but rather than the more straightforward discussion at the start and end of ‘Envergure de Reverdy’, it also demonstrates Du Bouchet’s poetic prose style. He writes, for instance, lecteur intermittent.          œuvre attenante au           lecteur intermittent. (p. 25) intermittent reader.          work adjacent to the         intermittent reader. Through spacing and repetition, he ensures that the form as well as the semantic meaning conveys the point he wishes to make, which is that reader and text exist in a relationship of apposition that is temporal, as was argued in chapter three about the relationship between subject and world. In Façons de lire, manières d’être, Marielle Macé emphasises that reading is not separate from life, but rather that the activity of reading is experienced as encouraging us to respond to dynamic forces. ‘[La lecture] invite à rejouer notre accès – attentionnel, sensible, existentiel – à notre propre environnement, et par conséquent, déjà, à modifier cet environnement.’18 ([Reading] invites us to replay the way in which we access our environment – through paying attention, using the senses, in our very sense of being – and, as an immediate result, to change that environment.) This development of reader-response theory understands reading as engaging us in a constant process of va-et-vient (toing and fro-ing) with our environment that enables us to act. Distraction is therefore inherent in attentiveness, and we should not ignore the fact that reading is a process. Macé cites Jean-Christophe Bailly’s assertion that reading produces a ‘très intense sensation de ralenti’.19 (a very intense feeling of slowing down). She goes on to specify that a range of temporal forms is produced by reading, and to argue that that temporality constitutes the meaning of the text: Cela nous conduit à redéfinir le ‘sens’ d’un texte non comme ce qui est visé, mais comme l’ensemble des événements mentaux causés par un 18 Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être, p. 32. 19 Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être, p. 31. Jean-Christophe Bailly, ‘La tâche du lecteur’, Cahiers de la villa Gillet, 1 (1994), 73-86, repr. in Panoramiques (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, coll ‘Détroits’, 2000).

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énoncé, puis par un autre, et dont le déroulement dans un flux temporal et individuel ( fait de vitesses, de ralentissements, de plateaux, d’intensités différentielles ) constitue la signification elle-même.20 That leads us to redefine the ‘meaning’ of a text not as what it tries to do, but as the collection of mental events provoked by an enunciation, then by another, whose unfolding in an individual and temporal flux (made up of speeding up, slowing down, plateaux, differential intensities) itself constitutes the meaning. Macé insists on the reader as an individual. In contrast to an approach to interpreting literature that would seek to ascribe meaning theoretically accessible to all readers, because it is to be found in the text itself or in particular ways of reading against the grain to uncover meanings, Macé presents meaning as emerging when a given reader engages with his or her environment through the medium of reading, and each of those situations is bound to be particular.21 Macé is at pains to stress that while this is a move from a phenomenology to a pragmatics of reading, and one that can have an impact on political action, that does not mean that it should be considered in utilitarian terms: ‘les livres ne s’appliquent pas à la vie, mais les lecteurs, dans la vie, s’approprient les formes qui les touchent, pour en faire, ou pas, leurs formes propres.’22 (books are not applied to life, but readers, in life, take for themselves the forms that affect them, to make them, or not, their own forms.) While Du Bouchet’s writing on poetry would seem to suggest that he shares Macé’s insistence on literature as transformative without advocating an instrumental approach to literary texts, their shared interest in the times of reading and writing is less visible in his texts on poetry than in another aspect of his critical work: his writing on visual art. Included there are reflections on speed and slowness, in some ways analogous to the ‘élan’ and ‘ralentissement’ cited by Macé, as well as formal constructions that produce times of reading. For that reason it is to Du Bouchet’s art writing that we can turn to understand what new forms critique might take.

20 Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être, p. 59. 21 Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être, pp. 17-18. 22 Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être, p. 202; 243.

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Art Writing

Du Bouchet’s writing on art is not all of the same kind. He published essays on artists including Poussin, Courbet and Géricault,23 but also wrote about his contemporaries: Giacometti, Tal-Coat, Bokor, Hélion, Bram Van Velde, JeanPaul Riopelle, Geneviève Asse, and, latterly, Nicolas de Staël.24 Giacometti was not only the subject of several essays, collected in the volume Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous, but also the illustrator of L’Inhabité (The Uninhabited), published after the artist’s death in 1967.25 An essay for a catalogue, Alberto Giacometti: Dessins (Alberto Giacometti: Drawings), was reworked and published as the small volume Alberto Giacometti: Dessin (Drawing) twenty-three years later, and Du Bouchet also wrote D’un trait qui figure et défigure (Of a Line that Figures and Disfigures) about him.26 Du Bouchet collaborated with Tal-Coat on two magnificent livres d’artistes: Laisses (L), and Sous le linteau en forme de joug (Under the Lintel in Shape of a Yoke), as well as the earlier illustrated volume Cette surface (This Surface).27 Hélion illustrated Au deuxième étage (ADE, On the Second Floor), whose title refers to the positioning of the artist’s studio. Du Bouchet, moreover, expressed caution about the term ‘illustrate’, pointing out that great illustrations can stand alone. In an interview he singled out pages from Laisses and from his translation from the German of L’Unique (Unique) by Hölderlin, for which Van Velde provided lithographs, stating that the viewer did not need to go back to the text (Entretiens, p. 72). Tal-Coat, Giacometti and Van Velde were the painters with whom he had a close friendship (Entretiens, p. 91), and that sense of closeness is often emphasised by those writing about 23

24 25 26 27

His early essay on Poussin, Orion aveugle à la recherche du soleil levant, famously inspired by viewing Poussin’s painting of that name, was written shortly before he left the United States to return to France in 1948, and was reworked much later in EM, pp. 7-13. A version of this, alongside short pieces on Vuillard and Delacroix, and multiple drafts of his wellknown texts on Giacometti, are reprinted in LPNJE. ‘Un critique exact’ (pp. 217-27) also reveals that he was familiar with Diderot’s Salons. In his preface, Augais quotes from the young Du Bouchet’s letters to his mother where he describes the effect on him of seeing some French art for the first time in American collections (p. 11). These essays are accessible, many for the first time, in LPNJE. Du Bouchet, QNPTVN; André du Bouchet and Alberto Giacometti, L’Inhabité (Paris: Jean Hugues, 1967). André du Bouchet, Alberto Giacometti: Dessins (Paris: Galerie Claude Bernard, 1968), and Alberto Giacometti: Dessin (Paris: Maeght, 1971); André du Bouchet, D’un trait qui figure et défigure (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1997). Sous le linteau en forme de joug (Lausanne: Françoise Simecek, 1978); André du Bouchet and Pierre Tal-Coat, Cette surface (Paris: Maeght, 1959). Augais traces the origins of their collaboration and Du Bouchet’s initial drafts in his preface to LPNJE, pp. 16-27.

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Du Bouchet’s responses to art.28 That proximity marks a difference from his insistence on foreignness and distance from the texts he sought to translate, as well as from the French language, even though the media of words and images could be thought further away from one another than two Western European languages, and in spite of his friendship with Celan. Indeed, the distinct media appear to enable that closeness. He produced other artists’ books in collaboration with Asse, Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies, and Albert Ràfols-Casamada.29 Du Bouchet’s art writing is perhaps best known from the volume Peinture, though the collected volume La Peinture n’a jamais existé (Painting has Never Existed) makes clear the breadth of his interests. Peinture was illustrated by his son Gilles, and the phrase ‘la peinture n’a jamais existé’ is taken from it (P, p. 50). He also published separate short texts also entitled ‘Peinture’, in Ici en deux.30 The word ‘peinture’ takes on shifting meanings, referring to particular paintings, the act of painting, and paint itself. It is characteristic of Du Bouchet to retain the ambiguity between parts of speech, incorporating the senses of ‘la peinture’ as an act, an object, and a material.31 Collot proposes that for Du Bouchet ‘peinture’ designates the dimension of experience that is beyond language.32 Du Bouchet specified that if painting does not exist, then ‘tout est peinture’, as we are surrounded by representations that we must pass through because they are not the purpose of our existence. He makes that passing through a material process, as the poet often expresses the need to move through the physical existence of a work of art in order to go beyond representation. Matter as opposed to representation is key to the short volume Une tache (A Stain).33 It is also blisteringly clear in De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture, with aquatints by Miklos Bokor, which has as its hinterland the suffering experienced by Bokor as a Holocaust survivor; memories

28

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30 31 32 33

In his introduction to Altérités d’André du Bouchet, Michael Bishop cites Du Bouchet’s phrase ‘Compagnie illumine’ (company illuminates) from L’Avril (Losne: Thierry Bou­ chard, 1983), p. 33, and writes that the volume he has edited aims to demonstrate the profundity of that company for the poet (p. 8). André du Bouchet and Geneviève Asse, Ici en deux (Geneva: Jacques T. Quentin, 1982); André du Bouchet and Joan Miró, La Lumière de la lame (Paris: Maeght, 1982); André du Bouchet and Antoni Tàpies, Air (Paris: Maeght, 1971); André du Bouchet and Albert Ràfols-Casamada, S. In the revised publication, those texts appear on pp. 89-90 and 141-42, and they are placed on either side of ‘Notes sur la traduction’, discussed in chapter four. Veinstein recalls that the first of two sets of texts called ‘Peinture’ in Ici was devoted to a particular work of art by Gaston-Louis Roux (Entretiens), p. 56. Michel Collot, ‘Inscrire la faille’, p. 12. André du Bouchet, Une tache (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1988).

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threaten to emerge as the acid corrodes the copper in the process of producing the illustrations. Written responses to art have been the subject of discussion from the time of Horace, and the French tradition in particular has kept open since the eighteenth century the question of what forms writing can and should adopt. In addition to innovation in the realms of nineteenth-century transposition of visual images into writing, and of the co-creation of livres d’artistes by artists and writers, which was at its peak in France between the Franco-Prussian and Second World Wars, French writers have reflected on the practice of poésie critique and experimented with the forms it might take.34 Visual art provides an opportunity for Du Bouchet to demonstrate careful attentiveness to the visual, but he does so without conforming to principles of ekphrasis when that is narrowly defined as the vivid bringing to life in words of a picture from visual art. Ekphrasis is more broadly understood by Murray Krieger as ‘any sought-for equivalent in words of any visual image, inside or outside art’; Krieger adds that his own most open definition of ekphrasis is as follows: ‘any attempted construction of a literary work to make it, as a construct, a total object, the verbal equivalent of a plastic art object’.35 Du Bouchet could be seen to aspire to such a construction, through his concentration on the double-page layout of his texts that, frequently designed without pagination, produces the sense that each page is a visual image rather than two stages, recto and verso, in the progression of a book. Nevertheless, writing for Du Bouchet could not be the ‘verbal equivalent’ of an art object because he does not consider the two media as distinct in that way. Both, in his view, are material. His writing therefore corresponds best to what Susan Harrow identified in 2010 as the emergence of a ‘new ekphrastic poetics’. It has two essential components: a focus on the material of the artwork, and a refusal to engage with the battle for dominance that has run through discussion of word-image relations. Harrow argues that ‘new ekphrastic forms […] are defined by their refusal to colonise art and by their 34

35

The tradition extends from Diderot’s Salons through Baudelaire’s reflections on the best kind of criticism (‘partiale, politique, passionnée’ (partial, political, impassioned: Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1846 in Critique d’art, ed. by Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 75-156 (78)) to Surrealist writers who responded to art as part of the Surrealist project, which did not separate creativity in different media. In the latter part of the twentieth century much of the best known poésie critique was written by poets with whom Du Bouchet is frequently associated, such as Yves Bonnefoy and Jacques Dupin. Murray Krieger, ‘The Problem of Ekphrasis: Image and Words, Space and Time – and the Literary Work’, in Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis, ed. by Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998), pp. 3-20 (4), emphasis original.

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preoccupation with the visual image that obstructs its own incorporation by the textual medium’.36 Alessandro De Francesco argues that what draws Du Bouchet to painting is above all the fact that a painting is a three-dimensional object: one can look sideways at it and see its thickness. It is that ‘épaisseur’ that Du Bouchet seeks in language, as set out in relation to the foreign language in chapter four. The materiality of the artwork enables him to reconnect with the materiality of the world that is beyond both the edges of the canvas and his own arsenal of words. His relationship with art does not mirror the one that he has with other poetry written in French. He can critique or write appreciations of that poetry, drawing out of it features that can also be identified in his own poems, but in order to write the kind of criticism that does not tend towards bringing its object into sharp focus, he needs it to be a response to a physical object that was produced using only non-verbal materials. Rita Felski argues that terms referring to action in and on the material world have become metaphors in the functioning of modern criticism. Felski characterises criticism as falling into two categories, and she advocates looking for an alternative to both. First, she describes Marxist and Freudian approaches through the metaphor of ‘digging down’, or ‘unearthing’, explaining that the language used to describe what it should do is a lexicon of symptoms, rifts, or fissures.37 The task of the critic was to look beneath the surface, uncovering hidden motivations and assumptions, reading against the grain and working in the gap that would allow a more truthful interpretation to emerge. Then, in reaction to that approach, she writes, criticism promoted defamiliarisation, as critics were suspicious of any argument based on what was deemed ‘natural’, and revealed that discourses operated in circulation. Metaphors here rested on notions of surface, slippage, and deferral, and critics were suspicious of clarity.38 In fact, she argues, writing that defamiliarises, while working against slogans and other overly facile phrases, ends up being elitist in that it excludes some readers while only being accessible to an ‘in-group’.39 In place of both of those dominant approaches, Felski welcomes the development she describes as a return to aesthetics and form, where interpretation is a process of forging links and the experience of an artwork is one of transformation.40 Her book is largely devoted to setting out the kinds of criticism she rejects, which include 36

Susan Harrow, ‘New Ekphrastic Poetics’, New Ekphrastic Poetics, ed. by Susan Harrow (= French Studies, 64, 3 (2010)), pp. 255-64 (258). 37 Felski, The Limits of Critique, pp. 53-56. 38 Felski, The Limits of Critique, pp. 70-72. 39 Felski, The Limits of Critique, pp. 137-38. 40 Felski, The Limits of Critique, pp. 179.

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not only attempts to uncover meaning or to defamiliarise, but also New Historicist readings of texts in their contexts, which, she argues, treat those texts as having an unchanging meaning.41 Only in the final chapter and the brief conclusion does she advocate a different kind of critique: one that acknowledges the effect of the work on the critic. While Felski implicitly focuses on critique of written texts, in art history, James Elkins takes issue with some art historians’ desire for rapid insights, arguing that as a priority it is at odds with their purported claim to take a material approach. Elkins suggests that art history tends to treat artworks as images, or, at best, as pictures, rather than studying them as paintings. That is because articulating materiality takes time, for which the pressures of academic publishing do not allow.42 The material and the transformative coincide in the temporal, corporeal situatedness of the critic.43 As editor of a volume that examines creative alternatives to academic art historical writing, Catherine Grant argues that, in many instances, ‘the body of the art historian is considered as a way into the desires and performances that take place in the writing of a history, the body of the text focuses on the materiality and visual nature of words on a page, and the body of the artist is discussed in relation to how art history constructs a narrative around and of an artist and their work.’44 Du Bouchet’s writing on art takes forward the debate on what criticism can and should be. It achieves this in two ways: by reflecting on – and reconcretizing – metaphors associated with criticism, and by producing a temporal model that might be called ‘slow criticism’. In this way, the criticism advocated by Felski, the central role accorded to the material in creative art writing, and even Macé’s transformed reader, can be applied also to forms of art criticism in which Du Bouchet is a viewer who encourages a particular kind of reading of his texts. The contention of this chapter is that Du Bouchet’s art writing demonstrates how properly timebound, material criticism can be achieved through the careful attention paid to forms.

41 Felski, The Limits of Critique, pp. 154-57. 42 James Elkins, ‘On Some Limits of Materiality in Art History’, 31: Das Magazin des Instituts für Theorie [Zürich], 12 (2008), 25-30. 43 The allusive and evocative work of Georges Didi-Huberman takes issue with art history’s purported attempts to acquire knowledge about art, and reflects instead on what it means for us to ‘poser notre regard’ on a work of art: Georges Didi-Hubmerman, Devant l’image. Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris: Minuit, 1990). 44 Catherine Grant, ‘“A narrative of what wishes what it wishes it to be”’: An Introduction to “Creative Writing and Art History”’, Creative Writing and Art History, pp. 230-43 (231).

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Du Bouchet’s Slow Art Writing

Slowness is bound up with the thickness of the work of art, which appears most clearly in Du Bouchet’s evocations of depth, ruptures, and surface. These are precisely the metaphors employed by Felski to describe actions carried out – or aspired to – by the forms of critique that she rejects. Du Bouchet’s use of them, however, carries an opposite force. He succeeds in re-concretizing the metaphors. When gaps and rifts occur in his writings on art, these are physical forms he has seen in the art, and which the art in turn has enabled him to see in his environment. The works of art have three-dimensional depth and that is what embeds them in the world. Similarly, movement across surfaces and across the support of the canvas evokes human reactions to movement through a physical environment: far from suggesting circulating discourses, it evokes walking in which the body experiences the uneven texture of the ground.45 For example, he writes of landscapes by Segers [sic]:                        … terre ouverte – à elle-même son sillage – où l’épaisseur au monde a repris…46                         … open earth – being its own wake – when the thickness in the world has begun again… The effect of opening up is not about revealing hidden depth, but rather an acknowledgement of the world’s three-dimensional existence. Du Bouchet always associates that materiality with movement and change (‘a repris’) so that engagement with it is not a situation of stasis.47 He links the surface of the 45

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‘Support’ is a key term in Du Bouchet’s art writing. It refers to the material on which an image is drawn, painted, or engraved, and is present both as the background on which that image appears and also an intrinsic, physical part of the artwork. He employs the term repeatedly in the text ‘Un mot, ce n’est pas le sens’ (A Word: it is not meaning…), endowing it with the power to illuminate such that material form determines meaning: ‘le support, éclairant à côté […] // support et / futur éclairant la tache’ (the support casting light alongside […] // support / and future casting light upon the marking): André du Bouchet, Un mot : ce n’est pas le sens, trans. by Michael Bishop (Halifax: VVV, 2013), pp. 25 / 68-69. André du Bouchet, ‘Hercules Segers’, I, n. p. Du Bouchet omits the ‘h’ that is generally included in Seghers’ name. Bishop reads Du Bouchet’s writing on Segers as presenting creation in terms of dispersal and ‘le rétablissement d’une plénitude faite d’absence’ (the re-establishing of a plenitude

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world with the surface of the paper – both the artist’s and the writer’s – because he does not want to place the world and representations of it in different categories:                           face de la page n’est que le dernier état de l’épaisseur.  Je ne veux pas la ramener à la surface. (P, p. 12)                          face of the page is only the final state of thickness.   I do not want to bring it back to the surface. ‘Face’ here is distinguished from ‘surface’ because it is part of thickness, not an opposite term. Du Bouchet plays on the sense it evokes of being ‘face on’ to something seen: ‘Je me détourne pour être de face, à nouveau.’ (I, n. p.: I turn away so as to be face on, once again.) In this text inspired by the work of his contemporary Bram van Velde he spells out the way in which art enables him to re-encounter the material world: the artwork causes him to turn from it not towards his own internal world, inspired to create his own work through some thought or memory it might have evoked, but rather towards the world that is the same as painting, because both are matter. The world precedes and succeeds the work of the artist. Michael Bishop has described Du Bouchet’s response to colour, which is central to La Couleur (Colour) while also being a feature of his other art writing, as ‘un simple vestige, primitif et primordial, de ce qui est’ (just a vestige, primitive and primordial, of what is.)48 Du Bouchet is not turning his back on painting but finding a way of leaving – temporarily – the representative function of language such that he is then able to take up words again via a closer connection with the material world. As De Francesco writes of Du Bouchet, ‘afin que le réel ne se perde pas, il faut concevoir un espace de possibilité langagière qui relève du non-verbal.’ (so that the real is not lost, we have to conceive of a linguistic space of possibility that comes from the non-verbal.)49

made from absence): Bishop, Altérités d’André du Bouchet, pp. 37-38. 48 Bishop, Altérités d’André du Bouchet, p. 144; André du Bouchet, La Couleur (Paris: Le Collet de buffle, 1975) (henceforth Couleur), n. p. Colour appears in the title of ‘Deux traces vertes’ [1991] (EM, pp. 77-81), and is central to two books he produced with Tal Coat: Laisses, and Sous le linteau en forme de joug. 49 Alessandro De Francesco, Continuum, p. 227.

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At first sight, Du Bouchet’s process of turning away from the work of art suggests speed: […] je me suis souvent aperçu que, quand une peinture me touche, je ne m’y attarde pas ; elle est l’amorce d’une accélération de temps qui m’incite à tourner très rapidement le dos à la peinture et à m’engager dans la lumière de l’espace qu’elle m’a ouvert. (Entretiens, p. 33) […] I have often noticed that, when a painting touches me, I don’t linger on it; it starts off a temporal acceleration that encourages me to turn my back on the painting very quickly and immerse myself in the light of the space that it has opened up for me. There are few mentions of ‘lenteur’ in Du Bouchet’s writing, and he does not tend to recommend it. For example, he writes in La Couleur: ( il y a dans l’étendue sans face une anxiété tâtonnante qui anticipe, et s’attarde, avec la lenteur de la coulée, lenteur sans frein, comme pour localiser l’endroit où l’emportement s’arrêtera – mais il ne s’arrête pas, et je ne reste pas sur un rapport de face… (Couleur, n. p.) ( there is in the surroundings without aspect a palpable anxiety that anticipates, and lingers, with the slowness of a sliding, slowness without a brake, as if to locate the place where the transport will stop  –  but it does not stop, and I do not stay bound in a relationship of aspect …

He discerns a ‘lenteur sans frein’, a desire that combines anxious anticipation and an attempt to locate the point where movement stops, but there is no such point. A deliberate slowing down in order to pinpoint something about the world is bound to fail. Indeed, he described a poem as embodying ‘le précipité du mot’ (words’ preciptateness).50 Instead, we read in Peinture, he advocates ‘urgence’ (urgency), which is distinct from ‘la hâte’ (P, p. 58, haste). Haste, paradoxically, would be a desperate attempt to grasp and halt the passing of time. In advocating ‘urgence’ Du Bouchet is stressing the need to discern what is important, to pay attention to forms of time as they move on. The kind of relationship to time that Du Bouchet proposes is outlined here:

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André du Bouchet, Surpris par la nuit, France Culture, 24 January 1995.

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                peinture : je la vois dans la durée du temps qui, à intervalles répétés, doit être ramené à rien. j’écris pour retrouver – y ayant corps – l’épaisseur du temps dans laquelle, tête aux deux yeux confondus : c’est la peinture, je la vois ou je l’ai vue. (P, p. 14) painting: I see it in the duration of time that, at repeated intervals, must be brought to nothing. I write to retrieve – being bodily there – the thickness of time in which, head and eyes confounded: it’s painting, I see it or I have seen it. Variations on the phrase ‘dans la durée du temps’ occur more frequently than evocations of either slowness or speed, and it is in his concern to show the reader how to look and to read in the process of time passing that Du Bouchet produces his own urgent slowness. embarras sur le point vide.           mais je ne vois pas            autrement que dans la durée du temps.            qui, « n’ayant pas le temps », hasarde que là, il n’y a rien, tout entier passera, perdant jusqu’à son retard, à côté. .................................................................. .................................................................. (P, p. 47) trouble at the empty point              but I do not see            other than in the duration of time.          whoever, ‘not having the time’, guesses that there, there is nothing, will entirely, losing even his lateness, miss out. ...................................................................... ...................................................................... This is a clear example of the importance of taking time – people who claim not to have time in fact lose the ability to notice the world around – and also of making time. The guillemets are more than just quotation marks: they draw attention to the metaphor of ‘having time’, which is precisely what is always impossible for us. Du Bouchet makes time for the reader, not only pointing out our habitual failure to live attentively, but also incorporating both a white space that encourages us to pause, and two lines of dots, which appear to

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indicate that ‘le point vide’ is not empty. Martinez, as part of his argument that Du Bouchet’s poetry produces an event with words going beyond semantic meaning, suggests that the dots, in contrast to the use of a line of dots by Victor Hugo to designate a gap, constitute ‘la trace d’un propos qui ne s’est pas suffisamment matérialisé pour constituer un énoncé’.51 (the trace of a proposition that has not materialised enough to constitute an enunciation.) I would agree that they have a material existence rather than signalling absence, but would emphasise that they incite attentiveness: these are small, repeated instances of material detail that we are encouraged to look at, and not to pass by. Du Bouchet writes in a text on Segers that ‘les points d’arrêt / eux-mêmes sont en déplacement’ (the stopping points / are themselves on the move): Ce qui est soustrait – à la lecture se soustrait comme en hauteur – // [page break] une parole ponctuelle, un moment, le soutiendra…  parole ponctuelle arrêtée, de même que son lecteur, sur la cassure. Mais les points d’arrêt eux-mêmes sont en déplacement… témoins – sur une interruption – en déplacement… (I, n. p.) That which is taken away – from reading takes itself away as if upright – // [page break] an isolated word, a moment, will support it…   isolated word stopped, as its reader is, at the break. But the stopping points themselves are on the move… witnesses – at an interruption – on the move… The transformative effect this process can have on the reader of a text is explicitly signalled: both the word and the reader are obliged briefly to hesitate at the point of rupture. Du Bouchet relates art to reading in the foreign language in his text on Segers by adding marginal notes to his text in Dutch; these are likely to be unattributed quotations, and they recall the marginal additions in German in his writings on Hölderlin and Celan. The writing that best accounts for the sense of opening up a thickness in the work of art is one that is also ruptured, and that is why Du Bouchet aims to create poetic writing that is disrupted and causes the reader to stop, repeatedly, much as his poetry as 51 Martinez, André du Bouchet, p. 79.

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discussed in chapter three produced moments of encounter with the physical environment.52 Disruption can be seen in action in formal terms in any number of Du Bouchet’s texts: not only those on visual art, but particularly in his work from the 1970s onwards, which follows his encounters with artists and texts in other languages. In the margins of ‘Hercules Segers’ we read the comment in Dutch ‘Het landschap met de twee windmolens’, a title and description (Landscape with two windmills) that draws attention to the space of the page by its marginal status and also puts distance between the francophone reader and the subject by including the untranslated Dutch words. The central column includes: … planitude de pays bas à l’infini – hoe land – hollow land – plus bas que le niveau marin – à vocables de clochers, et qui se ramasse en volumes noueux… l’infiniment bas retourné en hauteur éperdue… ne pouvant qu’intimer, en le conglobant, ici… signifier hollande sans nom, comme pierre – de front, ou rocher à l’aplomb … Le réel qui tranche, scindé lui-même, se dépassera, tremblant parfois, sans être franchi… (I, n. p.) … planeness of the netherlands for ever – hoe land hollow land – below sea level – in bells’s vocables, and which crouches in knotted volumes… the infinitely low turned into wild height… able only to imitate, encompassing it here… meaning nameless holland, like stone – face on, or rock directly under … The real that slices, in turn divided, will exceed itself, sometimes trembling, without being transgressed… The reader is not given a clear picture of the artwork as would be required by ‘descriptive ekphrasis’.53 A sense of the flat landscape is conveyed nonetheless, partly through the naming of recognisable features – low-lying land below sea 52

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De Rijcke identifies six features of Du Bouchet’s writing that serve to slow it down: slowing down the sentence; isolating single words with breaks; immobilising words; giving weight to words; making words ‘slip’ in their meaning; and enabling words to open out onto the material world (De Rijcke, L’Expérience poétique dans l’œuvre d’André du Bouchet, vol. II: pp. 140-44). Valerie Robillard, ‘In Pursuit of Ekphrasis (an intertextual approach) in Pictures into Words, ed. by Robillard and Jongeneel, pp. 53-72.

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level and church bells – and partly through wordplay involving English and Dutch where ‘hollow’ and ‘hoe’, both evoking ruptures in the ground, are linked to ‘Hollande’. ‘Vocables’ – words composed of sounds without regard to meaning – are ‘intransitive’ in the sense discussed in chapter four, and are present as elements of foreign languages Dutch and English as well as novel words (‘planitude’) and phrases (‘en volumes noueux’). This extract is a typical example of the way in which Du Bouchet combines attention to linguistic detail with a focus on features in the natural and elemental landscape. His attentiveness to form is also in evidence. Du Bouchet would classify the text as prose, owing to its clear object, but it blurs the boundary with poetry because the central text takes vertical form. There is movement, as ever, ‘se dépassera’, but it obliges the reader to slow down through its incorporation of em-dashes and suspension marks, the building up of relative clauses, and the internal echoes and assonance that combine with enjambement to create echoes. The text as a whole does not appear as a verbal equivalent of a particular artwork because it responds to Segers more broadly. Rather, it engages the reader in a process of attending to the text in relation to the visual and material elements it includes. The reader’s attention is captured and encouraged over the course of longer texts as well as within short extracts. For instance, Peinture’s 176 pages invite a reading slowed down through the repetition with variation of words and phrases, as was discussed in chapter three. je suis sorti            mais je n’ai plus à sortir           pour être dehors (p. 50) […]                 tout de même, je suis sorti, quoique n’ayant pas eu à sortir pour être dehors. (p. 51) I have gone out          but I no longer need to go out           to be outside […]                     all the same, I have gone out, despite not having needed to go out in order to be outside. Here Du Bouchet is playing with the use of the verb ‘être’ as auxiliary in the perfect tense. Despite the straightforward meaning of the phrase ‘je suis sorti’, it contains the suggestion of a passive construction. This might be quickly dismissed by the reader, but returns with greater force as a possible meaning when the phrase recurs over a line break, enjambement confronting the reader with ‘je suis’. Consequently, ‘pour être dehors’ is also coloured by the potential

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to give greater weight to the verb ‘être’: ‘to be, outside’, rather than simply ‘be outside’. The verb ‘sortir’ recurs over these two pages in the perfect tense and the infinitive, in combination with the change from ‘je n’ai plus à’ to ‘n’ayant pas eu à’. Over the course of Peinture, certain terms are worked on for a while and, although they do not disappear completely, the focus shifts imperceptibly onto the next one. Other examples include ‘dehors’, present in the example above, and ‘face’. Awareness of such variations may be more or less conscious on the part of the reader, but he or she is always aware of forward movement combined with references back through the text, rather as the writer (and probably the artist) looks back and forth between the world and the work he or she is creating. The result is a slow reading process that is attentive through distraction: engaging in shifts between what is here and there, now and then, world and word. This section has traced the ways in which Du Bouchet pays attention to works of art, turns away from them, and writes poetic prose that encourages the reader to engage in a process of slow reading. This involves seeing visual art and writing as part of the ‘thick’ three-dimensionality of the world, but, rather than concluding that semantic meaning is surpassed in favour of material signs, such an engagement with visual art enables close attentiveness to the world outside language that ultimately transforms the subject. The following section looks in detail at a piece of writing that combines essential elements of Du Bouchet’s art writing: De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture considers surface and depth; art, writing, and the subject; and engages indirectly with mid-twentieth-century historical circumstances and trauma in close conjunction with an evocation of the material world.

De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture

This text responds to work by Miklos Bokor: landscapes that he engraved using the aquatint technique, although no individual works are named. It was first published in the catalogue of an exhibition of Bokor’s work at Ditesheim in Neuchâtel in 1986. Readers of that first version would therefore have been able to view the works; moreover, one of the changes Du Bouchet made when revising the text for publication as a single volume in 1990 was to remove the sentence ‘paysages / de Miklos Bokor’ (landscapes / by Miklos Bokor), which occurs more than halfway through the text.54 54

André du Bouchet, ‘De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture’, LPNJE, pp. 147-58 (155).

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Particularly when read in the separate volume, De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture presents a poetic response in prose to an artist. The volume reflects on a number of words and ideas on the basis of viewing Bokor’s works, and does not explain or critique the artist’s works. It is written in blocks of text with justified margins, usually around four or five per page. Combined with the absence of pagination and the high quality of the paper used, even in the commercially available edition, it takes on, in common with most of Du Bouchet’s publications, characteristics of an art object.55 In addition to small revisions between the 1986 catalogue publication and the version produced by Éditions Unes, the principal change is a reduction in the length of some sections of the text, which are rendered sparser and more concise. A number of key terms, principally nouns, permeate Du Bouchet’s writing, some recurring across volumes and others associated with particular publications. That is what grants his poetic writing the quality of a single ongoing project, such as will be discussed in the final chapter, while also rendering his prose pieces specific to their subjects. In De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture, high-frequency words for Du Bouchet such as ‘surface’ (surface), ‘support’ (support), ‘rupture’, (rupture) ‘travers’ (through), ‘monde’ (world), ‘choses’ (things), ‘peinture’ (painting), ‘temps’ (time), ‘fraîcheur’ (coolness), and ‘lumière’ (light) operate in tandem with colour words, place names, and references to ‘oubli’ (forgetting) and ‘mémoire’ (memory); the latter are not absent from his other writing, but nevertheless occupy a less significant place.  De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture demonstrates Du Bouchet’s use of nouns such as ‘surface’ and ‘rupture’ in literal terms. The opening phrase: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . la terre par nappes de calme             peinture ici par nappes calmes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the earth in layers of calm              painting here in calm layers. is followed lower down on the page by:

55

The first fifty numbered copies were printed on Vélin d’Arches paper.

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déchiré plus d’une fois – entier, cependant, à la façon des éléments : et lui-même l’élément une composante de la peinture, papier intact alors même qu’entamé déjà, et recouvert en partie.56 torn more than once – whole, however, in the same way as the elements: and itself the element a component of the painting, paper intact, then, though already corroded, and partially re-covered. In referring to Bokor’s engraving technique, Du Bouchet employs a vocabulary of surfaces (‘nappes’, ‘papier’, ‘recouvert’) and breaches in those surfaces (‘déchiré’, ‘entamé’) in a literal way, referring both to Bokor’s artistic process and to the elemental substances from which his artistic materials are produced. The line of dots draws attention to the physical existence of those layers, and to the materiality of the book. Writing about Bokor’s work is not about getting beneath the visible surface of the finished work to explain it or the artist’s motivations, nor is it about describing or explicating what is represented on the paper, by the ink. Instead, the working process interests Du Bouchet, as it does a number of poets who respond to art by their contemporaries.57  De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture appears at first sight to differ from the majority of Du Bouchet’s work, though, precisely by introducing the metaphorical aspect of references to surface and depth that I have argued is generally absent from his writing. In this response to Bokor, Du Bouchet appears to refer, albeit obliquely, to the memories of trauma that Bokor experienced as a survivor of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Rhemsdorf, and Theresienstadt.58 Most of Bokor’s work does not directly evoke memories of his deportation, and it seems that before writing this text, Du Bouchet has looked at Bokor’s ‘abstract-landscapism’.59 However, by comparing the return of memory to the burning of acid: ‘le feu acide : corrosive, le retour de 56 57 58 59

Du Bouchet, DPD, n. p. Subsequent references are to this volume unless otherwise indicated. This is true of Du Bouchet’s writing on other artists, including Giacometti in particular, and of texts by poets such as Bernard Noël, who wrote about watching artists at work in Onze romans d’œil (Paris: P. O. L, 1988). ‘Bokor, Miklos’, Benezit Dictionary of Artists  (last consulted 29/11/17). The exceptions in Bokor’s œuvre are Apocalypse and Job (1974-75). It is noted in the Benezit Dictionary of Artists that ‘virtually all of his exhibitions in France (1969 onwards) are prefaced by remarkable, but not the easiest of poets: André du Bouchet, Yves Bonnefoy.

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la mémoire.’ (the acid fire: corrosive, the return of memory), he allows those memories to emerge. The first edition included fifty signed copies that were illustrated by three aquatints provided by Bokor. The aquatint technique, invented in the mid-seventeenth century, then briefly forgotten before being rediscovered and becoming more popular from the 1770s onwards, takes its name from the resemblance between the resulting print and a watercolour wash.60 The aquatint ground, which can be made from resin or various mineral substances such as asphalt, bitumen or pitch, is spread across the plate and adheres to it and produces a fine network with a random patterning enclosing islands of white. These granular globules prevent the acid from attacking the copper plate, and there can be variations in the density of the ground substance, which is useful for creating landscapes. Where line is used in addition to the ground material, the aquatinter employs normal etching techniques.61 Du Bouchet does not refer to particular memories, but rather traces through the volume a reflection on remembering and forgetting: ‘il n’en est pas moins déchirant d’oublier’ (it’s no less heart-rending to forget). ‘Déchirant’ is an adjective that describes an emotional response but it is also derived from the verb ‘déchirer’ that Du Bouchet uses to evoke the effect of the engraver’s acid. Du Bouchet’s indirect treatment of Bokor’s experiences is in line with his discussion of Celan in the volume Pourquoi si calmes, following criticism of him for failing to engage with Celan’s past. Clément Layet carefully analyses the charge against Du Bouchet. He writes: ‘Si elle [l’œuvre d’André du Bouchet] refuse de se référer à la politique, ce n’est jamais par indifférence ou cécité, mais c’est au contraire pour garder la révolte et l’espérance à leur plus haut degré d’incandescence’.62 ( if [Du Bouchet’s work] refuses to refer to politics, this is not due to indifference or blindness, but on the contrary in order to keep revolt and hope burning as brightly as possible.) When in Pourquoi si calmes Du Bouchet writes that the ‘terrible’ has never ‘fait retour’ in Celan’s poetry, he does not mean that it is not there, but rather that Celan’s writing is not orientated towards the past (PSC, p. 13). Similarly, he writes of the refusal of forgetting in relation to Bokor that the ‘dénuement du support par de grandes éclaircies’ (revealing the background in large intervals) on the third page of the volume results from the use of acid, and this reveals:

60 61 62

[…] And yet for all that, Miklos Bokor’s paintings and drawings are no more “literary” than any others’ (ibid.)  Bamber Gascoigne, How to Identify Prints: A complete guide to manual and mechanical processes from woodcut to inkjet, 2nd edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 17a. Ibid. Layet, ‘« La question du soleil »: André du Bouchet et la question politique’, p. 107.

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 monde net primant ce qu’il supporte – comme sur sa réitération, le point même de ce qui a été le départ, et élargi alors, par le travers de la peinture réalisée se fera jour.        distinct world taking precedence over what it bears – as if through its reiteration,  the very point of that which has been the start, and enlarged then, by crossing through the painting created, will make itself visible. What the painting enables is neither a traumatic return of a difficult memory – repressed or otherwise – nor a healing forgetting, but rather awareness of the materiality of the world. Revelation, then, is not the uncovering of something hidden in space or time, but the possibility of moving onwards. Bokor’s use of the aquatint technique allows Du Bouchet to focus on the insistent materiality of the process of artistic production: la peinture, comme elle couvre – et recouvre, ne fût-ce que pour une part – met à découvert un support qui n’est pas uniquement de toile ou de papier. painting, as it covers – and recovers, if only in part – reveals a support that is not made only of canvas or paper. It is the unclassifiable material of the ‘support’ that literally grounds the artworks and the text and prevents the effect of the acid from becoming metaphorical. That is not to say that Du Bouchet believes art or the mineral world can spare the artist the effects of those memories, but rather that artistic processes and a verbal response to the artworks are not consumed by their reference to Bokor’s past: they remain solidly material. It is no coincidence that the colour blue features strongly in this volume, blue being associated by Du Bouchet with forgetting.63 It is first introduced on the fifth page of the text, with the words ‘Le Guide’, referring to the Guide Bleu that is presumably accompanying the writer during the stay in Rome he goes on to evoke. He relates this immediately to the blue on the ceiling of the Casino dell’Aurora in Rome, continuing: 63

This is the case also in his text for the livre d’artiste, Sous le linteau en forme de joug.

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    […] il ne me reste  –  ce n’est pas un vestige – à l’esprit, que la virulence de ce bleu, ayant sur l’instant oublié ce qui précisément a pu l’amener dans une telle encoignure. I only have  –  it is not a vestige  –  in mind, the virulence of that blue, having for a moment forgotten exactly what could have brought it to such a corner. Blue is at once material, bringing about forgetting by overwhelming the subject’s vision, and also coded, designating the famous guidebook series and thereby linking art, the elements, the specificity of a place visited and a way indicated for the tourist through the city’s history. Towards the end of the volume Du Bouchet describes visiting the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia. He evokes the movement of going underground in terms of descending through ‘la durée’, ‘la peinture’, and ‘le support’. Blue occurs here in the bright acid blue of the sky, thereby linking sky blue with the acid of the etching plate described at the start of the text, as well as the strips of blue in the painted tombs themselves, the ‘ciel sous la terre’ (sky under the earth). Other colours are green, which again recalls Bokor’s engraving, and the ochre of the clay. Du Bouchet continues; d’ailleurs, cela a été fait pour les morts. Sur ce trait du déplacement de la couleur – en déplacement toujours – peint pour les morts, et, un jour – contenu par avance, un tel jour, et de si loin, dans la nuit rompue de l’heure qui a vu peindre – proposé par eux à des vivants de nouveau. moreover, it was done for the dead.     On that trace of the displacement of colour – always being displaced – painted for the dead, and, one day – contained in advance, such a day, and from so far away, in the ruptured night of the hour that saw painting – offered by them to the living again. The formulation ‘le déplacement de la couleur’ emphasises once again that perceptions are always overtaken by change, traces being understood as physical manifestations of change over time. Displacement is also figured formally, as clauses build up in order to shift the emphasis incrementally, and slow down progress towards the end of the sentence. What is unusual is his direct reference to the living and the dead, inspired by this visit to the tombs, in such a

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way that he is able to present this memorial in inverted form as a gift of time passing – inaccessible to those who have died – a gift to those who, still living, have the capacity to benefit from it. The humanity of these sections operates in a sophisticated relation to Du Bouchet’s references to indifferent matter, ‘cette indifférence de l’ordre élémentaire’ (this indifference that is of the order of the elementary), of which colour is a manifestation. Comfort is to be found there, expressed also as ‘calme’ (calm), ‘tranquillité’ (tranquillity), and ‘la peinture’. As we have seen, ‘la peinture’ is not just an individual painting or the act of painting, but the nonlinguistic outside world, and it is the connection between the elemental world and human concerns. That is why time is so important in Du Bouchet’s written responses to art: ‘le temps’ is the human dimension of matter, which has ‘la durée’. He writes: aujourd’hui je vois – ou je lis – autrement, ne pouvant voir ou lire que dans la durée, pour moi, du temps, mais sans imaginer, dans la fraction de temps compté et déchiré qui pour support m’est dévolu, qu’il ait jamais pu en aller autrement. today I see  –  or I read  –  differently, only able to see or read in the duration, for me, of time, but without imagining, in the counted and ruptured fraction of time devolved to me as support, that it could ever have happened differently. Here Du Bouchet is writing about the experience of transformation, which by its nature changes the subject such that he cannot imagine an alternative. He puts seeing and reading on the same plane, and also brings together his experience of an allotted time with the term ‘support’, here the page or engraving plate. He presents identity as formed from a combination of the experience of time and engagement with the material world. The sense he expresses of being changed suggests that identity does not result from individual experience and memory, nor is it – in poetry – the result of writing the text. Identity is, instead, awareness and acceptance of change, and that will be examined further in the next chapter. Having related the colour corrosion by acid to the blues encountered on the trip to Italy, including the sky, Du Bouchet increasingly introduces light and brightness into the final pages of De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture, and light is always connected with darkness. He gives the example

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of ‘la terrible peinture de Poussin au Vatican’ (the terrible painting by Poussin in the Vatican), which can be identified as the Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus (1828-29), and which he also describes as ‘radieuse’ (radiant). Along with a reference to a writer’s response to Dante, which is Jacqueline Risset’s translation of Inferno, in the preface to which she evokes Auschwitz, brightness returns the text on its penultimate page to the potential for terrible memories that has run throughout, more or less visibly.64 He concludes: ce qui porte en avant du premier plan comme jour – peinture comprise dans le jour –  et fraîcheur du futur élémentaire qui jusqu’au support actuel vivant renversera le temps, présent plus présent que ce présent à des degrés divers plongeant dans le terrible, c’est inextinguible, la matière même du support au ras assimilée à celle de la peinture traversant – à la façon de l’élément qui pour éclairer, et en déchirant, traverse – l’objet de la peinture. that which brings forward in the foreground like daylight  –  painting included in the daylight –  and freshness of the elemental future that up to the current living support will upend time,  present more present than this present plunged to varying degrees in the terrible, it is inextinguishable, the very matter of the support closely assimilated to that of painting crossing  –  in the same way as the element that in order to illuminate, and while rupturing, crosses – the object of painting. The complex final sentence, deceptive in the apparent simplicity afforded by the justified margins, brings together many of the key elements discussed here, as well as formal features that carry out the work described. It incorporates painting, in its complex sense involving all that is outside the subject and language, as well as visual art, light, freshness, present and future, matter, the ‘support’, and the actions ‘traverser’ and ‘déchirer’, brought together in this volume where traversal is always bound up with what is terrible. Du Bouchet himself brings everything forward, not placing it in the foreground of a visual image made comprehensible by perspective, but rather in a constant process of 64

Information taken from the notes by Thomas Augais to Du Bouchet’s essay in LPNJE, pp. 472-73. Dante Alighieri, L’Enfer, trans. by Jacqueline Risset (Paris: Flammarion, 1985).

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movement and traversal that the self must nevertheless always live in the present. He employs em-dashes, less ambiguously, perhaps, than in some of his writing, because they can be construed as two pairs containing parenthetical clauses. His text is signalled as prose because it stretches across the width of the page and has a definable object (the work of Bokor), yet enjambement is vital to its effects: the beginning of each line of text is deictic or designates freshness in some way: ‘premier’, ‘– ’, ‘actuel’, ‘ce’, ‘inextinguible’, ‘à celle’, ‘qui pour éclairer’, ‘peinture’. The structure of the sentence, without a clear subject, object or verb, enacts the process of things emerging forward: the reader has to accept each new element as it emerges without trying to assign it a position in a clear whole with constituent parts. That slows down the reading process as the reader, expecting to have to keep parts of a sentence in mind in order to grasp the whole at the end, must repeatedly relinquish that impulse while still engaging with its individual parts. The final phrase, ‘l’objet de la peinture’, nevertheless offers a conclusion, albeit one with a dual meaning. It suggests that the physical object that is a painting and also the material world is always at the end of the process by which humans grapple with a time-bound existence; in addition, the process he evokes is the purpose (‘l’objet’) of painting, a process in which we engage to pursue the action of constant traversal so effectively evoked by Du Bouchet. Du Bouchet’s understanding of the link between writing, art, and the physical environment in terms of time and movement is visible from his very earliest writings, such as the following: Eh bien, aujourd’hui, la poésie, la peinture qui nous semblent les plus urgentes, se passent des intervalles vacants, des chevilles de l’espace, du mot ‘comme’. Et nous faisons corps avec elles. La matière poétique qui leur est commune n’est plus située dans un cadre fixé d’avance, mais se trouve en perpétuel déplacement. (LPNJE, p. 238) And so, today, the poetry and painting that seem the most urgent to us do without empty intervals, padded-out space, the word ‘like’. And we join bodily with them. The poetic material they have in common is no longer situated in a framework fixed in advance, but is in perpetual displacement. This is an apparently extraordinary statement from a writer whose later work has become visually recognisable by its incorporation of blank spaces. He means that creators of abstract work do not feel obliged to cover the whole

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canvas, nor to attempt to represent what things are ‘like’. Du Bouchet’s texts are anything but padded out; the spaces are carefully planned, material contributions to works in which the support plays a vital role. In combination with temporal processes, that materiality is what allows the reader and book or artwork to exist in the same physical space. This chapter has drawn a distinction between Du Bouchet’s poetry criticism and his art writing, suggesting that the striking model of attentive criticism that he develops finds form in his writing on art, though his texts on Reverdy are closer to it than are the early poetry essays. A connection between all those texts, however, emerges in Du Bouchet’s insistence on the transformative effects of reading. The relationship between poet-critic and his audience is mediated via the written word and if, as is argued here, he aims to incite slow reading, he is creating the verbal equivalent not of an art object, but of the effect an art object can have on the viewer. His experience of encountering certain works of visual art sends him urgently away to engage with the material world; his own writing attempts to do the same, by reconcretizing critical metaphors and drawing attention to the pace of reading. In Peinture, he writes: le lien, toujours plus lent à se dénouer, est – pareil à un éclair – celui de mon retard sur la vélocité de l’inerte. (P, p. 26) the tie, ever slower to unravel, is – like lightning – that of my delay compared to the speed of what is inert. He reverses the expectation that human movement, through space and through time, is faster than that of inert matter, suggesting instead that he cannot keep pace with the physical world. The delay he evokes is not an independently temporal phenomenon, however; it is a ‘lien’, which implies a tension such as that discussed in relation to translation. The delay connects the poetic subject to his environment, and it is itself a process: ‘toujours plus lent à se dénouer’ implies a deferred ending to that tension. Moreover, Du Bouchet alternates references to speed and to slowness (‘lent’ – ‘éclair’ – ‘retard’ – ­‘vélocité’). The following chapter will consider Du Bouchet’s practice of rewriting texts. The cumulative effect of revisions and new publications is the sense of an œuvre developing as a project, which rejects any definitive or ‘original’ text. Reading Du Bouchet’s work across volumes produces another form of ‘slow’

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reading, as echoes and adjustments build up. An œuvre is also the result of a life; that life emerges not as the end result of writing, but as ‘le lien, toujours plus lent à dénouer’, or the acceptance that its meaning or contours will never be definitive.

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Chapter 6

A Life Writing     la faille sur laquelle j’ai pu reprendre est encore en avant de moi (EM, p. 135)        the fault on which I could resume is again ahead of me

⸪ This study began by highlighting the importance of gaps in Du Bouchet’s poetic prose writing, before arguing that gaps are better understood in terms of temporal pauses, despite the obvious focus on the space of the page in all his work. Chapter four proposed that such pauses are indicative of tensions that must be maintained to produce a certain distance between the writing subject and that which is other, while ensuring that they remain enmeshed. Chapter five then considered the consequence of maintaining those tensions, which is the production of texts that take time to write and to read, and therefore make time. Slowness is produced by the reader’s awareness of change and repetition within and even across texts, which means that while temporal structures can be studied at the ‘micro’ level of the sentence, word, and even phoneme, they also operate at a ‘macro’ level extending across Du Bouchet’s entire œuvre, from his earliest essays and notebooks to his final publications. His work is sometimes described as one long, continuous sentence; Pierre Chappuis writes that his ‘texte’ is ‘repris d’une publication (livre ou revue) à l’autre’; ‘À la limite’, he goes on, ‘chaque fragment est tout et peut, détaché […] reprendre sa pleine autonomie ; ou bien ( comme il arrive aussi ) le tout ne se constitue que de fragments, regroupés nouvellement au besoin.’1 ([his] text is taken up from one publication (in book form or in a review) to another. […] You could even say that each fragment is the whole and could, detached, become completely independent again; or else (as also happens) the whole is only made up of fragments, put together differently as required.) Such an understanding of his writing takes account of the connections between volumes, but does not tell us how it functions over time. This chapter will consider how attentiveness to his 1 Chappuis, André du Bouchet, pp. 15-16.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432888_008

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own work operates in Du Bouchet’s œuvre as a whole, examining the detail of revisions he makes to new versions of previously published texts or notebooks. Du Bouchet kept numerous notebooks. Elements from them appear, transformed, in published texts, and he rewrote and re-published many of those already in the public domain.2 Daniel Leuwers describes Du Bouchet’s notebooks as forming ‘une arche d’un recueil à l’autre’.3 In the shift from notebook to poem, anecdote is removed, as has been noted by critics since the publication in 1990 of the first of his Carnets by Michel Collot. Since the more recent, posthumous publication of further notebook entries, however, it has become clear that the three volumes of notebooks with whose publication Du Bouchet was involved are not transcriptions of the original notebooks, but are themselves the result of some rewriting.4 Not content with rewriting notebooks, he also made minor revisions to the majority of his texts that appeared in print more than once. The most substantial revisions were to poetic prose, including in particular pieces that might be described as circumstantial, among which are ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’, ‘Notes sur la traduction’, and Retours sur le vent (Taking Stock of the Wind), which will be one of the examples discussed in this chapter. Rewriting tended to involve reducing a text in length by removing sections, and, in some cases, by shortening individual sections also. Many revisions involve minute changes to word order or parts of speech that might seem trivial, but they also reveal the extent to which Du Bouchet considered precision in the detail of a text to be important. Rewriting is a practice that ties together Du Bouchet’s œuvre as a whole, and the changes in layout that he prescribes also contribute to the overall sense that the term œuvre should be taken in its literal, material sense. It is a ‘corpus’, a ‘body of work’ whose material and paratextual elements cannot be overlooked. Layout, non-pagination, typeface and paper are all vital to Du Bouchet’s first editions, and, despite his removal of anecdote, many of the prose publications include brief indications of the circumstance of their creation or a 2 Jacques Depreux writes: ‘[…] chaque publication nouvelle d’un texte, en livre ou en revue, est l’occasion d’une révision, parfois légère mais toujours scrupuleuse.’ André du Bouchet, ou La Parole traversée (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1988) p. 11 ( […] each new publication of a text, in a book or a review, is an opportunity to revise it, sometimes only slightly, but always scrupulously.’) The Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet holds 154 notebooks by Du Bouchet. 3 Daniel Leuwers, ‘Le Carnet et ses autres’, in André du Bouchet et ses autres, ed. by Met, pp. 43-53 (44). 4 Layet discusses this in his preface to Lampe, pp. 7-18. He notes in particular that Du Bouchet made choices that removed the sense of progression that Collot had detected in the notebooks dated 1952 to 1956 (p. 9).

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dedication.5 In chapter three we also saw the importance of the body in developing a poetics of time and movement: walking, breathing, perceiving, and remembering are shared human corporeal experiences. As such, the assertion that his work is a single sentence with variations can be nuanced. Nor are his books a series of creative products that can be compared to art objects. His practice of rewriting shows that he kept previous publications in mind, without merging them into an overarching undifferentiated work. Rewriting might be associated with a mid-twentieth-century sense of failure or inadequacy, such as is made explicit by Beckett: ‘Il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer‘6 (You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on). Alternatively, as an ongoing process, rewriting might suggest a poetics of ‘présence’ that is aware that true presence remains always out of reach. According to a poststructuralist approach, rewriting would show an endless deferral of meaning, with all words referring always to others, and that would link Du Bouchet more closely to poets of textuality. Instead of all those perspectives, however, his rewriting can be imagined as an attentive project that has as its aim a taking account, but also a paring back. It remains material as the corpus increases, but instead of accumulation Du Bouchet appears to value stripping away to fundamentals: rewritten texts are generally sparser than earlier versions. If his work testifies to a project, then who and where is the subject? It is neither created by the process of writing, as would be the case in a Modernist text, nor absent, despite the rejection of anecdote visible in his rewriting of his notebooks. Given that his circumstantial texts were among those most likely to be rewritten, the role of the subject becomes particularly problematic: they are associated with a fixed moment in time and space, and yet are subject to revision. As a result, they are both circumstantial and deprived of a fixed, originary status, and so can be understood as key points in the subject’s life but points that are also extracted from their context. This chapter will therefore begin with a brief discussion of autobiography, focusing in particular on notions of the project and on turning points. It will consider Du Bouchet’s notebooks and the ways in which they were rewritten before looking at examples of published texts that were rewritten and re-published, including in particular Retours sur le vent. Finally, it will propose a close

5 Examples include the dating of his two lectures on Hölderlin and Celan, discussed in chapter four, the note ‘Rome, 1986’ that concludes DPD, and the dedication of Retours sur le vent to Salah Stétie. André du Bouchet, Retours sur le vent (Paris: Fourbis, 1994) (henceforth RSLV). 6 Samuel Beckett, L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1953), p. 213.

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analysis of Tumulte, Du Bouchet’s last publication during his lifetime and one that was not rewritten.

Autobiography and Projects

André du Bouchet’s writing cannot be considered autobiographical in the commonly understood sense, expressed by Lejeune, of a retrospective account in prose in which the writer, narrator, and subject can be assumed to coincide7. Du Bouchet’s is a body of work whose poetic subject is impersonal. Nevertheless, reflection on autobiography can help bring to the fore ways of understanding Du Bouchet’s work as a project. Michael Sheringham examines understandings of autobiography, beginning with Dilthey, who conceived of the meaning of a life as dynamic.8 He notes that subsequent thinkers have rejected the assumption that a structure of meaning can pre-exist, but he then argues that the dynamism Dilthey proposes can be understood as activity and process rather than intention.9 Sheringham emphasises in particular the notion of turning points, not to be imagined as a kind of dramatic change or conversion, in the mould of Augustine, but rather as parts in the process of autobiography.10 He goes on to discuss self-quotation, arguing that it makes clear the distinction in time between the writing ‘I’ and the written one: ‘[…] it is ultimately this interface, or aperture, which must consistently be stressed: not as a formality, a consequence of certain inescapable verities, but as the arena in which a dynamic processing of intention arises by dint of the negotiations between a consciousness, a writing subject, and the heterogeneous materials out of which selfhood is made.’11 The notion that the aperture between writing and written self must be stressed is applicable to Du Bouchet’s rewriting of notebooks or previously published texts, which is a form of self-quotation in which some, or a great deal, of the ‘original’ material is retained, but the change effected by the intervening period is essential.

7 8

Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 14-15. Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 3. 9 Sheringham, French Autobiography, pp. 4-5. 10 Sheringham, French Autobiography, p. 12. 11 Sheringham, French Autobiography, p. 18.

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Self-quotation is discussed by Philippe Met in relation to Du Bouchet in Formules de la poésie.12 He argues, first, that Du Bouchet’s particular use of punctuation and layout works towards making his texts unquotable;13 quotation would be a kind of translation and would constitute a betrayal. This is ‘antipoétique’ because in rhetoric memorable texts are preferred as they enable citatio. Similarly, Du Bouchet describes Reverdy’s poetry as unmemorable in ‘Image à terme’: ‘Instant singulier dont la mémoire nous est presque aussitôt retirée’. (I, n.p., Singular instant the memory of which is almost immediately taken away from us).14 Met points out that Du Bouchet rewrote ‘Envergure de Reverdy’, of 1951, in Matière de l’interlocuteur; the earlier text becomes an intertext, whose material is remodelled through a process of generic displacement as the typographical layout is altered, and this renders it a poetic text and not criticism.15 Here Met is discussing a rewriting by Du Bouchet of his own work, but through the medium of engagement with a third party, albeit one who was integral to his finding of his own poetic voice. Similarly, Du Bouchet incorporates untranslated quotations from Hölderlin, Celan, and Heidegger in texts including ‘Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986’ and désaccordée comme par de la neige. While the similarities between the reuse of his own texts and the reworking of writing by others are clear, these are not interchangeable. Hölderlin and Celan are poets with whom Du Bouchet feels an affinity and a distance, and their foreignness is incorporated in order to maintain that distance in tension. His rewriting of his own texts, and to an extent his relationship with the work of Reverdy, is not about foreignness in quite the same way, even though he worked to retain the foreignness of French. That is because the aperture between the writing and written I, which is connected to the gaps, pauses, tensions and resultant slowness discussed over the course of this study, is temporal above all. It is not a straightforward movement from past to present, however, with the self looking back on previous thoughts and marking the ways in which he has progressed. Instead, the process of rewriting is one in which those previous incarnations of pieces of rewriting constitute turning points in the sense set out by Sheringham, as loci of the negotiation of a self with itself, and its awareness of itself as a temporal being. That being is constrained by the passing of time owing to its mortality, but does not experience life as teleological, noting instead that it is through a process of looking back, and thereby seeing 12

Philippe Met, Formules de la poésie. Études sur Ponge, Leiris, Char et Du Bouchet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). 13 Met, Formules de la poésie, p. 218. 14 This text was rewritten more than once; see note 28 of the Introduction. 15 Met, Formules de la poésie, pp. 219-22.

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differently, that the aperture between past and present selves forms life itself as process. Du Bouchet’s life’s work, therefore, is analogous to, but not identical with, the notion of project set out by Sheringham and Johnnie Gratton in their introduction to a volume of essays, which argues that the notion of the project forms a powerful tool for understanding much modern French cultural production: the ‘work’ made available to the reader/viewer is […] very often an account of the conduct of the project or experiment, the record or trace of its success or failure, its consistency with or deviation from its initial premises.16 It can be argued that Du Bouchet’s work does indeed reveal an account of the conduct of a project, but his œuvre also renders problematic the suggestion that it had initial premises from which it could deviate. The question this raises concerns the specificity of poetry in relation to autobiography: whether poetry can be considered through the framework of the project as prose accounts can, and, more importantly, what the study of Du Bouchet might bring to an understanding of modern poetry in relation to autobiography. An issue of the journal Life Writing considers the first of these, with editors Jo Gill and Melanie Waters examining the theoretical material surrounding poetry’s relationship with autobiography in their introduction. They move from Lejeune’s initial assumption that autobiographical writing was necessarily prose writing, to his later apparent nuancing of that position, then consider reflection by a range of theorists, including Paul de Man and James Olney, on what the particularities of the poetic subject add to an understanding of an autobiographical text. They cite Jacqueline Rose’s argument that autobiography ‘constitutes, as much as transforms, the reality to which it is presumed to refer’, and they suggest that poetry encourages us to read as if the ‘I’ is a construction, and to believe both that it might correlate to the biographical self, while also that it does not need to do so in order to be an authentic poetic subject.17 Gill and Waters argue that new lines of thinking in autobiography studies are contemporaneous with new ways of thinking about poetry, and that this is therefore an auspicious time (they are writing in 2009) to 16 17

Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham (eds), The Art of the Project: projects and experiments in modern French culture (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2005), p. 1. Jo Gill and Melanie Waters, ‘Editorial’, in Poetry and Autobiography, ed. by Gill and Waters (= spec. iss. of Life Writing, 6, 1 (2009)), pp. 1-9, (3-4).

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consider them together. They cite in particular Marjorie Perloff’s insistence in Poetic License that contemporary poetry questions the assumption that there is a correlation between the experience of the poet and the ‘I’ of the poem.18 The articles in the issue all consider English-language poetry, apart from a contribution by Candace Lang on Gide and Sartre, essential reference points in debates on autobiography and the role of poetry, but not poets. Nevertheless, it is striking that the theoretical points by Lang cited in the introduction are of particular relevance to the modern French poetry scene. In an essay from 1982, ‘Autobiography in the aftermath of Romanticism’, she argues that ‘poetry and art (as opposed to “ordinary” signs) alone express the inexpressible’.19 As a result, she proposes, the pre-linguistic self can use these forms to create a persona. It is precisely the legacy of Romanticism that is often identified or rejected in modern French poetry. The question of whether poetry has access to a special idiom that expresses what would otherwise be inaccessible to language continues to cause controversy and disagreement. In relation to autobiography, then, it would seem that post-Romantic poetry is clearly compatible with an autobiographical project, understood as the creation of the self through the process of writing. And yet the present study argues the self is not a product of poetic writing such as Du Bouchet’s. Rather, his œuvre reveals that the result is the project, not the self. In this sense, his writing is closer to that of the textualist poets who would reject both the notion of an impassioned, expressive self, and that of the self as outcome of writing. Consequently, it nuances our understanding of the Modernist self, which emerges through the text, as well as definitions of autobiography as leading to the creation of a self. Also, as Gill and Waters propose, it shows that autobiographical reflection can be opened up to a range of new avenues.20 The notion of ‘project’ offers helpful perspectives on the writing life and Du Bouchet’s œuvre. Indeed, his poetry is ‘à l’œuvre’ in the sense of poeisis.21 Poetry, therefore, is capable of revealing a distinctive angle on autobiography. Poetic practice such as Du Bouchet’s demonstrates that (a) life writing is a project, but one expected to have no definitive conclusion, and it is possible to study 18

19 20 21

Gill and Waters, ‘Editorial’, p. 5. Marjorie Perloff, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1990), p. 20. Especially interesting in Perloff’s approach in this book is her refusal to separate the poem from theoretical discourse that would treat it as an object, and her argument that the poem can also offer theoretical insights (p. 5). Candace Lang, ‘Autobiography in the Aftermath of Romanticism’, Diacritics, 12 (1982), 2-16 (p. 4). Cited in Gill and Waters, ‘Poetry and Autobiography’, p. 4. Gill and Waters, ‘Editorial’, p. 5. See the title La Poésie à l’œuvre: Poetry, Philosophy, Politics, ed. by Azérad and Kelly.

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his particular poetic techniques in order to discern how they combine to produce a sense of inconclusiveness. In this way, while his poetry might have associations with the Hölderlinian tendency to seek a means of expressing the world without expecting to be able to achieve it, it also echoes an alternative approach, which is characteristic of more recent explorations of the extrême contemporain by writers such as Dominique Fourcade. Michael G. Kelly argues that French poets are increasingly foregrounding their ‘unhousedness’ in their own language, and therefore that the ‘contemporary’ refers to ‘the situation of an individual subject witnessing its own inchoateness’.22 Du Bouchet’s ‘unhousedness’ was central to discussion in chapter four. His poetry does not produce the impression of a dispersed subject, fearing the loss of identity. Quite the reverse: we shall see that his rewritings pare back and tighten up verbal expression. But that does not mean that the poetic subject is becoming coherent, and gradually formed over the course of a writing life. Instead, by retaining the foreignness of French to the writing self through rigorous commitment to revision and variation, Du Bouchet creates an œuvre that rejects any tendency towards completion.

Rewriting the Carnets

Du Bouchet is well known as a writer who used notebooks. After some early variations, he settled on a pocket-sized format that he was able to carry with him as he walked. His walking took him first through the Vexin in Normandy, as well as around Parisian streets, and it was not until later, when he discovered the Drôme region, that he began to walk in the kind of mountainous landscape that appears to populate even his earliest texts. He said that the first readers of Dans la chaleur vacante would mistakenly ask him which mountains he lived in (Entretiens, p. 28). From the start, then, his evocation of mountains was as much to do with expressing his sense of the intractability of the French language as it was about conjuring up a landscape. His notebooks, now held at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, are a fascinating but daunting prospect for researchers, not least because his handwriting can be difficult to decipher. Reproductions of their pages have been included in edited volumes devoted to Du Bouchet, a practice that

22

Michael G. Kelly, ‘Poetry as a Foreign Language: Unhoused Writing Subjects in the Extrême contemporain’, Forum for Modern Languages Studies, 47, 4 (2011), 393-407 (395-96). He is referring to Fourcade’s Outrance utterance et autres élégies (Paris: P. O. L., 1990).

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suggests that the material, handwritten format is of interest in itself.23 Collot first had the idea of transcribing some of the notebooks, and the volume appeared in 1990 (Carnets). Subsequently, Du Bouchet himself added to these in Carnet (C), and then also published Carnet 2 and Annotations sur l’espace non datées. Carnet 3 (Undated Annotations on Space: Notebook 3).24 In 1996, he included extracts from his notebooks in the volume Andains (Strides), with photographs by Francis Helgorsky.25 Since Du Bouchet’s death, Layet has returned to the notebooks and published extracts, some the same as those that had previously appeared and some different, in Une lampe dans la lumière aride (A Lamp in the Arid Light). It is frequently asserted that Du Bouchet mined his notebooks for his poetry. Alain Veinstein, for instance, put this to Du Bouchet in one of their interviews, and Du Bouchet insisted that he did not work on poems with the notebooks in front of him; rather, he said: ‘il arrivait de temps en temps qu’une chose que j’avais notée continuait de me préoccuper’ (Entretiens, p. 212; from time to time it turned out that something I had noted continued to preoccupy me.) Dans la chaleur vacante, for example, includes terms and phrases that appear to be depersonalised versions of notations in the notebooks, with anecdote and circumstance removed. Those changes and continuities have not been examined in detail, although some instances have been noted by critics including Met, who discusses the transformation of notes dated August-September 1952 into the volume Défets (Defects), and by Jacques Depreux, who explains that the volume Rapides (Rapids) consists of elements from the notebooks juxtaposed with reflections from the time of preparing the volume.26 Similar associations can be found between one of the notebooks published for the first time by Layet, ‘Carnet 9, titré le Moteur blanc, daté du 15 août 1953’, and the subsequent poetic text of the same name. For example, in the notebook he wrote:

23

Photographs of notebook pages were included as plates in Autour d’André du Bouchet, ed. by Collot. He also edited Présence d’André du Bouchet, along with Jean-Pascal Léger, which incorporates the transcription of a whole notebook from 1956, including photographs of four of its double pages (Paris: Hermann, 2012), pp. 333-82. 24 Carnet 2 (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1998) (henceforth C2); Annotations sur l’espace non datées. Carnet 3 (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 2000) (henceforth C3). All citations from Carnet 2 © Editions Fata Morgana 1998 and Annotations sur l’espace non datées © Editions Fata Morgana 2000. 25 André du Bouchet, Andains. Pages de Carnet, photographies Francis Helgorsky (Die: Éditions A Die, 1996) (henceforth Andains). 26 Met, Formules de la poésie, pp. 245-46. André du Bouchet, Air suivi de Défets (Fontfroidele-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1986); Rapides (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1980). Depreux, André du Bouchet, p. 14.

A Life Writing

Quand je sors, un torchon rouge me serre la tête          La corde    pour faire trembler les murs hors de ma chambre Tous ces murs      et ces meubles immobiles délaissés par les yeux comme par des chaises vides ou la chaleur qui tremble Hors de son feu       toute seule au-dessus du mur il n’y a toujours rien rien le vent (Lampe, p. 202) When I go out, a red cloth is tight around my head          The cord    to make the walls tremble outside my room All these walls       and this immobile furniture abandoned by my eyes as if by empty chairs or the heat that trembles outside its fire

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      all alone above the wall there is still nothing nothing the wind The influence of Reverdy is clear in these notes that recall particularly the poems of Les Ardoises du toit (1918). By the time this section appears in Le Moteur blanc, whose parts can nevertheless not be mapped exactly onto the notebook, the presence of the poetic subject has indeed become more muted, but it has not disappeared altogether: Je sors dans la chambre comme si j’étais dehors parmi les meubles immobiles dans la chaleur qui tremble toute seule hors de son feu il n’y a toujours rien le vent. (DLCV, p. 64) I go out in the room as if I were outside among the immobile furniture

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in the heat that trembles all alone outside its fire there is still nothing the wind. The key difference between the published and unpublished writing is a reduction to minimal evocations of place and sensation, in combination with the abstraction of ‘il n’y a toujours / rien’. But the ‘comme’ in the published version appears to introduce a greater sense of the hypothetical, as was discussed in chapter three, than does the ‘comme’ used in the notebook: ‘comme si j’étais dehors’ succeeds in upsetting our perception of indoors and outdoors so it is not clear where the self is positioned. Examples from Carnet 2 also reveal the way in which notes are reduced as they are rewritten as poetry:             à ce qui, du corps va au bleu – comme la route casse, sauge dans l’asphalte. (C2, p. 24)         to that which, from the body goes to the blueness – as the road breaks, sage in the asphalt.                 et le vent lisse alors que l’asphalte – à peine moins haut que les                 genoux,             écorche. (C2, p. 25)              and the smooth wind while the asphalt – barely lower than the                 knees,             flays.27 27

It is particularly difficult to translate ‘les genoux’, as the definite article would be used in French by a person referring to his or her own knees. A standard translation would therefore be ‘my knees’, and yet the ‘je’ is not directly present as a speaking subject here.

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             jusqu’aux poignets l’aigreur, la fraîcheur de la route          ou sous la route la commotion        des pierres à demi incrustées d’une et même secousse (C2, p. 26)                 up to the wrists the bitterness, the freshness of the road         or under the road the commotion        of half-incrusted stones of a single jolt. dans l’eau bleue de l’asphalte, à leur tour genoux rompus             comme les glaciers du ciel       par la route seront plus bas                    solidité                  […] (C2, p. 27) in the blue water of the asphalt, in their turn broken-kneed               like glaciers by the sky      will be lower by the road                        solidity. Already it is clear that Du Bouchet is trying out variations of terms and phrases, with ‘la route’, ‘l’asphalte’ and parts of the body one might hurt on falling – wrists and knees – disembodied from the speaking self. The word ‘solidité’ is picked up as the title of a poem in Ou le soleil (Or the Sun). The first of four sections in this text reads:    De la route, plus bas, renvoyée aux poignets, quand elle nous reçoit.           Les pierres. (DLCV, p. 132)    From the road, below, returned to the wrists, when it receives us.          Stones. The third section is as follows:

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          Avant qu’à l’asphalte bleu les genoux soient traversés. Comme, en quelques jours, les glaciers du ciel,       au sommet aplani. (DLCV, p. 133).            Before on the blue asphalt knees are traversed. As, in a few days, glaciers by the sky,       at the flattened summit. A shift away from anecdote towards impersonality is not noticeable in this instance, as both the notebook extracts and the poetic text are lacking a named ‘je’ figure; in fact a ‘nous’ has appeared in the later text. The notes have emerged transformed into the poetic writing, however, the most significant change being the subtle shift in the presentation of time. In the Carnet 2 version, conjugated verbs are relatively rare, suggesting a state that has come into being (including occasional past participles used adjectivally) before the present of writing, and also evocations of the future. In the first section from ‘Solidité’ (Solidity), an otherwise similar combination of an evoked state and a past participle without a conjugated verb is rendered more complex by the syntax, by the pronoun ‘nous’, which is not attributed to known figures, and by the introduction of the word ‘quand’ following ‘de’, which unsettles any possible temporal position from which to observe the scene. In the latter section cited here, Du Bouchet’s use of ‘avant que’ is even more disruptive: the scene is set in the future without being anchored to a present. The past participle ‘traversé’ suggests not so much injury to the surface of the knee, but a breaching of the distinction between one element and another; these do not merge, but rather take part in a process of movement ‘through’. It is perhaps not surprising that the transformation from notebooks to published poem should involve a reduction, but it is also nevertheless noteworthy that the change in this instance does not consist of removing anecdotal or biographical context, but rather rendering more complex the time of the actions taking place. The examples above are taken from Layet’s transcription of a 1953 notebook and from the extracts published by Du Bouchet as Carnet 2 respectively, and they compare notebook entries with poetic texts. The publication of Une lampe dans la lumière aride, additionally, makes it possible in some instances to compare extracts from the transcribed notebooks with both the poetic texts which they resemble and their publication as ‘notebooks’ in Carnet or Carnet 2: it transpires that they are not always faithful transcriptions. For example, from March 1954, Michel Collot transcribed the following single phrase: ‘J’ignore ce

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qu’est le monde sans la main – mais la / main n’est rien sans le monde.’ (Carnets, p. 46; Lampe, p. 249; I don’t know what the world is without a hand – but the / hand is nothing without the world.) By the time of Carnet, Du Bouchet has incorporated two additional pages from the notebook, ending with that same phrase (C, p. 66). Of those two pages, one further phrase has been transcribed verbatim from the notebook: ‘je ne suis plus bon qu’à corriger’ (C, p. 65; Lampe, p. 238; I am no longer good for anything except correcting), and other elements appear transformed. Layet’s transcription of the original notebooks, however, reveals that entries for March 1954 numbered at least nineteen pages, and are divided into notebook 2 of 5 March, and notebook 3 of 25 March. The nouns that structure this entry occur throughout the course of those nineteen pages, and in particular in the notebook dated 25 March, from which omissions from an even longer text are indicated. For example, it opens: Être vivant autour des branches, des cendres (Lampe, p. 236) Being alive around the branches, ashes and the following page includes the lines: Ô mais l’air constaté   incinéré au-delà du feu vécu. (Lampe, p. 237) O but air recorded   incinerated beyond the lived fire These are echoed in Carnet by: la vie contiguë     au feu (C, p. 64) life contiguous      with fire.

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The latter formulation is more concise and therefore more forceful. Among other similar examples, the extract taken from the final pages of the notebook includes the lines: La poésie    c’est refuser la vie – partie par partie – pour l’accepter toute entière – (Lampe, p. 249) Poetry    it’s refusing life – bit by bit – so as to accept it entirely – They appear to have been rewritten in Carnet as: poésie — pas à pas la vie refusée          admise entière tout d’un coup. (C, p. 64) poetry – step by step life refused          suddenly let in whole The later version is much more recognisable as written by Du Bouchet: concise, uncompromising, the past participles transforming a reflection on the meaning of poetry into an assertion of a state of affairs in which poetry seems no less part of the material world than fire, houses, and other nouns evoked in the text. It is clear, then, that not only does Du Bouchet rework elements of his notebooks into poems, but he also significantly revises those notebooks before publishing them as Carnet(s). It is striking that he does not indicate omissions from the original notebooks as Collot and Layet do. He does not give the number of the notebook, and the dating is simplified to the month and year, with individual dates removed (in Annotations sur l’espace non datées. Carnet 3 dates are removed altogether, and attention is drawn to this in the title). The typeface used for the months and years in Carnet is identical to that of the main body of the text, so the dates appear as notations among others, and not as paratextual information. This is in line with Du Bouchet’s practice of rewriting more generally, where the date of first notation is not to be taken as indicative of an originary, anchoring moment outside the text itself, but rather included to provide a reference with which the text interacts.

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Moreover, study of the handwritten notebooks at the Bibliothèque Litté­ raire Jacques Doucet reveals that Du Bouchet corrected even those notes.28 As might be expected from any writer’s notebook, there are crossings-out that could have been made at the time or shortly afterwards, but there are also more formalised changes. For example, a card in the back of the notebook dated June 1967 reads ‘Revu aout [sic] 78 [in red ballpoint pen] 1967 [in blue]’. There are some corrections in red throughout the notebook, including crossings-out, where red is different from the colour that appears to be the original one used on the page. In addition, there are whole sections written in red; it is not possible to be certain whether these are subsequent additions, but the card would suggest that they are. Rewriting, then, is essential to Du Bouchet’s practice, such that even the notebook carried by the writer, a format usually considered distinct from the standard practice of drafting and refining, is subject to revision. Layet writes of Du Bouchet’s practice of transcribing his notebooks for Carnet: ‘Transcrire, pour lui, ce n’est pas se tourner vers le passé, ce n’est pas couper des passages de moindre envergure, c’est prélever la matière d’une expérience nouvelle, c’est vivre.’29 (For him, transcribing does not mean turning back to the past, cutting less successful passages, it means drawing from it the material of a new experience, it means living.) Du Bouchet’s project is not about perfecting an œuvre, making progress, or even showing the workings of his thought as it develops, as was the case for Francis Ponge in his various work-in-progress texts, but rather looking at his writing through its relation to the present in which he encounters it.30 In this way, it resembles the conjunction of perception and memory set out in chapter three. This project is in tune with the process of keeping notebooks more generally, as described by Alain Duschene and Thierry Leguay: Le journal procède d’une rédaction egocentrique […]. Au contraire, nous désignerons, sous le nom de carnet, les notations diverses portées vers l’appréhension de la réalité à travers une pratique du langage qui s’interroge sur elle-même. […] Le carnet rassemble ainsi des notations qui ne 28 29 30

I am grateful to Madame Anne de Staël for generously allowing me to read some of the notebooks, and to Philippe Blanc at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet for facilitating access to them. Layet, ‘Préface’, in Lampe, p. 10. See, for instance, Francis Ponge, Comment une figue de paroles et pourquoi (Paris: Flam­ marion, 1977), in which Ponge published the preparatory notes for his text ‘La Figue (sèche)’, published first in Tel Quel in 1960 and subsequently in Pièces (Paris: Gallimard ‘Poésie’, 1962), 179-82.

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sont pas de simples constats personnels, mais des fragments du réel déjà pris en écharpe par la langue […].31 Keeping a journal is an egocentric process […]. Conversely, the making of notes in a carnet [=notebook] is to be understood as using language to question itself, with the ultimate aim of apprehending reality. […] The notebook is therefore a repository for notes that are not personal records, but rather fragments of the real that have been hit sideways by language […] Met builds on this categorisation to explore the carnet as a phenomenon in modern French writing, from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry, and Reverdy, to a range of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century poets.32 Among these, Du Bouchet’s friend and editorial colleague Philippe Jaccottet kept and published a number of notebooks.33 Not only does Du Bouchet take part in the modern French tradition of writing and making public his notebooks, then, but he also demonstrates an original approach to those notebooks which places them on a par with much of his published output in their violability. They hold no more originary status than does a piece that has already undergone revision. Together with those texts that are rewritten, the notebooks therefore constitute a particular kind of ‘turning point’ in his writing life: as Sheringham described, they are evidence of the self’s negotiation with itself and awareness of itself as a temporal being. Du Bouchet wrote in the undated notebook extracts in Andains that ‘il y a une parole qui  –  s’arrachant à elle-même, s’enracinera.’ (Andains, n. p.) (there is a language that  –  tearing itself away from itself, will take root.’)

Rewriting Published Texts

The published texts that Du Bouchet rewrote, many of which can be labelled circumstantial, function in an analogous way. We saw in chapters one, three, and four respectively that the revised versions of ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’, ‘Notes sur la traduction’, and, to a lesser extent, De plusieurs déchirements dans 31 32 33

Alain Duschene and Thierry Leguay, Les Petits Papiers. Écrire des textes courts (Paris: Magnard, 1991), p. 67. Philippe Met, ‘Fausses notes: Pour une poétique du carnet’, in Poetic Practice and the Practice of Poetics in French since 1945, ed. by Hugues Azérad, Michael G. Kelly, Nina Parish, and Emma Wagstaff (= spec. iss. of French Forum, 37, 1-2 (2012)), 53-67. Philippe Jaccottet, La Semaison. Carnets 1954-1979 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

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les parages de la peinture, are significantly shorter. They are also frequently inspired by other people, and a further important text that takes its starting point from another writer is Retours sur le vent.34 Like the lectures on Hölderlin and Celan, it was first delivered orally, and is in part an homage to the Lebanese poet Salah Stétié. Du Bouchet presented it at an event at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in 1994. Met notes that a later version, ‘Pour Salah Stétié’, is less a ‘remaniement’ (reworking), than a ‘retour sur son « histoire »’ (return to his ‘(hi)story’). He goes on: ‘Il s’agit donc d’un exercice d’anamnèse, de remontée vers l’origine ; d’une remémoration de l’« accident » de départ, c’est-à-dire de la matière brute du poème.’35 (It is a case of anamnesis, of going back to the origin; of remembering the ‘accident’ of the start, that’s to say the brute matter of the poem.) Met rightly emphasises the return to the matter of the poem, and also the poem’s practising of anamnesis, but it is questionable whether Du Bouchet’s rewriting conducts a return to an origin. This chapter argues, rather, that the original event that constituted the composing of the first text is as much open to revision as subsequent versions will be, just as was the case with the notes in his carnets. Indeed, Du Bouchet revised the text a second time for publication in L’Em­ portement du muet in 2000.36 The differences between the three versions can be divided into the following categories: layout; minor adjustments; expansion or contraction; and altered tense usage. The layout is frequently different across all three versions, but much of this can be attributed to the narrower pages available in the Gallimard ‘Poésie’ edition in which the second was included in 1998. Du Bouchet often adjusts individual words and phrases, including, for instance, the shift from ‘apparaît’ (RSLV, p. 17, appears) to ‘se révèle’ (A, p. 142, is revealed, using the reflexive structure). He changes key terms, replacing ‘l’amnésie’ (RSLV, p. 22, amnesia) with ‘la perte de la mémoire’ (A, p. 146, the loss of memory), and then, in the same section, replacing ‘elle a supporté le mot’ (A, p. 146, it bore the word – with a dual sense of supporting and tolerating) with ‘elle a porté le mot’ (EM, p. 132, it carried the word). Between the first and second versions, ‘estompé’ (RSLV, p. 23, blurred) has become ‘résorbé’ (A, p. 147, reabsorbed). Revision does not always mean paring back, as shown by the change between the following: 34 35 36

‘Faire un retour sur’ is to go back over something, or review it. ‘Un retour’ is a return. André du Bouchet, ‘Pour Salah Stétié’, in A, pp. 141-50; Met, Formules de la poésie, p. 223 (emphasis original). André du Bouchet, ‘Retours sur le vent’, in EM, pp. 123-37.

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     papier    ou encre.   ou le corps.    matière et qui, dans le temps même où elle contient, expose – incarnée. (RSLV, p. 22)       paper    or ink.   or the body.     matter and which, in the very time when it contains, exposes – incarnated. becomes: encre. papier. Corps, encore. matière de rencontre – et qui, dans le temps même où elle doit contenir, expose, et elle retranche – incarnée. (A, p. 146) ink. paper. Body, again. matter of meeting – and which, in the very time when it should contain, exposes, and it deducts – incarnated. By the 2000 version, though, he has shortened it slightly again: encre.  papier.  fraction du corps.  matière de rencontre – et qui, dans le temps même où elle doit contenir, expose – incarnée. ink. paper. fraction of the body. matter of meeting – and which, in the very time when it should contain, exposes – incarnated. (EM, p. 132) In some cases Du Bouchet’s revisions include changes in tense. For instance, ‘doit donner’ (RSLV, p. 21, must give) becomes ‘donnera’ (A, p. 146, will give), and ‘reprend’ (A, p. 143, takes up) is transformed into ‘reprendra’ (EM, p. 129, will take up). In a more complex example, dans son prolongement à l’infini, la cohésion de l’élémentaire que de ma personne je n’ai pas pu rompre traversera les signes imposés. (RSLV, p. 22) in its infinite prolongation, the cohesion of the elementary that with my person I have not been able to rupture will cross through the imposed signs becomes:

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dans ses prolongements indéfinis, la cohérence de l’élémentaire que de ma personne je n’aurai pas suspendue, traverse par endroits les signes imposés. (A, p. 146) in its indefinite prolongations,   the coherence of the elementary that with my person I shall not have suspended, in places crosses through the imposed signs. Not only has ‘prolongement’ become plural, ‘à l’infini’ changed to ‘indéfinis’, and ‘la cohésion’ been transformed into ‘la cohérence’, but ‘de ma personne que je n’ai pas pu rompre’ is rewritten as ‘que de ma personne / je n’aurai pas suspendue’: a perfect tense is replaced by the future perfect, and the present ‘traverse’ has become the future ‘traversera’. This is in line with Du Bouchet’s increasing tendency to employ the future perfect, discussed above as a destabilising tense that posits a looking ahead to what will have been a past state. The same shift occurs when ‘une chose […] dont […] on a tenté de s’en saisir’ (RSLV, p. 24, a thing […] some of which […] you tried to seize) becomes ‘une chose […] de laquelle […] on aura tenté de s’en saisir’ (A, p. 148, a thing […] a part of which […] you will have tried to seize). This is where Retours sur le vent shows how Du Bouchet’s work does much more than stage returns to an original point. His revisions constitute a looking back from an altered position in the present, but they simultaneously reveal and enact the awareness that there will be future revisions. They look ahead to a point in the future when the present, as past, will have changed, and, although his use of the future perfect tense increases, Du Bouchet practises the awareness of future change from the very start of the process of writing a text, be it in its first published form or in notebook jottings that precede that. The text always contains the certainty that, through future perspectives on it, it will have changed. He said, with deceptive simplicity, ‘vous n’êtes plus le même lorsque vous lisez que lorsque vous avez écrit.’ (Entretiens, p. 93, You’re no longer the same when you read as you were when you wrote). If ‘retours’ contain this complex looking forward to the past, then where does the Dubouchettian term ‘révolu’ fit in? It is a charged and valuable word meaning ‘bygone’ or ‘what is past’ and recurs in nominal, adjectival, and past participle form. Jean-Michel Reynard writes: ‘Le révolu, c’est le retard du monde. Individu, j’emporte l’épaisseur étendue-langue-durée que j’entame en la soustrayant à l’inertie du futur sans mémoire.’37 (The révolu is the world’s delay. As an individual I carry off the thickness of expanse-language-duration 37 Reynard, L’Interdit de langue, p. 81.

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that I launch by subtracting it from the inertia of the future without memory.) In a sentence worthy of Du Bouchet himself in its combining of abstract and concrete terms, but with a greater theoretical bent, Reynard first links space, language and time and makes that connection a material one, then argues that its thickness prevents an abstract understanding of the progress of time. The ‘révolu’ is oriented towards the future rather than indicating cyclical movement. While this takes effective account of the ways in which embeddedness in the world removes Du Bouchet’s subject from a teleological, conceptual notion of time, it does not do full justice to the complexity of ‘le révolu’, which is more than a ‘retard’. As with the particular interpretation of ‘retours’ outlined above, ‘le révolu’ shows that both the present and the past are changed from the future: renewed perception always necessarily alters any state that is recalled, and, crucially, awareness of that affects the present at the time of seeing, living, and writing it. Martinez discusses the term ‘le révolu’ in relation to Du Bouchet’s use of past participles, which mark a temporal neutrality until they are used in conjunction with an auxiliary verb.38 The past participle shows an action in the past, ‘mais saisie dans l’écoulement’ (but captured in the flow). He continues: ‘Le moment saisi apparaît comme révolu, mais encore sous l’angle de l’incidence, comme en vestige dans ses effets’39 (The captured moment appears as past, but still in relation to its impact, as if it were there as a vestige in its effects.) The explicit connecting of Du Bouchet’s use of ‘le révolu’ with past participles is helpful in understanding it as suggesting an anchor in time while resisting contextual placing, but I would argue that the action of ‘le révolu’ is more complex than the continuing impact or presence of the past in the present, because it overturns any secure form that might have been taken by the past. Jacques Depreux writes: C’est l’un des paradoxes de la pensée poétique d’André du Bouchet qu’elle conserve ce qui disparaît sans nier la disparition […]. C’est parce que le révolu n’est pas le retour du même dans son état premier et parce que le même revient alourdi de son expérience, que le recommencement n’est pas une répétition.40 It is one of the paradoxes of André du Bouchet’s poetic thought that it retains what disappears without denying the disappearance […]. It is 38 Martinez, André du Bouchet, p. 130. 39 Ibid. 40 Depreux, André du Bouchet, ou la parole traversée, p. 81.

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because le révolu is not the return of the same in its original state and because the same comes back weighted with experience, that beginning again does not entail repetition. He points out that in Peinture Du Bouchet associates ‘le révolu’ with the agricultural stone roller, which moves by turning on itself, and, unlike devices such as ploughs, can go back over the same land without having to turn 180 degrees. It is perhaps not surprising that the poem ‘Le révolu’ is one of those that Du Bouchet rewrote. It first appeared with Orange Export Ltd in 1977, then two years later in Laisses.41 The poem covers twelve unpaginated pages in Laisses, including two pages – the fifth and sixth – which are left blank. In the version included in the Gallimard ‘poésie’ collection L’ajour, the first three pages have few changes: the text is slightly compressed, including material that occupies the first four pages of Laisses, before the blank ones. The two sections on the final page in L’ajour are taken (separately) from the final six pages of the Laisses version, so the revised version is considerably shorter. The omitted parts are all made up of short, centralised lines. The only remaining section in L’ajour with that form is the final one, which had been placed earlier in Laisses and did not constitute the end of the poem. In this instance, therefore, Du Bouchet has reduced the length of the text and endowed it with a form that uses the full width of the page, with the notable exception of the final section. Most striking about ‘Le révolu’, in the later version in particular, is the repeated emphasis on ‘r’ sounds, especially on the first two pages. For example, pages one and two in L’ajour contain at least one word including a strong ‘r’ sound in each section. On p. 82 it occurs at the start of words: ‘Le révolu’ as a noun; ‘révolu’; ‘la roue’ (the wheel); ‘rentrée’ (gone back in); ‘racle’ (scrape); ‘la route’ (the road); ‘le rêche’ (harshness); ‘râpeux’ (rough); ‘rugueux’ (coarse). On p. 83 the ‘r’ is more often in the middle of words: ‘obstruent’ (obstruct); ‘soustrait’ (subtracted); ‘trait’ (line); ‘grandie’ (grown). The sound ‘r’ seems to draw attention to its repetition, and many of the words mean ‘rough’. It refuses to allow the words to emerge smoothly. Above the copyright notice at the start of L’ajour is the phrase: ‘l’ajour est l’état définitif des pages extraites de […]’ and then a range of publications are listed (l’ajour is the definitive state of pages excerpted from […]). Published in 1998, less than three years before the poet’s death, these texts were not subsequently rewritten, suggesting an end to the process of revision that this chapter argues permeates Du Bouchet’s writing. It is striking, nevertheless, that, like 41

André du Bouchet, Le révolu (Malakoff: Orange Export Ltd, 1977) (henceforth R); L, n. p. In using the lower case ‘r’ I am following Du Bouchet’s own preference.

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‘Le révolu’, many of the texts in L’ajour are both rewritten versions of earlier publications and are poetry rather than prose, so it is not the case that he rewrote only circumstantial prose. For example, ‘Le Surcroît’ (Excess) was first published with illustrations by Ràfols-Casamada in 1989, then as text in 1990 (S), reprinted with some revisions in Axiales in 1992 (pp. 27-59), then finds its ‘état définitif’ in L’ajour in 1998 (pp. 105-37). There are several instances where the layout differs slightly between two, or even all three of the text versions.42 The version in L’ajour has been shortened on p. 121, the final line that appeared in Le Surcroît (n. p.) and Axiales (p. 43) having been omitted. In addition, Du Bouchet slightly rewrote and changed the order of three pages in the centre of the text between the publication of Axiales (pp. 47-49) and L’ajour (pp. 127-29). In one instance, the second part of a page in Le Surcroît:    où l’air et du même souffle alors dès qu’il ira n’a pas eu de sens. (S, n.p.)     where the air and from the same breath then once it goes has made no sense. becomes the following in Axiales: 42

The differences in layout can be found between the following pages: S, n.p. / Ax, p. 38 and A, p. 116; S, n.p. and Ax, p. 39 and A, p. 117; S, n.p. and Ax, p. 40 and A, p. 118; S, n.p. and Ax, p. 41 / A, p. 119; S, n.p. and Ax, p. 49 and A, p. 129. The majority of the changes consist of moving words towards or away from the left-hand margin.

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  où de l’air sitôt qu’il sera allé même souffle n’a pas eu de sens. (Ax, p. 44)    where some air as soon as it has gone same breath has made no sense.43 The future perfect has once again been introduced, though English uses different tenses in time constructions. By the time of L’ajour, though, Du Bouchet has rewritten it for a second time into a more telescopic version:      où l’air sitôt qu’il est même souffle allé va quitte du sens. (A, p. 122) 43

The first two lines of this extract represent a particular translation difficulty: ‘où’ can mean ‘when’ or ‘where’, and ‘de l’air’ translates either as ‘of the air’ or ‘some air’; the context does not enable the translator to decide between these possibilities.

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     where the air as soon as it has same breath gone will go clear of meaning. Even when preparing a selection of extracts for inclusion in the Gallimard ‘poésie’ series, Du Bouchet continued to refine his work, moving parts of a text around, slightly adjusting the mobile left-hand margin, and revising individual words and tenses. What, then, should we make of Du Bouchet’s final publication during his lifetime, the slim collection Tumulte? Unlike his penultimate volume, L’Em­ portement du muet, which consists of previously published texts, revised in the ways discussed above, Tumulte does not include pieces of writing that had appeared before. Does it indicate a new direction in his work, or is it merely the case that, had he lived longer, he might well have revisited those texts? It could be tempting, owing to its apparent distinctiveness, to see it as embodying a ‘late style’, in which Du Bouchet, aware that he was coming to the end of his life, offers writing ‘out of time’ or work that appears either notably serene or irascible.44 In an edited volume of essays questioning the critical concept of ‘late style’, Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles argue that it is too frequently applied as a universal category, eliding the differences between writers, artists, or musicians who might have died young or in old age, affected or not by illness or decline, working in different media, and who might be considered to embody, or not, wider aesthetic tendencies or responses to historical circumstances.45 I would argue that Du Bouchet does not produce a final work ‘out of time’. His writing project is one of paring back which is in itself concrete in that it builds 44

45

A frequently cited reference is Edward Saïd, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). Saïd in turn cites Theodor W. Adorno’s Essays on Music, ed. by Richard Leppert, trans. by Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002). Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, ‘Introduction’, in Late Style and its Discontents, ed. by McMullan and Smiles (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship online, 2016), pp. 1-17.

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up over the course of a writing life to produce work that offers an account of the passing of time. In so doing, it shows that time is not experienced as chronos, but as repeated returns through which the past is understood differently in the present, and it is possible to project ahead to a time in the future when the present will appear differently. The following analysis of a text from Tumulte will argue that the volume is not a summation of a life or a late shift that looks forward to subsequent developments in poetry, but rather an exemplary work in which Du Bouchet produces process: a volume that shares features with the rest of his output, while embodying – in part through a focus on the human body – the paring back that his practice of rewriting had also aimed to achieve.

‘À l’arrêt’

This poem, whose title means ‘stationary’, is the last in Tumulte, itself Du Bouchet’s final volume. While the title might seem to refer to the situation of the speaking self, it becomes clear over the course of the text that this is far from the case. Stasis is attributed to the world around while the self moves forward: the final lines are ‘tu avances // cela / n’a pas bougé’ (you go on // that / has not moved). Moreover, the text as a whole is anything but still. Perhaps that can be seen in the title, in a way that is absent from the English translation that employs an adjective to describe a state. The words ‘à l’arrêt’, position the subject of the action at a point where pauses are made, with the implication that movement might subsequently begin again. Two insistent words throughout the text are ‘dehors’ (outside) and ‘la neige’ (snow). The outside is both ‘outdoors’ and all that is external to the speaking self, which only occurs once as ‘je’ (je ne peux pas’ (I cannot)), but is present in addresses to a ‘tu’ figure, which appears to be the self rather than a second person present: ‘tu as / accroché / le / véloce’ (you hung / up / the / quick). ‘Le véloce’ is not standard usage as a noun; it transforms an adjective into nominal form, making the description of speed into something worthy of attention in its own right. The verb ‘accrocher’ links this utterance to two other previous uses of it in the text. The second time it occurs it is, as in the example cited above, employed to evoke the hanging up of an abstract entity: Du Bouchet writes that the breath of the snow has been hung up by its own weight. The reader is primed to read ‘ce souffle de / la neige’ (this breath of / snow) as a physical entity, however, because of the striking first instance of ‘accrocher’ on the opening page, which reads:

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dehors   mais vide le dehors aujourd’hui entrailles et poumons dans le grand froid à côté de la porte comme un torchon accrochés outside     but empty the outside today entrails and lungs in the great cold beside the door like a cloth hung up There is a suggestion of a hunter’s catch hung up on returning home, but these are entrails and lungs, not whole animals. The lines produce the impression of a writing self whose relationship with the outside world is one experienced viscerally, through internal organs that make their presence felt as the outside seems to penetrate the body rather than being experienced on the skin or the extremities. ‘Le torchon’ further emphasises the effect by contrasting it with a scene of domesticity. There is little that is domestic in Du Bouchet’s work, if that is understood as homely, familiar, known, and safe.

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Snow is a valuable entity in Du Bouchet’s poetry, and one that returns frequently: it evokes weather cold enough to be felt inside the body through breathing; additional thickness in the landscape that must be negotiated by the walking self ‘comme entre terre et soi / la neige’ (as between earth and self / snow)); a means by which the natural world takes on the colour of the page or the canvas; and in ‘À l’arrêt’ it enables the introduction of an imagined avalanche: comme   avalanche de l’air resurgi like   avalanche of air resurgent The layout of the words on the page appears to suggest the movement of the unnamed snow, the word ‘avalanche’ placed after three line spaces and slightly to the right. But it transpires that it is made of air, and not only that, but ‘l’air // resurgi’, which suggests an upward movement while occurring lower down on the page, so Du Bouchet refuses any straightforward scene that the reader might attempt to visualise. Snow is a mass that can be both intractable and shifting, rather than falling as gentle flakes. His presentation of snow is therefore very different from that of his contemporary Yves Bonnefoy, whose Début et fin de la neige (Beginning and End of the Snow) is sensitively analysed by Emily McLaughlin as employing snow to reveal attempts to touch the material world that always remains just beyond our grasp, as the snowflake melts on touch.46 Snow stands for the cold in Du Bouchet’s work, and it appears in a number of his titles: Dérapage sur une plaque de verglas, déchet de la neige (Skidding on 46

Yves Bonnefoy, Début et fin de la neige (Paris: Mercure de France, 1991). Emily McLaughlin, ‘Noli me tangere. Bonnefoy, Nancy, Derrida’, in Poetic Practice and the Practice of Poetics in French since 1945, ed. by Azérad et al. pp. 183-94.

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a Patch of Ice, Snow’s Waste)47 and ‘Autour du mot la neige est réunie’ (Around the Word Snow has Gathered),48 the latter title a quotation from Celan which is used to structure the text. Du Bouchet writes, for instance: autour du mot la neige est réunie.    le temps – temps de l’entre-temps – où, prenant consistence, un mot recomposé, là, s’y confond avec les éléments qui ne sont pas ceux de sa langue uniquement, marque le point où il lui faut disparaître aussi. (PSC, p. 12) around the word snow has gathered. time – time of between-times    –    where, taking shape, a word recomposed, there, becomes conflated with the elements that are not just those of its language,   marks the point where it has to disappear as well. Snow, here, is solidly material and also about to melt, and thereby offers a striking equivalent for words as Du Bouchet understands them to work. Although part of the material world, they are not unchanging: each time they are uttered their context is slightly different. In ‘À l’arrêt’, the outside fulfils the same function. It is not an ‘other’ to the self, a landscape into which he might venture, and cannot be so because the self does not have integrity separate from the world around: this is clear from the picture of the lungs and entrails hanging by the door. As Susan Harrow writes, the body has been much more rarely examined in relation to modern poetry than it has to prose, and the body is essential to the autobiographical project: in her examination of writing by Francis Ponge, she posits the body as ‘forming the material seam between inner self and exterior surface.’49 Du Bouchet does not take a phenomenological approach to the relationship between self and outside, because he does not posit the self as existing prior to its interaction with its environment. ‘Le dehors’ recurs frequently in this text, and it has the same qualities of change that Du Bouchet attributes to language: it is repeated in different formulations, including phrases such as

47 48 49

André du Bouchet, Dérapage sur une plaque de verglas, déchet de neige (Paris: La Répé­ tition, 1985), text reprinted from an homage to Jean Tortel, Action poétique (1985), 96-97. André du Bouchet, ‘Autour du mot la neige est réunie’, in PSC, n.p.; the text also appeared in Ralentir travaux, 5 (1996). Susan Harrow, The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 133.

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         passer dehors          move outside where enjambement is used to prevent it from being read only as an infinitive or imperative with a complement. Two pages later, he writes: mais       dehors    sans l’avoir arrêté je ne peux pas but      outside     without having stopped it I cannot The subject expresses powerlessness in the face not of the outside, but of its movement, and in that sense the outside is temporal as much as spatial. Tumulte is an intensified version of much of Du Bouchet’s writing in that many of his texts show the outside world without naming it or its constituent parts, just as they show the relationship of the subject to the world without detailing actions that can be situated. We are presented with process itself, in sections such as that cited above, or the following page from ‘Par un fil du vent’ (By a Thread of the Wind) in Tumulte.    que cela        cesse et cesse

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ce qui devant soi peut-être a été (T, n. p.)    that it     should end and end that which before you perhaps has been Du Bouchet uses ‘ce qui’ in place of nouns, removing all identifying features except the fact that something existed or happened. ‘Que’ in this instance could be either the expression of a wish or the opening of a subordinate clause that has no preceding main clause. ‘Cesse’ is repeated, negating its apparent meaning, but perhaps lending weight to the idea of a wish that it should cease. By introducing ‘peut-être’, Du Bouchet reinforces the hypothetical status of the future perfect sense. He evokes duration without attributing it to things. The final page of ‘À l’arrêt’ reads: le dehors le tout petit du dehors lui-même comme l’autre jour une                bête sorti             et ressorti tu avances

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cela n’a pas bougé the outside the very small part of the outside itself the other day like a              beast gone out          and out again you go on that has not moved While it might appear from the final lines that the subject is distinct from the outside world, moving onwards while the world stands still, the text as a whole has shown that there is no such simple distinction: the outside is, if not personified, then associated with a beast, or a part of the wild environment, that repeatedly moves outside: ‘sorti / et ressorti’. What is designated by ‘cela’ is therefore unclear, and is not identical with the environment in which the subject lives. The boundary between them is porous, especially since the mention of ‘bête’ leads the reader to associate the outside with the entrails and lungs hanging up at the start of the text. Martinez has written in detail about this volume, arguing that it reveals ‘vitalité’. He suggests that Du Bouchet’s poetic subject is dispossessed, but thereby attains vivacity.50 I would agree, because the subject is no longer defined by any attributes, and that has been the case from his early work. But rather than attributing vitality to a dispossessed subject, the text’s achievement is to express and produce process itself. Process is particularly evident in those sections where change over time is enacted independently of things that undergo that change, and is visible in numerous utterances such as ‘remuer / une fois encore’ (stir / once again). The complex use of tenses that we have seen throughout is apparent here in extracts such as the following: 50

Victor Martinez, ‘Les sources de la vitalité’, L’Étrangère, 16-18 (2007), 147.

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tête       traversée encore par ce qui plus loin emportera head        crossed through again by that which further on will carry off Du Bouchet’s combining of a past participle with a future tense evokes movement in the past experienced in the present, ‘traversée’, and projects ahead to a future state where change will happen and will have happened. A sense of process is built up over the course of poems, volumes, and Du Bouchet’s œuvre as a whole, in writing that performs as well as evokes it. In ‘À l’arrêt’, for instance, we see a clear example – even, perhaps, the culmination – of procedures Du Bouchet worked on over many years: a total absence of punctuation, and the exploitation of the space of the page in such a way that the piece combines his creation of sparse poetic texts occupying a few short lines in the centre of the page with the feature of his poetic prose that uses the right-hand margin to split short lines in two and create enjambement, such as the example cited above:        passer dehors Generic distinctions are broken down in Tumulte, but these had been questionable much earlier in Du Bouchet’s writing. This chapter has shown that rewriting was an essential part of his practice from his early poems onwards. It is clear that he paid as much attention to minor details of linguistic expression in his prose as he did in his poetry, including those pieces labelled as circumstantial. By rewriting the latter, sometimes more than once, Du Bouchet questions the privileged status accorded to the first delivery or writing of a piece of work. In the same way, by rewriting the notebooks for their publication in Carnets, and even editing the handwritten notebooks themselves, he takes away the quality of originality that might otherwise be accorded to the first time a set of words is spoken or committed to paper.

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This makes Du Bouchet’s work postmodern in the sense that it rejects the notion of an origin. The texts to which Du Bouchet returns seem changed, and that is why he rewrites them, even if they have previously been published, and even if they are then to be presented as dated carnets. It is not somehow deceitful to rewrite the carnets because Du Bouchet is testifying to the meaning they have for him at the time he publishes them. Language is not in an endless process of self-referral, because it always has meaning that relates directly to the outside world: the crucial ingredient is time, which ensures that words never mean exactly the same thing. Just as Du Bouchet pays attention to the words of others, the natural world, visual works of art, and the sounds of other languages, he pays attention to his own language when writing and rewriting his poetry and prose, and, concomitantly, to his relationship to the language he uses. That is not the same as saying that that language is his ‘own’, or ‘native’. The reverse is true: by devoting attention to it through the medium of rewriting and of producing time in his poetry, he is ensuring that it always remains unpossessed. There is a temporal gap between the writer and his words, and his relationship to them is a welcome tension. A study of Du Bouchet’s work through the lens of autobiography would, at first sight, appear to be aided by the increasing availability of his notebooks. This chapter has shown, however, that those texts and Du Bouchet’s treatment of them frustrate any attempt to read an autobiographical subject through or as a result of his writing. Instead, his practice of rewriting, and the exemplary Tumulte, reveal that his œuvre is an ongoing project where the past is affected by the present from which it is viewed, and, crucially, the texts embody an awareness of a future state that will render that present itself subject to change.

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Conclusion This book has aimed to show that at the heart of Du Bouchet’s writing are pauses held in tension. They are moments from which the poet moves on in order to resist stasis and to avoid occupying a place, as ‘poet’, that should instead be shared with others. Pauses allow the subject not to arrest time but to exist fully in the present while retaining awareness of past and future. Such existence does not equate to a metaphysical sense of presence, where the poet would privilege the reality of the natural world in order to glimpse the ideal, or other-worldly realm. His writing focuses instead on producing temporality in the form of the text by repeated instances of intensely evoked bodily existence. Du Bouchet’s production and maintenance of tensions between past, present, future, and, particularly, future perfect perspectives, between self and other, familiar and unfamiliar, work to create the sense that the world is experienced from multiple, changing perspectives, which have in common an acute awareness of time passing. The resulting time of the text’s writing and reading can be described as slow in that it resists onward momentum while retaining a sense of change, and it requires the reader to be attentive to formal detail. Du Bouchet offers the processes of writing and living, which involve returning, revising, and renewing perspectives as we age. Reading the forms of Du Bouchet’s poetic writing enables a response to the questions posed by the thinkers cited in this book: how to give people an equal voice; how to understand time in a non-teleological way; how to be de-centred rather than occupying a clear subject-position; how to write about the work of others without claiming to interpret it objectively; and how to reflect on a life in terms that are not straightforwardly autobiographical. Examining Du Bouchet’s work in tandem with those thinkers reveals his contribution to broader debates concerning equality, mortality and the subject. The attentiveness displayed by Du Bouchet’s writing – to other people, languages, and media, to language itself and to the non-linguistic world – has three important characteristics. It is an ongoing process, but without a final goal; it involves constant shifts between concentration and distraction; and, above all, it is enacted by the forms of Du Bouchet’s poetry rather than only being evoked as a trope. Attention is of interest to him as a temporal, formal phenomenon of language and as a means of enabling interaction between humans and the material world before being a psychological activity. If that is what attention means for the study of Du Bouchet, what does Du Bouchet’s particular kind of attentiveness bring to poetry? What might it mean for a theory of attention? In what ways might further study of poetry contribute

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432888_009

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also to debates on attention? This conclusion will suggest answers to those questions. A rejection of the phenomenological model of attention raises the question of the status of the subject. A Modernist subject would be constructed in and by the text, but Du Bouchet’s refusal to privilege a final or original version of a text throws that into doubt. Where and what is the subject in texts that have no conclusion? In studies of poetry in French since around 1980, the subject is frequently present as ‘fondamentalement intersubjectif’1 (fundamentally intersubjective). The subject is still key beyond those writing practices where poetry is conceived as ‘voice’ or ‘offering’: it exists as the axis of a process of assembling on the basis of pre-existing texts,2 and subjectivity is still present even when ‘purement extériorisante’ (oriented purely towards the outside).3 That orientation can be construed as attentiveness to the forms produced when words and sounds are assembled. As Steven Winspur argues, the subject for poets including Philippe Jaccottet and, I suggest, Du Bouchet, ‘ne tombe pas sous l’égide d’une conscience en quête de signification.’4 (does not come under the aegis of a consciousness in search of meaning). Anne-Christine Royère proposes that the existence of the subject ‘est donc dépendante de sa relation avec un dehors, conçu comme une extériorité nommable et descriptible, mais aussi comme « dehors du dedans » (therefore depends on its relationship with an outside, understood as an external world that can be named and described, but also as the ‘outside of the inside’).5 A complex relation between the outside and the inside also characterises the subject in Du Bouchet’s writing, as seen in the interaction between attention and distraction that he evokes and produces. While its history might not be described or even referred to, the subject clearly has bodily existence as a single entity engaging with its environment. At the same time, however, its 1 Renée Ventresque, ‘Le « tourniquet-poème » de James Sacré’, in Sens et présence du sujet poétique : la poésie de la France et du monde francophone depuis 1980, ed. by Michael Brophy and Mary Gallagher (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 327-37 (322). 2 Claude Pérez, ‘Olivier Cadiot poète lyric’, in Sens et présence du sujet poétique, ed. by Brophy and Gallagher, pp. 283-90. 3 Jérôme Game, ‘Cut-up et montage : d’un sujet constructiviste dans la poésie chez Vannina Maestri’, in Sens et présence du sujet poétique, ed. by Brophy and Gallagher, pp. 127-42 (131). 4 Steven Winspur, ‘L’Absence joyeuse de sujet chez Philippe Jaccottet’, in Sens et présence du sujet poétique, ed. by Brophy and Gallagher, pp. 347-56 (p. 352). In place of the subject of phenomenology, Winspur uses Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the ‘corps spacieux’ (spatialised body). 5 Anne-Christine Royère, ‘« Je ne suis que là où le rouge me fendre » : l’« horrible en dedans’ en dehors » ou l’absolue transitivité du sujet dans la poésie d’Emmanuel Laugier’, in Sens et présence du sujet poétique, ed. by Brophy and Gallagher, pp. 307-15 (315).

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chief attribute is its changeability: the self is not identical to itself over time. Rather, the va-et-vient between self and world constantly alters the self’s understanding of its place in the world, as well as its conception and memory of its internal processes. The subject is further complicated by the awareness that, in speaking, it temporarily separates itself from what it evokes. The self is therefore also engaged in a constant movement from closeness to the ‘dehors’ to distance from it, then nearness again. Moreover, distance from the world means brief coherence with the self, but that self seeks the proximity to the outside even though nearness causes the self to exceed its boundaries. Du Bouchet writes in ‘luzerne’ (lucerne), for example: Étant là membres ou mots mais sur un bras j’ai débordé comme le vent. (A, p. 69) Being there limbs or words but on an arm I overflowed like the wind. Otherness can be associated with a search for renewal: Michael Brophy attributes a future-oriented, temporal dimension to the engagement of the poetic self with all that is different from it in the work of poets of Du Bouchet’s generation, some of whom were his close associates.6 Du Bouchet’s is not a straightforward response to the environment that the subject encounters 6 Michael Brophy, Voies vers l’autre : Dupin, Bonnefoy, Noël, Guillevic (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997).

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because the position and limits of the subject who attends to the world are constantly shifting. He accords prime importance to a connection between poetic subject and other, although the relations he sets up are not the same throughout his œuvre. ‘Je’, ‘tu’, and ‘nous’ are used at different times and in various ways, ‘je’ occurring less frequently in the later texts. ‘Tu’ appears to suggest at times another person who is an interlocutor of the self, and sometimes the self as interlocutor.7 ‘Nous’ appears in earlier verse poetry and later prose texts. In Dans la chaleur vacante, for instance, it seems to designate the ‘je’ and ‘tu’ together:     L’ombre,       plus courte, la chaleur, dehors, nous tenant lieu de feu. Rien ne nous sépare de la chaleur. Sur le sol du foyer j’avance,           rompu,      vers ces murs froids. (DLCV, p. 25)    Shadow,        shorter, the heat, outside, standing in for fire for us. Nothing separates us from the heat. On the floor of home I go forward,               broken,     towards these cold walls.8 Not only are the subjects joined under the label of ‘nous’, but ‘rien ne nous sépare de la chaleur’: those subjects are intertwined with intense sensation of the physical environment. The ‘je’ has not been subsumed entirely, because it must enact movement through space alone: ‘sur le sol du foyer j’avance’. In Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous, his volume of pieces responding to the art of Giacometti, Du Bouchet posits a first person plural different from a conjunction of self and other. We, in that instance, are human beings who are given a 7 Numerous instances of the self addressing itself in twentieth-century verse include the opening to Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ (Zone), ‘À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien’ (Alcools (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 7) (‘You are weary at last of this ancient world’: Alcools, trans. by Anne Hyde Greet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), p. 3). In ‘Cortège’ (Procession) in the same collection, Apollinaire writes: ‘Je me disais Guillaume il est temps que tu viennes’ (Alcools, p. 49) (‘I said to myself William it’s time to come’: Alcools, trans. by Hyde Greet, p. 67). 8 Mus’s translation: ‘Shadows, / briefer, shrunken, now heat, outside, stands / in place of fire. Nothing keeps us apart from what / heats. On the ground of its hearth and home where I, / ex- / hausted, / make for these cold walls.’ WHL, p. 23.

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glimpse of what is on the other side of the visible world: as Thomas Augais argues, in Du Bouchet’s analysis Giacometti succeeds in showing us death.9 The ‘nous’ discussed in chapter two of this book is a slightly different entity again: a collective which acquires a voice provided that the place of the poet remains empty. In Du Bouchet’s view, the writer can maintain that space open for others by producing work that is constantly on the move. His temporal forms are not verbal experiments or personal preferences: they constitute an ethical project. ‘We’ share an engagement with a time and a place. He evokes shared experience in a way that appears to bring him closer to the poets of presence, employing terms such as ‘l’expérience’ (experience), and ‘l’événement’ (event). Nevertheless, we have seen that the event, in the sense of an original experience, is constantly challenged by his work. Also, his questioning of the status of the writer in ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage »’ means that he does not align himself with writers who see in poetry a privileged language. His delineation of what ‘nous’ might be is a powerful counterbalance to a politics of individual demands, and shows that a collective voice can emerge if people stop trying to speak individually or for one another. The relationship between self and other is further complicated by his writing on translation, which demonstrates that there is no situated habitus from which the writer, translator, or indeed subject would relate to what is other to him or her. Instead, the process of ‘meshwork’ – a temporal activity rather than a static web of relations – ensures that such relations remain in tension as they develop. As art critic, the subject position Du Bouchet adopts might appear more distinct: he is inspired to turn away from works of art to begin verbal creation. But the resulting texts show that words and world, visual, verbal and bodily matter, are not easily distinguished: art is valuable to him when it shows how ‘tout est peinture’ and ‘la peinture n’a jamais existé’. Writing and reading thus offer a particular process of encounter with the other, one that requires writer and reader to slow down. Slowness is not just the opposite of speed; it is, like the tension of chapter four, ongoing engagement with one’s environment that resists merging with it. His contribution to an understanding of the poetic subject in the late twentieth century is thus to show that it exists in a complex process of connection with, and distance from, all that is outside it, such that distinctions between internal self and external world are never fixed. The place of Du Bouchet’s work in the context of late-twentieth-century poetry in French is therefore elucidated by the study of attention, because it demonstrates how his writing straddles the divide in approaches. The scholars who 9 Thomas Augais, Giacometti et les écrivains : l’atelier sans fin (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017), p. 877.

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tend to categorise poetic practice into opposing positions do not all identify the same two strands. For example, it is possible to write of poets influenced by Heidegger and those who take their inspiration from Wittgenstein. Alternatively, there is a distinction between ontological poets and poets of the text. The latter grouping maps partly, but not wholly, onto the former because ‘ontological’ and ‘textual’ are broader categories than Heideggerian or Wittgensteinian, even though different emphases can also be found in the various interpretations of the philosophers’ work by poets. In other studies, poets are divided according to their association with the journals l’Éphémère and Tel Quel, offering slightly different distinctions again, as Tel Quel writers were interested in Dada and Formalism as well as, or instead of, the ideas of Wittgenstein, while the poets associated with l’Éphémère are linked as much through a shared interest in visual art and translation as by philosophical approach. Other oppositions are based on associating particular poets with an understanding of poetry as either a ‘means’ or an ‘end’,10 as primarily either ‘content’ or ‘form’, or with a quest either to seek the ‘ineffable’ or to show, through grammar, how language makes the world rather than representing it.11 Not only is it difficult to categorise Du Bouchet as belonging to either alternative in each case, but the ways in which attention operates in his work serves to link them. He attends to the material world and to sensation, but also to the impetus provided by linguistic variation; pauses in the present moment are vital to the textual layout he constructs as well as to the subject’s experience of the natural world, and yet he also displays a craftsman’s attention to detail rather than offering a voice. Jean-Michel Maulpoix, who promotes ‘la poétique du texte offert’ (the poetics of text as offering), suggests that offering might be the condition of a text ‘dans sa disponibilité et sa dispositio’ (in its availability and its dispositio); that is, its arrangement on the page, from where the French term ‘dispositif’ emerges. Maulpoix continues: C’est ici avant tout le texte comme objet, comme attention et non comme intention : attention portée au langage, au monde, à autrui, à l’existence…

10 11

Robert W. Greene, Six French Poets of Our Time: A Critical and Historical Study (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). Glenn W. Fetzer traces and problematises the ‘form/content’ dichotomy, arguing that late-twentieth-century poetry has moved to more pragmatic considerations, ‘arising, in part, from the perception of poetry as under siege’: ‘Jean-Marie Gleize, Emmanuel Hocquard, and the Challenge of Lyricism’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 29, 1 (2005), 29-46 (p. 30).

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C’est enfin la poésie comme lieu du « il y a », formule qui, en allemand, se traduit par « es gibt », littéralement « cela donne ».12 Above all it is the text as object, as attention and not as intention: attention devoted to language, to the world, to others, to existence… It is, in the end, poetry as the place of ‘there is’, a formulation that translates into German as ‘es gibt’, literally ‘that gives’. Maulpoix is a proponent of ‘le nouveau lyrisme’, but his reference to attention devoted to language is echoed by a very different poet and writer on poetry, Christian Prigent, who proposes that ‘la poésie est un iconoclasme’ (poetry is a form of iconoclasm), and, at the same time, ‘poésie n’est rien d’autre que le nom d’un autre saisi du réel.’ (poetry is just the name for another way of grasping the real.)13 The purpose of poetry according to experimental poet Prigent is to approach reality by disrupting conventional language use. He rejects the function of language as primarily for communication in the same way that Du Bouchet resists using other people’s language. In neither case is the resulting difficulty wilful or elitist; it is, rather, evidence of the attempt to employ language truthfully. Du Bouchet’s work is, in many ways, far from Prigent’s disruptive creation of sounds and neologisms that jolt the reader into taking notice. At the same time, however, writing by Du Bouchet is iconoclastic in its refusal to allow visual images to settle in the mind’s eye of the reader. The complex, ever-changing relationship between words and the world around make ‘le réel’ (the real) central to his project. By devoting attention both to the non-linguistic world and also to the internal resources of the words he uses, he produces a tension that is one of the key motivating aspects of his writing project. For instance, at the end of the 1992 volume Axiales, he writes:                choses, comme entre elles elles se retirent, la parole, à l’écart un instant, suit. (Ax, p. 132)                things, as between them they withdraw, speech, standing briefly aside, follows.

12 13

Jean-Michel Maulpoix (ed.), Poétique du texte offert (Fontenay-aux-Roses: E. N. S. Éditions, 1996), p. 12 (emphasis original). Christian Prigent, ‘À quoi bon encore des poètes ?’, in À quoi bon encore des poètes ? (Valence: Erba, 1995), pp. 9-21 (14) (emphasis original).

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These lines appear to suggest a disjuncture between language and the material world, the indeterminate ‘choses’, a word whose usage is less common in French than it is in English, taking on a literal sense of objects. Their presence is reinforced by the awkward, repeated ‘elles’ at the end and start of two consecutive lines, and they are placed in the active position, subject of the verb ‘se retirent’. Speech can only follow after being briefly set apart, which might lead us to conclude that language is always trying to catch up with the things it is supposed to designate. Indeed, Jean-Marie Gleize includes Du Bouchet among those poets who are preoccupied by ‘[…] la possibilité ou non, de faire coïncider cette expérience du réel et l’acte de langage’.14 (the possibility or otherwise of making that experience of the real and the act of language coincide). Du Bouchet’s response to this question that has always preoccupied poetry is not to lament the inadequacy of words, however. The temporal gap at the heart of Du Bouchet’s writing is precisely what grants the human subject a meaningful relationship with his or her material environment. Without the disjuncture between language and things, words would fix the meaning and description of those objects; the gap is what keeps the relationship between the self and the world around under review and therefore paradoxically closer. Rather than endlessly trying and failing to catch up, then, words take the initiative by being always on the move. The temporal forms of his writing, such as repetition with variation, pauses, and the use of some of the resources of verse in prose texts, reveal the ways and extent to which his poetry embodies attentiveness, and demonstrate that attention is not something to be harnessed or spent, but rather a continuous action that involves engaging in time itself. Consequently, it is clear that the study of such poetry can contribute a particular perspective to debates on attention. Yves Citton relates the importance of being attentive to what he describes as the ‘réagencements écologiques nécessaires à la reproduction des formes de vie que nous valorisons’ (ecological reorganization necessary for the reproduction of the life forms that we value). He identifies five ‘levels’ of that reorganisation, arguing that ‘[l]’écologie biophysique de nos ressources environnementales, l’écologie géopolitique de nos relations transnationales, l’écologie socio-politique de nos rapports de classes, l’écologie psychique de nos ressources mentales dépendent toutes de l’écologie médiatique qui conditionne nos modes de communication.’ (the biophysical ecology of our environmental resources, the geopolitical ecology of our transnational relations, the socio-political ecology of our class relations and the psychic ecology of our mental resources all depend on the media ecology 14 Gleize, À noir, p. 341 (emphasis original).

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that conditions our modes of communication.)15 These levels can be loosely related to the lenses through which Du Bouchet’s work has been examined in this book, and which poetry is especially well placed to illuminate. The ecology of environmental resources can be seen at work in the relation of the speaking subject to the natural and elemental environment. Transnational relations are bound up with the enmeshment of languages and cultures associated with translation, and Du Bouchet’s broader interest in writers and artists who have had to cross borders owing to war and persecution. Class relations were central to the protests of May ’68, and poets such as Du Bouchet offer formal rather than discursive responses to such social and political contexts. What Citton calls the psychic ecology of our mental resources can in some senses be mapped onto the acknowledgement of the role of turning points in a writing project that rejects the autobiographical, and, more broadly, the reflection in poetry on what constitutes subjectivity. Modes of communication are central to any writing project, of course, and Citton’s focus on the role of the media in global communication is different from Du Bouchet’s work and much modern French poetry, which does not consider mass media. Nevertheless, a study of communication across media, between the verbal and the visual, constitutes a particular kind of ecology that Du Bouchet investigates and performs, and twenty-first-century poetry is characterised by the crossing of boundaries between media and modes of communication and artistic ­expression.16 This book has argued that attentiveness to others, pausing to engage with the natural world, acknowledging enmeshment across boundaries, slowing down to encounter other forms of creativity, and actively pursuing a necessarily unfinished endeavour constitute an ethical and broadly political way of being through writing, and one that poets such as Du Bouchet are well-placed to carry out. Future research might consider the ways and extent to which such an approach is ecological. Geopoetics (redefining the ‘role of personal experience of the real world’), and ecopoetics (‘the ways in which new literary forms give rise to an aesthetic theory of nature’)17 have much in common with critical approaches to modern French poetry that emphasise the influence of Hei15 16 17

The five ‘levels’ are first identified by Citton in Renverser l’insoutenable (Paris: Seuil, 2012), and cited in relation to attention in Pour une écologie de l’attention, p. 46 / The Ecology of Attention, p. 23 (emphasis original). Authors discuss the crossing of those boundaries in articles in Poetry’s Forms and Trans­ formations, ed. by Parish and Wagstaff. Rachel Bouvet and Stephanie Posthumus, ‘Eco- and Geo- approaches in French and Fran­ co­phone Literary Studies: Écocritique, écopoétique, géocritique, géopoétique’, in Hand­book of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, ed. by Hubert Zapf (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), pp. 385-412 (385-90). They also define geocriticism (examining how ‘space becomes place’) and ecocriticism (the study of ‘environmentally oriented literature’); ecopoetics

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degger, with titles such as Habiter en poète (Dwelling as a poet) and Habiter poétiquement le monde (Dwelling poetically in the world).18 Du Bouchet’s work cannot be unproblematically aligned with a focus on habitation, and while a francophone geopoetic or ecopoetic lens might be productive in future analyses of poetry, it would have to take into account the ways in which time comes to challenge spatial representations. Studies such as Stephanie Posthumus’s French Écocritique suggest how ecocriticism might focus on processes of becoming; she cites Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, which insists on the need to articulate ‘a nascent subjectivity; – a constantly mutating socius; – an environment in the process of being reinvented’.19 Posthumus discusses contemporary fiction rather than poetry. The times that Du Bouchet sets up, which reveal the imbrication of the speaking subject with his or her environment, and refuse both speed and a teleological mindset, could offer a striking perspective through which to explore an ecocritical approach to becoming and subjectivity. A specifically formal, poetic approach to the analysis of attention is a powerful means of examining the interaction between human temporality and the timescales of the natural and elemental world, between language, human creativity, and ecological resources, and between equality among people and responsibility for the natural environment.

A Note on Translation

The quotations in this book have been translated for the benefit of the nonfrancophone reader, because part of its purpose is to introduce the work of André du Bouchet to readers who have not encountered his writing before. The published translations of his poetry, by David Mus and by Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers, include only a small proportion of his œuvre, and privilege the texts in verse. The process of translating has aided my understanding of the nuances of the texts, revealing where a word suggests more potential meanings than are contained in any of the available English equivalents. For example, the phrase ‘une dureté provisoire’, cited at the start of chapter three, retains the and ecocriticism consider place with reference to the notion of ‘home’ (‘eco-’ as opposed to ‘geo-’ – ‘earth’). 18 Pinson, Habiter en poète, and Brun (ed.), Anthologie manifeste. Habiter poétiquement le monde. 19 Stephanie Posthumus, French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction Ecologically (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), p. 58; Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), p. 68; Félix Guattari, Les Trois Écologies (Paris: Galilée, 1989).

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striking combination of the ephemeral and the solid in the translation ‘provisional hardness’, but it loses the sense of duration contained within ‘dureté’, which gestures to ‘la durée’. That meaning would be indicated by the word ‘endurance’, but using it in place of ‘hardness’ would remove some of the materiality that is equally important there. It was a deliberate choice to make the word the ‘unit of translation’ where possible,20 to enable a reading of the source texts through parallel translation, because much of the argument of this book depends on reading Du Bouchet’s work at the level of the word, though that does not detract from the significance of his often innovative collocations, or his use of enjambement and blank spaces. Indeed, those devices tend to focus the attention on potential meanings implied by individual words. I have used the published translations where these exist, but only in cases where they allow such a reading at the level of the word that also respects enjambement. For example, Rogers’ translation of the following extract from ‘Soutiré à un futur’, a text discussed in chapter three, works well in English:              déjà              toi qui à tes pieds as pu porter la terre, tu sais – avant de te voir, glacier retractile, en sens inverse vaporisé, qu’ici, et plus avant, de nouveau elle s’aggravera. (Ax, p. 63)           already         backward-moving glacier, who have been able to carry the earth at your feet, you know – before seeing yourself dissolve in reverse, that here, and farther on, once again the ground will weigh more heavily. (OW, pp. 242-43) While the decision to move the naming of the glacier to the second line aids clarity, it shifts the emphasis away from the address to ‘toi’, indicating it instead rather awkwardly with ‘have’. In addition, transforming ‘vaporisé’ into ‘dissolve’ moves the agency to the glacier and away from the ambient conditions, while ‘s’aggravera’, which means to worsen, escalate, or be exacerbated, is less specific than ‘weigh more heavily’. An approach to translation that favours the word is in line with a reading of Du Bouchet that insists he cannot be unproblematically aligned with poets of ‘presence’. Du Bouchet’s own practice as a translator, while influenced by 20

Jean Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. Méthode de traduction (Paris: Didier, 1958).

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Hölderlin to the extent that he is interested in those moments where language appears foreign to the speaker, is nonetheless not identical to Romantic theories of translation which render the native foreign. That is because Du Bouchet does not operate from a position of a writer making his native language foreign through an encounter with what is other; rather, his work demonstrates that the binary native-foreign no longer applies, instead beginning from a position of enmeshment between languages and cultures. The approach adopted in this book, which combines close readings of selected texts with translations into English (the language in which Du Bouchet completed his higher education and published his first essays) is intended to show how Du Bouchet conveys the deep unfamiliarity of words but also the intimate way in which humans engage with the world around. Writing this monograph in English is also a reminder that being a non-native speaker of French affects the author’s interpretation of Du Bouchet’s texts. Research is sometimes needed to establish whether an unfamiliar construction or expression is equally unfamiliar to francophone readers. It can also aid understanding of the multiple potential meanings in a phrase, particularly in cases where Du Bouchet reconcretizes metaphors. For example, Aujourd’hui c’est includes the utterance ‘couler ici comme la pierre coule’ (AC, p. 7). ‘Couler comme une pierre’ means ‘to sink like a stone’, but readers to whom that expression is not immediately familiar will perhaps be more likely to notice both the smooth movement implied by ‘couler’, especially in this instance where the infinitive comes before the collocation. Moreover, such readers might also be quicker to notice the association between ‘couler’ and water, the medium through which the stone sinks. Du Bouchet frequently employs common verbs in ways that gesture to alternative, or re-concretised, uses in addition to the expected ‘first’ meanings, casting new light on the constructions to which speakers habitually pay little attention. The habitus of the non-native speaker interpreting Du Bouchet’s work, along with that of the translator who is a literary critic but not a poet, leads to the translations in a book such as this one having a function that sits between the documentary (where it is obvious that a translation has been undertaken) and the instrumental (according to which the translation exists in its own right).21 The translations aim to help readers refer to the source texts at the level of the word, and help the critic to interpret them, but they attempt also to convey the extent to which Du Bouchet disrupts standard French usage.

21

Christiane Nord, Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained (Manchester: St Jerome, 1997).

Conclusion



205

Poetry’s Role?

Attention is a subject that increasingly preoccupies popular commentators on modern life, as they reflect on the ubiquity of digital and internet-enabled devices that simultaneously allow their users to avoid boredom at all times and, it is said, be distracted from tasks that require long concentration spans and deep thought.22 The best-selling volume by Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between rapid, instinctive decision-making, which he terms fast thinking, and slower, deliberate, concentrated thought processes.23 Both are necessary functions, he argues, but the latter requires concentrated attention. ‘Slow’ is interpreted as a sustainable mode of being and acting by multiple commentators fearful that a culture of speed is eroding attention spans and harming mental health. ‘Slow’ movements, which began in Italy with ‘slow food’, have multiplied to encompass numerous domains, from slow travel, and fashion, to the slow academic.24 The contemporary preoccupation with ‘mindfulness’ emerges from a similar concern for time. Defined as ‘one’s ability to regulate attention to the present moment with an attitude of acceptance and nonjudgment,’25 the quest for mindfulness encapsulates the link between attention to the present and tolerance of uncertainty.  22 23 24

25

See, for instance, Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (London: Piaktus, 2016). Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Penguin, 2012 [2011]). The Slow Food movement, which began in the 1980s, aims to ‘prevent the disappearance of local food cultures and traditions, counteract the rise of fast life and combat people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat’, and has an avowedly environmental approach, supporting sustainability and biodiversity. (last accessed 04/07/19); Éloge de la lenteur, debate on France Culture with Gilles Clément, David le Breton, Catherine Potevin, and Frédéric Worms, broadcast 31/10/17 (last accessed 04/07/19); Rhys Tranter, ‘Could “slow philosophy” offer an antidote to modern academia?’, interview with Michelle Boulous Walker, posted 11 October 2017 (last accessed 04/ 07/19). It is striking that the expression ‘slow reader’, which might designate a reader who tries to pay attention to detail, nuance, or form, is also used to define a child deemed to be deficient in her or his acquisition of reading skills. Kristen M. Kraemer, Emily M. O’Bryan, and Alison C. McLeish, ‘Intolerance of Uncertainty as a Mediator of the Relationship between Mindfulness and Health Anxiety’, Mindfulness, 7, 4 (2016), 859-65 (859). They define the term on the basis of work by Feldman et al. and Kabat-Zinn: G. Feldman et al., ‘Mindfulness and emotion regulation: the development and initial validation of the Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale-Revised (CAMS-R)’. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 29, (2007), 177–190; J. Kabat-Zinn, ‘Mindfulness-based interventions in context: past, present, and future’, Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10 (2003), 144–156.

206

Conclusion

It appears paradoxical that attention is deemed threatened by technology that enables people to devote constant attention to the things that interest them. The fear of shorter attention spans and over-stimulation is not a modern phenomenon, and it relies on restricted, and sometimes contradictory, definitions of attention: either attention is focused concentration on a particular object, to the exclusion of distractions from the immediate environment, or it is an openness to the detail and particularity of that environment; either it is a limited resource to be expended with care, valuable both to the one who possesses it and others who wish to attract it (frequently for economic advantage), or it should not be measured in such terms, and is instead part of a collective ecology that resists competition. Attention is implicitly or explicitly associated with time. Where value is accorded to the attention people devote to an object, their time also becomes valuable; when attention is understood as a collective phenomenon, the perspective is ecological, beyond the temporal limits of a human life. Focused attention on a task implies both an extended period of time devoted to a single endeavour and a concomitant lack of awareness of time passing – a shift from the everyday reliance on the clock. Conversely, paying detailed attention to the everyday means being aware of its temporal existence: the rhythms of the day, season, or year. The contemporary popular preoccupation with attention takes the form of two competing imperatives. As communications accelerate, readers of selfhelp literature seek both the means to achieve greater productivity and to develop the capacity to live in the moment. An awareness that, in a secular paradigm, the ways in which we spend moments and days constitute the sum of our lives26 leads to a hypersensitivity to things taking up time, rather than contributing to the rhythm of a day, and a resulting desire to carve out more time. What poetry can do is make time in the sense that it makes readers aware of time. It sets up times of reading that demand attentiveness over a certain period of time, often through complex rhythms that cannot be hurried. It reveals the complexities of the human experience of time, and heightens the reader’s sense of the present of reading. Poetry’s capacity to draw attention to time, and to produce new times of reading, makes it a clear candidate for enabling both reflection on attentiveness and attention itself. Nevertheless, modern French poetry, along with its counterparts in other languages and traditions, has largely abandoned strict metre and rhythm. Much of the poetry that might be classed as either metaphysical or lyrical is now written in prose – and not always in the compact 26

Philip Larkin, ‘Days’, Collected Poems, ed. by Anthony Thwaite (London and Boston: The Marvell Press and Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 67.

Conclusion

207

form of the prose poem, but rather exploring longer formats. Meanwhile, writers who focus either on the autonomous workings of the text or on producing texts that literally are what they say, appear to have stripped poetry of its temporal dimension by eliminating rhythm. Du Bouchet’s work, in the doubts it casts over the boundaries between those dominant approaches, and his development of an original practice based firmly on the page without privileging space over time, offers a new way of understanding the intimate connections between poetry, attention, and time. Du Bouchet produces times of reading that are inconclusive, obliging the reader to notice the experience of reading in the present without an end in prospect. His later prose texts in particular demonstrate and incite the awareness of mortality and the related, and conflicting, sense that there can be no conclusiveness. The past is always subject to revision in the light of the present and the projected future; Du Bouchet’s distinctive use of the future perfect acknowledges that this will be the case in the future too. Devoting time and attention to his texts in the present is a way of acknowledging inconclusiveness without that becoming paralysing. Their open-endedness does not encourage the reader to ignore mortality, but rather to cope with uncertainty. Does Hölderlin’s question, ‘À quoi bon des poètes en temps de détresse?’ (Why poets in times of distress?) relate to Du Bouchet’s writing?27 After his return to France in the late 1940s, Du Bouchet lived there during les trente glorieuses (thirty glorious years) of postwar prosperity and the settled period of the late twentieth century. But his interest in Celan and Bokor, and his sympathy with the 1968 protests that he relates to Pasternak, suggest a care for the consequences of war experience, and also belief in the potential for change. His work presents a reflection on what poetry does at a human (rather than textual or metaphysical) level. Du Bouchet insists that poetry should not be instrumentalised. In an interview Alain Veinstein asked him: ‘Pensez-vous que la poésie a encore un rôle à jouer ? N’est-elle pas définitivement menacée ?’ (Do you think poetry still has a role to play? Is it not threatened with extinction?). Du Bouchet’s answer focuses not on whether a threat exists, but on the problematic term ‘rôle’. He replies: Elle n’a jamais eu un rôle, et c’est ce qui en fait de la poésie. Mais c’est la forme de communication singulière qui est, je crois, la seule réelle. Si vous voulez, le fait de ne pas parler pour les autres dans le langage des 27

‘Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?’ is a line from Hölderlin’s poem ‘Brod und Wein’ (Bread and Wine): Friedrich Hölderlin, Gedichte, 2 vols, ed. by E Staiger (Zürich: Manesse, 1984), vol. 1, p. 295.

208

Conclusion

autres fait que, de temps en temps, un autre est atteint réellement, et réellement touché.28 It has never had a role, and that’s what makes it poetry. But it is the only real form of communication, I think. In other words, the fact of not speaking for others in the language of others means that, occasionally, another person is really reached, and really affected. Poetry for Du Bouchet involves the desire to make contact with people by avoiding the temptation to speak in their place. It does not heal distress29 or intervene to make a better world. But it can touch readers and encourage a relationship between the reader, the world, and mortality distinct from other potential uses of literature, including entertaining, instructing, and educating, through the time and attentiveness that it fosters. As Terry Eagleton argues, ‘[p]oems are moral statements, […] not because they launch stringent judgements according to some code, but because they deal in human values, meanings and purposes.’30 Du Bouchet’s work exemplifies the attentive power of poetry and poetic prose writing, but it also offers a particular model of attentiveness that is of interest beyond the poetic domain. He presents an understanding of attention as sustained, but not exclusive to a single object; resistant to being co-opted into economic or productive exchange; an attribute of the individual but directed towards the collective; of the everyday without enumerating detail; embedded in its time but offering a perspective relevant beyond a particular historical context. Attentiveness as it can be discerned from a reading of Du Bouchet’s work is not a scarce commodity, threatened by multiple stimuli specific to the modern world, but rather a vital human capacity that is nurtured by time spent in the natural world, with others, and by reading: it is distinguished by its ability to discern what is important from competing imperatives, and it enables a fulfilling acceptance of the passing of time. 28 29

30

André du Bouchet : Entretiens avec Alain Veinstein, pp. 115-16. Alexandre Gefen argues that a thread running through contemporary French writing is precisely a sense of literature as therapeutic; he focuses largely on prose fiction, récits (nar­­rative texts), or autofiction (self-writing) in which healing is in some sense part of the content as well as the form of the works: Réparer le monde (Paris: Corti, 2017). Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 29.

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‘À côté de quelques mots relevés chez Francis Ponge’, in Francis Ponge, ed. by JeanMarie Gleize (Paris: L’Herne ‘Cahiers de l’Herne’, 1986), pp. 54-67  Air suivi de Défets (Fontfroide-le-haut: Fata Morgana, 1986)  L’ajour (Paris: Gallimard, 1998)  Alberto Giacometti: Dessin (Paris: Maeght, 1971)  Alberto Giacometti: Dessins (Paris: Galerie Claude Bernard, 1968)  Andains. Pages de Carnet, photographies Francis Helgorsky (Die: Éditions A Die, 1996)  Annotations sur l’espace non datées. Carnet 3 (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 2000)  Au deuxième étage, ill. by Jean Hélion (Paris: Dragon, 1956)  Aujourd’hui c’est (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1994 [1984])  Aveuglante et banale. Essais sur la poésie, 1949-1959, ed. by Clément Layet and François Tison (Paris: Le Bruit du temps, 2011)  L’Avril (Losne: Thierry Bouchard, 1983)  Axiales (Paris: Mercure de France, 1992)  Carnet (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1994) Carnet 2 (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1998)  Carnets 1952-1956, ed. by Michel Collot (Paris: Plon, 1990)  La Couleur (Paris: Le Collet de Buffle, 1975)  Dans la chaleur vacante, suivi de Ou le soleil (Paris: Gallimard ‘Poésie’, 1991)  De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture, ill. by Miklos Bokor (Le Muy: Unes, 1990)  Dérapage sur une plaque de verglas, déchet de neige (Paris: La Répétition, 1985)  …désaccordée comme par de la neige, et Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1989)  D’un trait qui figure et défigure (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1997)  L’Emportement du muet (Paris: Mercure de France, 2000)  Entretiens avec Alain Veinstein (Nancy: L’Atelier contemporain et L’institut National de l’Audiovisuel, 2016) ‘… Hölderlin Today’, trans. by Beatrice Cameron with the assistance of Madeleine Hage, Sub-Stance, 10 (1974), 5-13  Ici en deux, ed. by Michel Collot (Paris: Gallimard ‘Poésie’, 2011 [1986])  L’Incohérence (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1979)  Laisses (Paris: Hachette, 1979)  Lire Finnegans Wake ? (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 2003)  Matière de l’interlocuteur (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1992)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432888_010

210

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 Openwork: Poetry and Prose, selected, translated, and presented by Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014)  Peinture (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1983)  La Peinture n’a jamais existé. Écrits sur l’art 1949-1999, ed. by Thomas Augais (Paris: Le Bruit du temps, 2017)  Poèmes et proses (Paris: Mercure de France, 1995)  Pourquoi si calmes (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1996)  Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972)  Rapides (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1980)  Retours sur le vent (Paris: Fourbis, 1994)  Le révolu (Malakoff: Orange Export Ltd, 1977)  Sol de la montagne, ill. by Dora Maar (Paris: Jean Hugues, 1956) ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage » [Notes du mai 1968] ’, l’Éphémère, 6 (été 1968), 5-11  Le Surcroît (Paris: Fourbis, 1990) ‘Sur Joyce…’, L’Étrangère, 16-18 (2007)  Sur le pas, ill. by Pierre Tal Coat (Paris: Maeght, 1959)  Surpris par la nuit, France Culture, 24 January 1995  Tumulte (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 2001)  Une lampe dans la lumière aride. Carnets 1949-1955, ed. by Clément Layet (Paris: Le Bruit du temps, 2011)  Une tache (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1988)  Un mot : ce n’est pas le sens, trans. by Michael Bishop (Halifax: VVV, 2013)  Vakante Glut. Gedichte, trans. by Paul Celan (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968)  Verses (Le Muy: Unes, 1990)  Where Heat Looms, trans. by David Mus (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1996) André du Bouchet and Geneviève Asse, Ici en deux (Geneva: Jacques T. Quentin, 1982) André du Bouchet and Alberto Giacometti, L’Inhabité (Paris: Jean Hugues, 1967) André du Bouchet and Joan Miró, La Lumière de la lame (Paris: Maeght, 1982) André du Bouchet and Albert Ràfols-Casamada, Le Surcroît (Paris: Clivages, 1989) André du Bouchet and Pierre Tal-Coat, Cette surface (Paris: Maeght, 1959) André du Bouchet et Pierre Tal-Coat, Laisses (Lausanne: Françoise Simecek, 1978) André du Bouchet et Pierre Tal-Coat, Sous le linteau en forme de joug (Lausanne: Françoise Simecek, 1978) André du Bouchet and Antoni Tàpies, Air (Paris: Maeght, 1971) André du Bouchet and Jacques Villon, L’Ajournement (Paris: Le degré quarante et un, 1960)

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224

Index

Index

Index Albiach, Anne-Marie 27-28 Apollinaire, Guillaume 9, 196n7 Apposition 93-94, 96, 132 Argile, l’ 34 Arnim, Achim von 56 Art 15, 85n52, 98, 100, 201 Art writing 1, 5, 19, 23-24, 32, 123, 133, 134-55, 192, 197 In l’Éphémère 17, 35, 54, 56, 198 Painting 135, 137, 147, 150-53, 197 See also Ekphrasis, Engraving techniques, Livres d’artistes, Poésie critique Asse, Geneviève  134, 135 Augustine  2, 15, 161 Auster, Paul 75-76, 202 Autobiography 19, 160, 161-65, 192, 193, 201 Bachelard, Gaston 22 Badiou, Bertrand 44, 115 Bataille, Georges 54 Baudelaire, Charles 77, 129, 131, 136n34, 175 Benjamin, Walter 5, 6, 13, 83, 105n31  Bensaïd, Daniel 44 Bergson, Henri 5, 18, 62, 74-79, 89, 95 Berman, Antoine 103-04, 106, 116 Blanchard, Daniel 56n55 Blanchot, Maurice 32, 44 Bokor, Miklos 17, 19, 55, 100, 126, 134, 135-36, 146-54, 207 Bonnefoy, Yves Critical response to 30-31, 83, 136n34, 186 Editor of l’Éphémère 35, 37, 40, 56  Friendship with Du Bouchet 22 On art 148n59 On poetry 14, 26 Breach 35, 46, 50-51, 52, 58, 60-61, 62-63, 78, 113, 148 Breton, André  26n27, 82 Bruzon, Louis 25, 56n55, 99-100, 108, 110 Burgart, Jean-Pierre 56n55, 102, 116 Butor, Michel 43n29 Cadiot, Olivier 194 Celan, Paul 114, 207

And attention 13-14 And l’Éphémère 37, 55-56 Friendship with Du Bouchet 115, 135   And Heidegger 31n54 And Hölderlin 102 Der Meridian 102 ‘Schneebett’ 106, 115-22 Translator of Du Bouchet 103 See also Pourquoi si calmes, Translation, Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986 Celan-Lestrange, Gisèle 55-56 Certeau, Henri de 82 Cesbron, Gilbert 43n29 Cézanne, Paul 108 Char, René 22, 26-27, 128 Chrétien, Jean-Louis 4 Circumstantial texts 1, 19, 23, 62, 71, 82, 159, 160, 175, 181, 191 Citton, Yves 6-7, 200-01 Clastres, Pierre 56 Collective  6-7, 36, 45, 51, 53, 58-61, 193, 206, 208 Nous 47, 196-97 See also May ’68, Politics, Rancière Collin, Bernard 56n55 Colour 140, 147, 151 Blue 91, 101, 150, 151-52 Green 140n48, 151 Ochre 151 Concentration 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 19, 70, 83, 193, 205-06 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 2 Contemplation 2, 3, 6, 13, 83, 89 Courbet, Gustave 134 Cousin, Bernard 45 Critique 128n14, 128n15, 130 Dada 27, 198 Daive, Jean 27-28, 102, 116 Deferral 130, 137, 160 De Gaulle, Charles 42 Deguy, Michel 66-67, 71-72, 88  Deixis 12, 47, 70, 81, 154 Delacroix, Eugène 134n23 Deleuze, Gilles 123

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432888_011

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Index De Man, Paul 163 Denis, Philippe 53, 56 Derrida, Jacques 123 See also Différance Des Forêts, Louis-René 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 51, 56, 58 Dickinson, Emily 98 Diderot, Denis 134n23, 136n34 Didi-Huberman, Georges 138n43 Différance 130   See also Deferral Dilthey, Wilhem 161 Distraction 2, 5-6, 10, 20, 23, 70, 83, 84, 89, 132, 146, 193, 194, 206 Dohollau, Heather 105n31 Donne, John 98 Du Bouchet, André Air 22 L’ajour  80, 81, 83n46, 176-78, 180-83, 195 L’Ajournement 125 Alberto Giacometti: Dessin 134 Alberto Giacometti: Dessins 134 Andains. Pages de Carnet 157, 166, 175 Annotations sur l’espace non datées. Carnet 3  166, 173 Au deuxième étage 22, 134 Aujourd’hui c’est  7-8, 63, 73, 84-85, 87, 88-89, 204 Aveuglante et banale. Essais sur la poésie, 1949-1959 11n28, 22n5, 24, 47n41, 77n36, 125n5, 127-29 Axiales  62, 69, 90-95, 181-83 Carnet  27, 166, 171-74 Carnets 1952-1956 127n13, 159, 166, 173, 191 Carnet 2 166, 169-73 Cette surface 134 La Couleur  140, 141 Dans la chaleur vacante 2-3, 9, 12, 22, 33, 48, 64, 67, 81, 84, 86, 103, 165, 166, 168-71, 196 Dans leur voix les eaux 75 Défets 166 De plusieurs déchirements dans les parages de la peinture 126, 135-36, 146-54, 175-76 Dérapage sur une plaque de verglas, déchet de neige 186-87 …désaccordée comme par de la neige  100, 101-02, 162



D’un trait qui figure et défigure  134 L’Emportement du muet  24, 77, 124, 134n23, 140n48, 158, 176-78, 183 Entretiens avec Alain Veinstein 5, 24, 77n36, 124, 127, 130, 134, 135n31, 141, 165, 166, 178, 208 ‘Envergure de Reverdy’ 130-32, 162 ‘Hölderlin aujourd’hui’ 31n54, 91, 100, 101, 102, 122, 143, 160n5, 162, 176 Ici en deux 1, 23, 24n15, 64, 65, 70, 75, 78-80, 85-86, 97, 107-14, 135 L’Incohérence  11n28, 23, 91, 100-02, 139, 140, 143-45, 162 L’Inhabité  134 Laisses  23, 56, 134, 140n48, 180 Matière de l’interlocuteur 55, 110n43, 131, 162 Le Moteur blanc 103, 166, 168-69 ‘Notes sur la traduction’ 1, 24, 91, 97, 104, 106, 107-14, 122, 135n30, 159, 175 Ou le soleil  55, 170-71 ‘Parce que j’avais voulu…’ 23, 78-79 Peinture  126, 135, 140, 141, 142, 145-46, 155, 180 La Peinture n’a jamais existé. Écrits sur l’art 1949-1999 22n5, 125n5, 134n23, 134n24, 134n27, 98n2, 135, 146n54, 153n64, 154 Poèmes et proses 24n15, 107-14 Pourquoi si calmes  67-68, 82, 149-50, 187 Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous 38, 114n46, 134, 196-97 Rapides  166 Retours sur le vent  159, 160, 176-78 Le révolu 28, 180-81 Sol de la montagne 22n10 Sous le linteau en forme de joug 134, 140n48, 150n63 ‘« Sous les pavés, la plage » [Notes du mai 1968]’ 17, 36, 45-53, 58, 60-61, 97, 128, 159, 175, 197 Le Surcroît  181-83 Sur le pas 22n10, 125 Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986 100, 102, 111, 122, 160n5, 162, 176 Tumulte  1, 20, 24, 161, 183-92 Une lampe dans la lumière aride. Carnets 1949-1955 22n9, 159n4, 166-68, 171-73 Une tache  135

226 Du Bouchet, André (cont.) L’Unique 134 Un mot : ce n’est pas le sens 139n45 Verses  126n11 Du Bouchet, Gilles 25, 56, 99, 108, 135 Dupin, Jacques  Critical response to 105n34, 126, 136n34, 195n Editor of l’Éphémère 35, 40-41, 42, 43, 44, 53, 56 Friendship with Du Bouchet 22, 35 On poetry 26 Duthuit, Georges 22, 125 Ecology 7, 65-66, 71, 81, 201-02, 205n24 See also Elemental world Ekphrasis 136-37, 144-45, 155 Elemental world 14-15, 25, 30, 32, 34, 64, 81, 84, 92, 105n34, 148, 198-200, 208 See also Ecology, Materiality Elkins, James 125, 138 Engraving techniques 146-52 Enjambement 8, 10, 23, 48-49, 77, 85, 93-94, 145, 154, 188, 191, 203 Éphémère, l’ 13, 17, 22, 24, 25, 34-61, 102, 103 Categorisation of poets as group 29, 30, 32, 83, 198 Ernst, Max 100n7 Esprit, l’ 42 Esteban, Claude 31-32, 34 Event 30, 36, 48, 51, 52, 61, 67, 82, 94-95n, 143, 197 Everyday life 4, 9-11, 18, 27, 36, 43, 62, 66n6, 95, 98, 127, 206, 208 Theories of 81-87 Faulkner, William 98 Felski, Rita 125, 137-39 Formalism 27, 198 Fourcade, Dominique 165 Freudian criticism 137 Future perfect tense 52, 68, 85, 86, 92, 178, 182, 189, 193, 207 Gallant, Mavis 43n30 Genette, Gérard 54n50 Géricault, Théodore 134 Giacometti, Alberto 24, 38, 48, 54, 58, 83n46, 114n46, 125, 126, 134, 148n57, 196-97

Index Gide, André 164 Gleize, Jean-Marie 27, 28n34, 29, 198n11, 200 Glissant, Édouard 104-05, 112 Guattari, Félix 123, 202 Hamburger, Michael 117-22 Heidegger, Martin 27, 31 Alētheia 25, 35, 65-66, 113 Critical response to Du Bouchet as Heideggerian 35, 65, 82, 198 Heideggerian approach to translation 104n25 See also Hölderlin Helgorsky, Francis 157, 166 Hélion, Jean 22n10, 125, 134 Hocquard, Emmanuel 27-29, 198n11 Hocquenghem, Guy 44 Hölderlin, Friedrich 31, 165, 207 Du Bouchet’s translations 24, 97, 100-04, 115, 122, 203-04 Early essays by Du Bouchet 129 In l’Éphémère 55 Heidegger’s reading of 25-26, 65, 91, 94-95n, 100-01, 201-02 See also …désaccordée comme par de la neige, ‘Hölderlin aujourd’hui’, ‘Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986’, L’Unique Holocaust 19, 94-95n, 115, 135-36, 148-49, 153 Horace 136 Hugo, Victor 19, 128, 129, 143 Image 11, 33, 54, 55, 92, 95, 128, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139n45, 153, 199 Du Bouchet on the poetic image 13, 26-27, 62, 69n12, 74-78, 130, 162 L’Ire des vents 34 Jaccottet, Philippe Critical response to 30-31, 67n8, 83, 101n14, 105n34  Friendship with Du Bouchet  22, 25, 175 On poetry 26, 194 Jackson, George 39 Jackson, John E.  55, 102, 116 James, William 5 Jaulin, Robert 56 Jolas, Tina 21, 25 Joyce, James 98-99, 101

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Index Kleist, Heinrich von 56 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 94-95n, 100n10 Lam, Wifredo 55, 56 Laugier, Emmanuel 194n5 Lecuire, Pierre 39 Lefebvre, Henri 82 Lefebvre, Jean-Pierre 117-22 Leiris, Michel 37, 39, 55, 56 Lejeune, Philippe 161, 163 Lenz, Jakob 102 Littéralité 27, 29, 207 Livres d’artistes 23, 55, 125, 134, 136, 150n63 Lucretius 15 Lycophron 38 Lyricism 30, 33, 194n2, 198n11, 199, 206 Maar, Dora  22n10, 125 Macé, Marielle 8, 125, 132-33, 138 Maeght, Aimé 35, 37, 53 Maestri, Vannina 194n3 Maldiney, Henri 30n44, 67-68, 82 Malebranche, Nicolas de 2, 13 Mallarmé, Stéphane 32, 71 Mandelstam, Ossip 17, 25, 55, 56, 72-73, 99-100, 107-14, 122 Manifesto of Czechoslovakian Writers 39 Marxist criticism 137 Maspero, François 44 Masson, André 21 Materiality 2, 10, 19, 68, 73, 91, 125, 146, 179, 184-190, 195-97, 203 Of the artwork 135, 136-37, 140, 149-52, 154-55 Of the body 58, 62, 95-96, 128-31, 160, 184, 187, 193-94, 197 Of poetry 1, 16, 48, 67, 72, 88, 99, 101-02, 109-12, 119n, 136, 143, 145, 148, 159, 173, 176 Maulpoix, Jean-Michel 30, 198-99 May ’68 17, 35, 36, 39-53, 78, 201, 207 Memory 10, 11, 16, 18, 95, 135, 140, 148-53, 162, 174, 176, 178-79, 195 Mercure de France, le 34 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12n29 Mesconnic, Henri  14, 116, 120, 121 Mesures 34n2 Metre 10, 71, 128, 206

Michaux, Henri 56 Mindfulness 205 Miró, Joan 56, 135 Modernism 4, 9, 15, 47, 57, 83, 95, 106, 160, 164, 194 Monet, Claude 108 Moore, Marianne 28 Mus, David 3n5, 9n25, 81n41, 86n3, 86n4, 196n8, 202 Nancy, Jean-Luc 194n4 New Historicism 138 Noël, Bernard 148n57 Notebooks 1, 12, 19, 21, 82, 98, 158-61, 165-75, 176, 178, 191, 192 Nouvelle critique, La 42 Nouvelle revue française, La 36 Objectivists 28 Olney, James 163 Opacity 104-05, 112, 114 Orange Export Ltd 28, 29, 180 Pasternak, Boris 19, 47, 97, 128-29, 207 Perception 5, 7, 11-12, 18, 52, 57, 59-60, 74, 83, 88, 90, 96, 151, 169, 174, 179 Perec, Georges 82 Phenomenology 11-12, 25, 33, 133, 187, 194 Picon, Gaëtan 35, 37, 39-40 Pindar 102 Pleynet, Marcelin 29 Plimpton, Sarah 25 Plotinus 54 Poésie blanche 27-28, 32 Poésie critique 38, 123, 127, 136, 147 Poetic subject 84, 86, 97, 152, 165, 193-202 Expressive  1, 28, 31, 81, 163, 192 Impersonal 23, 62, 64-65, 72, 95, 161, 170-71 Modernist 18, 163 And the natural world 7, 33, 87, 146, 184, 187-90 See also Autobiography, Collective Politics  And attention 5-6, 10, 14, 34, 60, 133, 200-01, 208 And l’Éphémère 36, 39-45 And the poetic subject 18, 60

228 Politics (cont.)  And voice 15, 17  See also Rancière Ponge, Francis 19, 22, 30, 31n52, 57, 127, 128, 131, 174, 187 Poussin, Nicolas 24, 134, 153 Presence 1, 15, 17, 26, 30-32, 35, 83-84, 89, 101, 129, 160, 193, 197, 198, 203 Prigent, Christian 29, 72, 199 Project 17, 20, 147, 155, 160-65, 174, 183, 187, 192, 197, 199, 201 Proust, Marcel 47, 53, 99 Punctuation 41, 48-51, 53, 113, 131, 145, 154, 162, 191 Suspension marks 23, 41, 48-49, 50, 53, 113, 119, 145 Quignard, Pascal 56n55 Ràfols-Casamada, Albert 69n14, 135, 181 Rancière, Jacques 17, 36, 44, 58-61 Raquel 28 Reader-response theory 129, 132 Relation 104-06, 113, 197 Meshwork 105-06, 122, 158, 197, 201, 204 Relevance Theory 87-88 Repetition 10, 16, 18, 23, 62, 75, 82, 84-86, 90-95, 112, 132, 145, 147, 158, 200 Reverdy, Pierre  Du Bouchet critic of 126, 130-32, 155, 162 Du Bouchet responding to 55n53, 110n43 Influence on Du Bouchet  22, 168 Notebooks 175 On the image 26n27, 57, 69n12 Reviews 17, 36-61 Rewriting 10, 16, 19-20, 24, 33, 124, 155, 159-84, 192 Ricœur, Paul 11-12n29 Riding, Laura 98 Rimbaud, Arthur 32, 67, 175 Riopelle, Jean-Paul 134 Roche, Denis 29, 33 Romanticism  And autobiography 164 Critical association of Du Bouchet with  5, 7, 12, 25, 27 Defamiliarisation  15, 113

Index And ecopoetics 66-67 Poetic subject 81 Translation 65-67, 204  Rose, Jacqueline 163 Roubaud, Jacques 54n51 Royet-Journoud, Claude 27-28 Sacré, James 194n1 Sartre, Jean-Paul 44, 164 Scève, Maurice 74-75, 128 Seghers, Hercules 38-39, 55, 126, 139, 143-45 Shakespeare, William 98 Signac, Paul 108 Situationists 45 Slowness 10, 19, 61, 123, 124-56, 193, 197, 201, 206 Sound poetry 27 Staël, Anne de 25, 56n55 Staël, Nicolas de 24, 25, 39, 55, 134 Stein, Gertrude 83 Stétié, Salah 176-78 Stevens, Wallace 28 Storti, Martine 44 Suied, Alain 38, 56n55 Support 73, 79-80, 139, 147, 149, 150, 151-53, 155 Surrealism 1, 26, 32, 57, 95, 136n34  Tàpies, Antoni 135 Tel Quel 29, 42, 57, 174n30, 198  Temps modernes, les 21-22, 42  Textuality 17, 32, 57, 160, 164, 198, 207 Transition 22, 125 Translation 1, 10, 13, 17, 18, 23-24, 58, 92n60, 97-123, 124, 135, 155, 197, 200-01 Du Bouchet’s translations of Celan 14, 17, 100, 102, 106, 115-22 l’Éphémère 32, 35, 38, 198 Typography 84-86, 132, 136, 147, 153-54, 186, 207 In l’Éphémère 53, 55, 57 Experimental layout 10, 71, 72, 90-92, 144, 191, 198, 203 And rewriting 159, 162, 176, 182-83 Uncertainty 2, 15-16, 53, 156, 205, 207 Union des écrivains 42, 51

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Index Unreadability 18, 62, 70-74, 90, 94, 95, 114, 199 See also opacity Valéry, Paul 175 Van Gogh, Vincent 108 Van Velde, Bram 100, 134, 140 Verses  126n11 Verve 34n2

Villon, Jacques 125 Vuillard, Édouard 134n23 Wahl, Jean 22 Williams, William Carlos 28 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 27-29, 31, 82, 198 Wols 56 Wordsworth, William 5, 8, 10n27