From Babel to Pentecost: The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel 9780773587625

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Acknowledgments

from babel to pentecost

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From Babel to Pentecost The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel mary anne o’neil

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2012 isbn 978-0-7735-4028-6 Legal deposit third quarter 2012 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from Whitman College. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication O’Neil, Mary Anne, 1945– From Babel to Pentecost : the poetry of Pierre Emmanuel / Mary Anne O'Neil. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-4028-6 1. Emmanuel, Pierre – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Christian poetry, French – History and criticism. I. Title.

pq2609.m58z674 2012

841'.914

c2012-902547-x

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10/13 Sabon

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction

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1 The Early Poems, 1938–1944 2 War Poetry

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3 The Biblical Epics: Sodome, Babel, and Jacob 4 Short Poetry, 1940–1970

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5 Long Poems of the 1970s: Sophia and Tu 189 6 The Return to Myth 240 Conclusion 266 Notes 271 Bibliography Index 293

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Acknowledgments

I dedicate this book to William Calin, Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida, who introduced me to the works of Pierre Emmanuel when he directed my doctoral dissertation on contemporary French devotional verse at the University of Oregon in the 1970s. While he was Arnold Professor at Whitman College in 1988, he gave me the idea of a full-length study of Emmanuel’s poetry for an English-speaking audience. More recently, he read a draft of the present book and made suggestions for its improvement. Bill served as a model of the teacherscholar in his graduate courses at the University of Oregon. His classes were exciting as well as informative, and his students came away with a love of medieval literature and French literature in general. Bill also taught us two valuable lessons in scholarship: always do your homework – that is, research your subject thoroughly so you know what you’re talking about – and have the courage to write what you think. Over the years, Bill has been a faithful friend to me and my husband, encouraging us in our scholarship and counselling us on our careers, as he has done for countless other graduate students during his five decades of teaching. I count it a blessing that I did my graduate work at University of Oregon when he taught there. Thanks to Whitman College’s generous sabbatical program, I was able to write this book in spite of heavy teaching and administrative responsibilities. I am also grateful that I had the opportunity to teach for twelve years in the Whitman General Studies program, Antiquity and Modernity. This course kept me focused on the continuity of Western literature from Ancient Greece to the twentieth century and forced me to study Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, all of whom have

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helped me to understand Emmanuel’s poetry. Whitman’s Aid to Scholarship and Instructional Development fund was also kind to provide a generous subsidy for the publication of this book. I would like to thank the Camargo Foundation of Cassis, France for the fellowship that allowed me to spend a spring semester on the shores of the Mediterranean while formulating this book. Numerous people helped me with the preparation of my manuscript. Jane Baffney, administrative assistant in the Humanities at Whitman College, typed the first three chapters. Her French is so good that she served as a sounding board for my interpretations of the poetry. My daughter, Anne O’Neil-Henry, typed the final chapters because, as she likes to remind me, she is the only human being who can decipher my handwriting in English or French. My colleague in Spanish and friend, Celia Weller, not only taught me how to format texts but spent a great deal of time proofreading my chapters and critiquing my translations. Celia is a well-known translator of Cervantes, and, although she doesn’t read French, she has a trained eye for what works in English. Pat Sorenson and Richele Loney, our current administrative staff in the Humanities Division, were endlessly helpful converting files and Xeroxing and posting manuscripts, as were Karen Zollman and Susan Bennett of the Provost and Dean of Faculty’s Office in dealing with contracts. I was fortunate to have Jane McWhinney of McGill-Queen’s University Press as a bilingual copy editor. She has a gentle way of suggesting changes that respect the author’s style while making the text more readable. I am also indebted to Ginette Adamson, Pierre Emmanuel’s literary executor, for obtaining permission from Emmanuel’s family to cite his writings. Finally, I want to thank my sweet husband, Patrick Henry. He not only encouraged me in this lengthy project but patiently read every chapter many times, catching mistakes and making suggestions for stylistic changes, as well as making me conscious of Emmanuel’s connections to twentieth-century ecumenical peace movements.

Introduction

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1 Introduction

I met Pierre Emmanuel once, in August 1978, in his apartment on the rue de Varenne in Paris when I was writing my doctoral dissertation on twentieth-century French religious poets. He graciously accorded me a twohour interview to clarify the influences on his early poetry, the subject of my final chapter. I remember him as a humble and open-minded man. When I asked about the influence of the English Metaphysical poets on his work, he first answered that he had nothing in common with the Renaissance but rather had a thoroughly medieval mentality. He followed this comment with an admission that he had, in fact, translated the Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century English Metaphysical poet John Donne in his youth and, he added with a smile, had patterned much of his war poetry after Agrippa d’Aubigné, the great French baroque poet of the late sixteenth century. When I finished my questions, it was his turn, he said. He asked first if I had any children and was sorry when I said that I did not. Then he asked about the physical landscape of my region of the United States. His face brightened when I described my small town in eastern Washington State as an agricultural area planted with wheat fields that reminded me of the Beauce region of France. He said he loved France because the mark of the human hand was everywhere present, from its rich farmlands to the sculptures of cathedral doors. His only pessimistic remark was that the French public had lost its taste for religious poetry. Waving his hand toward a copy of his long poem Jacob, he complained: “They see a religious title, and they refuse to read it.” I reassured him that, whatever the reading habits of the French may have been, he was well known and appreciated in America, and that his reputation had spread all the way to

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The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel

the rural areas of the Pacific Northwest. I am sure that this personal contact – which I later learned Emmanuel extended to all scholars of his work – did much to influence my decision to undertake a study of Emmanuel’s complete poetic works for an English-speaking audience. Emmanuel wrote on subjects ranging from social criticism, metaphysics, and history to love, nature, and the mystical experience. He successfully composed epics as well as short poems. His language ranges from everyday terms to medical and astronomical vocabulary. He mastered fixed forms, such as the sonnet, but also wrote poems several hundred pages in length. For a poet, Emmanuel was unusually successful in other genres of literature. His two-volume autobiography, Qui est cet homme? and L’Ouvrier de la onzième heure, recalls St Augustine’s Confessions in its story of an intellectual journey that leads to a spiritual conversion. His novel, Car enfin je vous aime, is reminiscent of the best novels of Pierre Jean Jouve and François Mauriac in its psychically tortured protagonists. Emmanuel also wrote several volumes of essays on world poetry from the Romantic era to his own time. They are models of insightful literary criticism. In other essays, he engages in self-reflection. In addition to being a prolific author of literary works, Emmanuel was a journalist and an engaged public intellectual, involved in educational reform in France and the defence of repressed intellectuals living in totalitarian states. In the final decade of his life, he established a multi-media library to document the history of the city of Paris. He remained faithful to the religion of his youth, Catholicism, but was, throughout his life, also a serious student of Judaism and Protestantism, and, later, Eastern religions, especially Hinduism. A translator as well as a creative writer, he was a cosmopolitan intellectual who refused to consider himself limited by his nationality, language, or time in history. His work attracted a global audience, as the translations of his prose and poetry in over a dozen foreign languages, from Rumanian to Japanese, clearly demonstrate. Emmanuel’s career as a poet lasted over forty years. His Tombeau d’Orphée, a long poem that combines Greek mythology, Freudian dream interpretation, and the New Testament gospels, was a succès de scandale with French readers and critics when it appeared in 1941 because of its daringly erotic treatment of religious themes. During the Second World War Emmanuel’s poetry spoke strongly in support of his suffering nation. From 1942 to 1945, he was known as one of the most important poets of the French Resistance. He was called a prophet, an apocalyptic writer, a patriotic and politically committed artist. In the decade following the

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war, however, he moved away from the Surrealist and Communist poets who had been his friends during the war, and his poetry took two very different directions. He wrote epic poems based on the Hebrew Bible. Sodome (1944) and Babel (1952) are both difficult works because of their length and their strange mixture of events from the book of Genesis and twentieth-century European history. He also wrote short poems during these years, works completely different from the epics in their subject matter, metres, and vocabulary. Visage nuage of 1955 and Versant de l’âge of 1958, two collections of short poems that often evoked Emmanuel’s personal life, seemed to confirm a change in the direction of his career. In 1962 the Canadian critic Eva Kushner expressed confidence that Emmanuel’s poetry had evolved definitively from complexity to simplicity, from a fascination with myth to an appreciation of nature and everyday life, and had achieved a purity not found in his earlier verse.1 Then, unexpectedly, between 1958 and 1970, with the exception of two commissioned volumes of short poems, Emmanuel stopped writing poetry. He became a professional homme de lettres, composing critical essays, giving workshops on contemporary poetry in North America, and speaking at international conferences. In 1968 his election to the French Academy, the stodgiest of French intellectual institutions, where poets were in a minority, seemed to confirm the end of his creative work. Yet, with Jacob (1970), Emmanuel’s career as a poet began anew, and in a way his readers of the 1950s would not have predicted. Jacob represents a return to biblical themes and myth, but with a new emphasis on Emmanuel’s personal life and the spiritual condition of contemporary humanity. It is also a very long work, but divided into sections of alternating long and short individual poems, a structure Emmanuel also uses in Sophia (1973), Tu (1978), and Le Grand œuvre (1984). It was Jacob and Sophia that led William Calin to suggest in 1983 that it was not possible to speak of an evolution in Emmanuel’s work; it was rather an oscillation “between the long poem and collections of brief lyrics, between the elaboration of a myth-oriented, often politically militant, technically difficult verse … and inner meditations in a much simpler, frankly elegiac form,” with a synthesis of all of these different styles in the 1970s.2 This evaluation, however, does not explain the trilogy of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme, which is structured according to a personal numerology, with each of the three volumes containing the same number of poems, all of which use the same metre and contain the same number of verse lines. The extraordinary variety within his poetic

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opus demonstrates that Emmanuel never stopped experimenting with new subjects or poetic forms and would probably have taken his work in ever newer directions had he lived longer. His biographer, Anne-Sophie Andreu, says he was still working on his final volume, Le Grand œuvre: Cosmogonie, in the months before his death in September 1984.3 In the course of Emmanuel’s lifetime, his literary reputation underwent significant ups and downs – certainly more than other contemporary French poets experienced. Given his twelve-year break from poetry from 1958 to 1970, it is not surprising that he slipped from the French reading public’s view in the 1960s and early 1970s. There were also other reasons for his temporary fall into obscurity. First, the mid-twentieth century witnessed the dominance of the novel over all other literary genres in France. Poets who retained a readership – Jacques Prévert, Yves Bonnefoy, Francis Ponge – wrote short works either in free verse or as prose poems that concentrate on the natural world or on everyday life. The vocabulary of this poetry is familiar. Not only are Emmanuel’s later volumes very long and complex in their metre, but their vocabulary, often drawn from the applied sciences and medical arts, is abstruse, as are his allusions to other literatures, languages, religions, and philosophies. An education in Classical Greek and Latin literature, as well as in mythology, psychology, mathematics, and engineering, does not go amiss in approaching Pierre Emmanuel’s poetry. In addition, Emmanuel expressed his Christian convictions in his poetry at the time when France was becoming increasingly secular and, as a consequence, less interested in any religious literature. A final factor that contributed to a decline in studies of his work in the 1960s and 1970s was the impossibility of associating Emmanuel with a specific literary movement. These decades were witness to the triumph of critical theories – structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, Marxism – and Emmanuel’s work, with its frequent shifts of subject matter and lengthy poems, did not fit easily into such systems of thought. The revival of interest in Emmanuel’s poetry began in the 1980s. Both before and after the poet’s death in 1984, scholars from the United States, France, Belgium, and Switzerland who had an interest in religious or philosophical literature were producing dissertations, book chapters, and monographs on his works.4 These efforts culminated in 1994 with the creation of a literary review, the Cahiers Pierre Emmanuel. To date, two volumes have been published.5 Most significantly, in 2003, Emmanuel’s Œuvres poétiques complètes was published by Editions de L’Age d’Homme

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in Lausanne, Switzerland. This two-volume work, under the direction of François Livi, brings together for the first time the entire corpus of Emmanuel’s poetry, and provides detailed biographical information and the most complete bibliography of secondary sources ever compiled, along with helpful introductions and notes. Livi and his team of young scholars have laid the foundation for all future studies of Emmanuel, and I am indebted to them. My goal in the present study is to present Pierre Emmanuel’s poetry to an English-speaking audience. Emmanuel had many ties to England and America. He spent part of his childhood in the United States, where his parents had emigrated, and later taught at universities on the east coasts of the United States and Canada. In the mid-1940s he worked in the English and American sectors of French radio. In the years following the Second World War, he met and discussed poetry with T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas and, in his later years, he befriended the English poet Brian Merrikan Hill, who became his translator. English religious poets, from John Donne in the seventeenth century to Gerard Manley Hopkins in the late nineteenth century were among his favourites. To make Emmanuel’s work more accessible to an English-speaking audience, I have translated all of his prose and verse that I quote. I have adopted the practical definition of translation formulated by the American linguist and biblical scholar Eugene Nida: “Translating consists in producing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent to the message of the source language, first in meaning and secondly in style.”6 In my English versions, I have tried to convey the meaning of Emmanuel’s poetry, as I understand it, while respecting his vocabulary, complex syntax, and use of punctuation and capital letters, as well as the appearance on the page of the lines and stanzas of the original French. I have made no attempt to translate Emmanuel’s metres or rhymes, but I do address both rhyme and metre in my analyses of the poetry. Unlike English poetry, which is measured in feet of stressed and unstressed syllables, French poetry stresses each syllable. In order to avoid an unnecessary discussion of the fine points of French metre, I simply state the number of syllables in the lines of poetry I quote or note Emmanuel’s use of fixed poetic forms, such as the sonnet or the ballad. I have arranged my study chronologically and by category. Chapter 1 introduces Emmanuel’s three most important works of the 1940s, Le Poète et son Christ, Tombeau d’Orphée, and Le Poète fou. These early volumes explore three of the poet’s ongoing preoccupations – with Christ, sexuality,

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and the poet’s vocation – all of which followed Emmanuel throughout his life. Chapter 2 concentrates on poetry written during and immediately after the Second World War, and the third considers his three epics, composed on themes from the Hebrew Bible – Sodome (1944), Babel (1951), and Jacob (1970). The fourth chapter treats all of Emmanuel’s short poetry written from the 1940s until 1970. Chapter 5 studies the long volumes of the 1970s, Sophia and Tu; and the last chapter analyses Emmanuel’s final poetic works, Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme and Le Grand œuvre: Cosmogonie, in the context of his entire opus. To give some idea of the history of the publication of Emmanuel’s works, I refer to the original edition of each book and note second editions or volumes of collected poems whenever they exist. The endnotes indicate where each book of poetry appears in the Œuvres poétiques complètes of 2003. Although no one has yet written a complete biography of Pierre Emmanuel, several scholars have included biographical data in their studies of his work.7 Since events in Emmanuel’s life, such as the Second World War, had a decisive influence on his choice of subjects, I have included such information in every chapter, but I have not gone into the details of his personal life because they are not particularly helpful in interpreting his poetry. Emmanuel’s experiences in childhood and public life no more account for his symbolism and metres than Baudelaire’s venereal disease explains the sensual beauty of Les Fleurs du mal. I have, however, referred often to Emmanuel’s prose writings, which he published regularly during four decades and certainly intended as guides to his poetry. His Autobiographies and his Introduction to Alain Bosquet’s Pierre Emmanuel (1959) give the main literary and philosophical influences on his poetry from 1938 until 1952. Beginning with Poésie Raison Ardente of 1948 and continuing until Une Année de grâce of 1981–82, his collected essays provide a record of the development of his conceptions of poetry and the poet’s mission. From the late 1940s, he also wrote explanatory prefaces to most of his books, and later added notes on the back covers of his final volumes. Emmanuel’s prose writings have been an invaluable resource, and I have acknowledged their importance in every chapter. T.S. Eliot, in his 1930 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” describes the traditional poet as an artist with an acute sense of history: “the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature

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of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.”8 I know of no twentieth-century French poet who better fits Eliot’s definition of the traditional writer than Pierre Emmanuel. He knew the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelations. He studied Greek mythology and philosophy, and read both English and German literature in the original languages. His penchant for epic poetry led him to study the European epics from Virgil to Milton and French verse narratives not only of the medieval period but of the Renaissance and nineteenth century. Such erudition makes him unusual among French poets of the mid-twentieth century; but it also presents problems for the reader less well versed in the history of European literature, who may find Emmanuel’s allusions to philosophy, theology, and other literatures confusing. In an effort to introduce his poetry to a readership not as familiar with classical literary and religious texts as Emmanuel himself was, I have explained the allusions, as I understand them. I have tried not only to draw parallels between Emmanuel’s interests and those of earlier writers but also to indicate when his poetry reveals the influence of another poet’s style and when he imitates metres or stanzas from other poetry. My goal is to allow the reader to appreciate better what Eliot calls in the same essay “an experience different in kind from any experience not of art,”9 that is, an aesthetic satisfaction encompassing the emotions and the intellect. I believe Emmanuel intended his readers to experience such aesthetic satisfaction. The approach I have outlined in the previous paragraph is “intertextuality,” that is, the study of the presence of other writers and other texts in a writer’s works. Besides demonstrating Emmanuel’s connections to world literature and philosophy, this method requires close readings of the poetry, and close readings are the only way to do justice to Emmanuel’s complex verse. Given the prevalence of symbolism in his opus, I also refer to several schools of psychoanalytic criticism to elucidate Emmanuel’s poetry. Freud’s theories of dream interpretation and the structure of the psyche are especially helpful in analysing the imagery of the early poems, written at a time when Emmanuel, like the Surrealists and his mentor Pierre Jean Jouve, were studying Freud. Beginning in the 1950s, when Emmanuel was attracted to myths and archetypes, his poetry reveals the influence of his contemporary, the philosopher and literary

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The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel

theorist Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard is best known for the attention he pays to dreams and the imagination, as well as to the evocation of the symbolism of the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire in L’Eau et les rêves [Water and Dreams] and La Psychanalyse du feu [The Psychoanalysis of Fire].10 By 1970 Emmanuel’s interest had shifted to the archetypal studies of Carl Jung, and his final works incorporate Jung’s notions of the collective unconscious, the male and female principles of animus and anima, alchemy, and the occult. Emmanuel also subscribed to a much earlier system of symbolism used in biblical exegesis: typological, or figural, symbolism. A grounding in this symbolism is essential for understanding Emmanuel’s surprising juxtapositions of characters and events drawn from the Bible, twentieth-century history and culture, and his personal life. Typological symbolism is, briefly, a way of reading the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible as a unified story of sin and redemption with applications to Christian moral conduct in this world as well as to the quest for eternal salvation. This method of approaching the Bible had its origin in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (3:29), where the apostle proclaims that the God of Moses is the god not only of the Jews alone but also of the Gentiles. Paul lays the groundwork for reading the stories of Genesis, Exodus, and the prophets symbolically, as “a series of prefigurations of Christ, of his incarnation and passion, and of the foundation of the Christian Church.”11 Typological symbolism operates on four levels: literal, allegorical, moral or tropological, and anagogical or mystical, and invites us to read the stories of Genesis and Exodus not only as historical truth but also as allegories of Christ’s life, guides for moral conduct, and pre-figurations of the Second Coming. This system of explication, elaborated in the early years of Christianity, became widely accepted during the Middle Ages in Europe.12 It is found throughout Catholic liturgy, as well as in medieval sculpture and painting, and, as the German philologist Erich Auerbach has explained in his study of Dante, in medieval poetry.13 No other twentieth-century French poet demonstrates as well as Emmanuel what Northrop Frye calls this “impact of the Bible on the creative imagination.”14 Emmanuel’s initial exposure to the Bible came through the Latin mass as celebrated in Catholic churches during his childhood and, later, through his readings of the religious poets of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and twentieth century – poets such as Dante, Donne, and d’Aubigné, but also Claudel and Jouve, all of whom subscribed to the typological tradition. Emmanuel

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did not approach the Bible as a theologian or a linguist. For him, as for Dante, it contained the fundamental truths of human history and expressed these truths through imagery that was timeless and universally comprehensible. Although Emmanuel harks back to earlier European poetic traditions, he is very much a writer of his century. The poetry of the first half of his career, from 1938 to 1958, reflects all the major trends in French poetry from the turn of the twentieth century until the 1960s. His first volumes, Le Poète et son Christ, Tombeau d’Orphée, and Le Poète fou, reveal traits of two early twentieth-century movements, Symbolism and Surrealism. During his university years in the 1930s, Emmanuel read the late-Symbolists, notably the poet Paul Valéry and the novelist André Gide. The influence of Symbolism accounts for Emmanuel’s interest in Greek mythology, his nostalgia for a lost Golden Age, his quest for a pure poetic language and nuanced imagery, and, above all, his belief that symbols were the essence of poetic language. The 1920s and 1930s in France also witnessed the Surrealist movement, with its emphasis on the liberation of the unconscious through automatic writing and the recuperation of imagery from dreams. In the late 1930s, Pierre Jean Jouve, who was not a Surrealist but, like the Surrealists, was inspired by Freud, initiated Emmanuel into a poetry based on dream interpretation and the recognition of unconscious desires, a poetry that shocked readers with its frank presentation of sexuality. All three of the early volumes, especially Tombeau d’Orphée, can be considered verse psychodramas that bring subconscious conflicts and eroticism to the surface. During the war, when Emmanuel moved to the South of France to escape the German occupation of Paris, he met and became close friends with several prominent Surrealists who had Communist sympathies. Through his associations with Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet, and Paul Eluard, he came to understand poetry as an act of political resistance as well as a communal effort, a celebration of friendship and love for one’s suffering countrymen. Like these poets, Emmanuel became patriotic and declared his sentiments in impassioned verse. By the mid-1950s, he was composing shorter poems in simple vocabulary designed to convey the spiritual force and sensual beauty of nature and the ephemerality of human experience, as did Patrice de la Tour du Pin, René Char, and Yves Bonnefoy in the 1960s and 1970s. Emmanuel never went as far as another contemporary poet, Francis Ponge, to concentrate uniquely on the objective description of ordinary things, but his

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The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel

short poetry of the 1940s moves away from the development of symbols to an appreciation of everyday reality and the concrete objects that connect us to this world. All the symbolism, dream imagery, and awareness of ordinary experience found in the volumes written between 1940 and 1958 still appear in the later poetry, written between 1970 and 1984. In the final years of his career, however, Emmanuel seemed also to be experimenting with the techniques of visual, or concrete poetry, a pan-European movement that began in the second decade of the twentieth century and continues into today’s computer age. Visual poets arrange letters, words, or whole lines of verse into pictures that fuse form and meaning. Sophia can be considered a visual poem in which the different sections of individual poems imitate, verbally, the structure of a Byzantine cathedral. Tu and Le Grand œuvre contain short poems in which lines of verse are arranged to resemble the shape of a mirror. Words and letters in differently sized fonts add to the new importance Emmanuel accords the physical appearance of words on the page. Finally, Emmanuel’s emphasis on communal song and chant in Sophia and Tu suggests that he was conscious of the appeal of contemporary popular music, what Calin calls the “pseudo-popular tradition” of poetic song represented in the 1950s and 1960s by Georges Brassens, Jacques Prévert, and Boris Vian in France,15 as well as by Bob Dylan in the United States and Leonard Cohen in Canada. His inclusion of the actual words of Latin hymns and of syllables used in Buddhist meditation reminds us of the ancient and universal origins of poetry in music. It is also helpful to recognize Emmanuel’s connections to the renouveau catholique, the influential trend in French intellectual life that immediately followed the First World War.16 The theorists of this Catholic Revival, principally the philosophers Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, saw no conflict between traditional Catholic doctrine and modern art’s fascination with contemporary urban life or love of formal experimentation. They underlined the catholicity, or universality, of Catholicism, emphasizing the agreements, rather than the divisions, among all religions and philosophies. For them, Catholicism was central to the survival of European civilization, and Catholic artists and thinkers had the power to bring about the spiritual regeneration of society.17 Emmanuel was familiar with these ideas from his study of philosophy and theology at the University of Lyon in the 1930s. He also loved the poetry of Baudelaire and

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the prose of Léon Bloy, two nineteenth-century precursors of the Catholic Revival.18 His poetry of the 1940s had already brought unconventional subject matter and imagery into poetry based on the Bible, as did the work of most Catholic poets of the early twentieth century (Péguy, Claudel, Jouve, and Jacob, for instance). It is really after 1960, following his break with French Communist intellectuals at the end of the Resistance and his increasing involvement with Catholic intellectuals throughout Europe and North America, that Emmanuel’s subject matter reflects most clearly the principal tenets of the renouveau catholique. In his poetry of the 1970s, the connections among the fine arts, from painting to music to literature, become a dominant theme. In Sophia and Tu, he stresses the beliefs common to all world religions – Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism – as well as the themes and imagery common to the sacred texts that express these beliefs. While recognizing the universal need for religious faith, Emmanuel promotes Christianity as the only appropriate and most effective antidote to twentieth-century atheism and materialism, in his opinion the most pernicious diseases affecting European society of his time. His final volume, Le Grand œuvre, unabashedly declares his faith in the ability of poetry to recall his countrymen to their spiritual roots. Emmanuel is unique among late-twentieth-century French religious poets in retaining this sense of the civilizing role of Christian art, a dominant idea of the Catholic Revival. In 1885 Stéphane Mallarmé, the founder of Symbolism, declared that France was undergoing a “crise de vers,” a revolution in verse that was freeing French poetry from the strictures of traditional metre and restoring the musicality of language. For Mallarmé, the modern poet should no longer engage in the representation of reality or moral instruction but rather conduct the reader into the realm of pure art.19 In 1985 the poet and critic Henri Meschonnic wrote of a very different crisis in French poetry. The century-long argument over metre and imagery had reduced poetry to a sub-category of linguistics; the poet had become the representation of the isolated artist who wrote incomprehensible verse to alienate unsophisticated readers.20 As a literary critic as well as a poet, Emmanuel was conscious of the devaluation poetry had undergone during the twentieth century and of the misconceptions that had caused this decline. In his four decades of writing poetry, in addition to addressing matters of poetic language,

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The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel

especially imagery and metre, he also posed philosophical questions about the ethical responsibilities of the poet and the poet’s ability to speak for the community. Attuned to each decade in which he lived, Emmanuel understood the power of poetry to clarify the human condition, to teach, and to persuade. It is my hope that this study will enable readers to rediscover, through Emmanuel, the continuing richness and relevance of French poetry.

1 The Early Poems, 1938–1944

In Qui est cet homme?, the first volume of his autobiography, Pierre Emmanuel gives a detailed account of his birth as a poet. He had begun writing in the late 1930s, at the same time as he started his teaching career in a secondary school in Cherbourg. The novelist and poet Pierre Jean Jouve, whom he had sought as a mentor, generously read and critiqued his early verse. His judgment was not favourable. Emmanuel’s verse, he told the budding poet, lacked personality – contained no ideas; it was nothing but a pastiche of other poets. This brutal honesty proved salutary, and when Emmanuel took up his pen again after six months of silence, he composed a short religious poem that both he and Jouve recognized as a truly inspired work.1 From that day in 1938 until his death almost five decades later, Pierre Emmanuel made poetry his life’s work. Although Le Poète et son Christ, 1938 [The Poet and His Christ] (1942) is not Emmanuel’s first published collection of poetry, it corresponds to his earliest inspiration.2 This volume contains “Christ au Tombeau” [Christ in the Tomb] and “Rédemption” [Redemption], the poems that confirmed his poetic vocation and the first works to be signed with the pseudonym Pierre Emmanuel (Aut., 187–97). The subtitle “1938” draws our attention to the year of their composition as the beginning of Emmanuel’s literary career. In a series of separate poems, some several pages in length and others a page or even shorter, Le Poète et son Christ retells the Passion of Christ, following closely the evangelist John’s account, which begins with the story of the adulterous woman and ends with Christ’s appearance to the disciples at Emmaus. The original version of 1942 and the augmented edition of 1946 integrate into this interpre-

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The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel

tation of the Redemption pieces on the poet’s mystical aspirations as well as discussions of religion in the twentieth century. Emmanuel is only one of many twentieth-century French poets to find inspiration in the Bible. Paul Claudel, who wrote plays and poetry based on the New Testament, and Charles Péguy, the author of long poems on the Virgin and female saints, are certainly the best-known Catholic poets of the century’s early decades. Several Catholic poets were active in the 1930s as the Second World War loomed. Max Jacob, the Surrealist and convert to Catholicism, composed verse meditations on sin and Christ. Pierre Jean Jouve reinterpreted the Apocalypse in Kyrie of 1938 and La Résurrection des morts [The Resurrection of the Dead] (1939). Patrice de la Tour du Pin, a translator of the Latin mass into French after the Second Vatican Council, paraphrased the psalms. During the war years and into the 1960s, biblical allusions appeared in the works of secular as well as religious poets, from the Resistance fighter Jean Cayrol to the priest Jean Grosjean. What distinguishes Le Poète et son Christ from other religious poetry of the same period is the way the structure of the collection and the style of the poems hark back to a much earlier poetic tradition, the meditative verse of the late Renaissance composed under the influence of CounterReformation devotional practices outlined by the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola. This type of verse, exemplified by Donne and Herbert in England, Sponde and La Ceppède in France, Góngora and Quevedo in Spain, attempted to recreate a biblical scene, then to analyse the theological importance of the scene and, finally, to apply the knowledge gained from this meditation to the poet’s own life, often through prayer. The structure of Le Poète et son Christ resembles especially that of Jean de La Ceppède’s Théorèmes [Theorems], a four-volume sonnet sequence written between 1613 and 1631, in which separate poems evoke the stages of the Passion in chronological order. Emmanuel’s style more nearly recalls that of Donne in the Holy Sonnets. Like Donne’s verse, this poetry is highly dramatic, sensual, and emotional; it is dense in its use of complex imagery, irony, and paradox and calls upon the intellect as well as the imagination.3 Emmanuel’s education in the Catholic schools of Lyon, his study of Catholic and Protestant theology during his university years, and his readings in the poetry of Claudel, Jouve, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross, and the modern English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins certainly contributed to his development of the type of religious poetry to which his mind and emotions already inclined him.4

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Le Poète et son Christ opens with “Soliloque d’un Pharisien” [A Pharisee’s Soliloquy], which introduces the notion of poetry as spiritual exercise: Pétrifiée par le sel des miroirs L’Ame-statue meut lourdement ses masses d’ombre en de calmes perspectives ouvrant sur dieu mais fausses car le jeu des glaces et des yeux n’éclaire point de l’intérieur les très profondes solitudes qui sont le tain de ces miroirs (PC, 13)5 [Turned into stone by the mirror’s salt The Soul-statue sluggishly moves its masses of shadow onto calm perspectives opening toward god but they are false for the exchange between mirrors and eyes doesn’t illuminate the very deep, inner solitude that forms the reflective surface of these mirrors]. These lines illustrate Emmanuel’s tendency to use imagery from a variety of religious and secular sources. The salt and the petrification come from the story of Lot’s wife in Genesis 19. The Pharisee is the hypocritical enemy of Christ in the gospels. The mirror recalls Freudian theory as well as the Surrealist poetry of Paul Éluard, especially the poem “Le Miroir d’un moment” [The Mirror of a Moment] of 1926, in which the mirror suggests an interpretation both as the subconscious and as poetry. The poet condemns himself as a Pharisee, someone too sure of his understanding of God to risk actually re-reading the scriptures. At the same time, he recognizes that his false self-confidence simply alienates him further from God and humanity. This poem evokes the seventeenth-century Christian moralist Blaise Pascal, and his concept of divertissement, or distraction, through which the soul masks its despair. It also gives a sense of the soul’s misery at being separated from God. The poet tries to bridge the distance between himself and God by confronting his spiritual emptiness. Emmanuel then begins his retelling of the Passion with the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). The depiction of the woman’s sin is graphic. The Pharisees interrupt the couple as they make love. The

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Pharisees appear less interested in defending Jewish law than in attacking Christ through the woman. Their hatred of the saviour verges on madness: “Ah! LE confondre … ils rient de jouisseuse attente: / que la haine en leur bouche est pulpeuse!” [Ah! A chance to trap HIM! ... they laugh in sensuous expectation: how palpable is the hatred in their eyes!] (PC, 22). Emmanuel constructs the story cinematically. His eye discovers the characters and follows their actions. He recreates the encounter between the woman and the Pharisees in physical detail. The adulterous woman’s naked thighs sink into the ground under her partner’s weight. The Pharisees surround her, screaming and salivating like wild dogs preparing to devour their prey. The men loom as shadows over their victim; a wind shakes the trees as if in reprobation. The adulterous woman smells the Pharisees’ bloodthirstiness: une odeur d’hommes lui monte sur le dos, étalon fauve qui l’étreint des jarrets et cherche à la forcer (PC, 22) [an odour of men climbs up her back, tawny stallion that holds her down with its knees and tries to force her]. Emmanuel plays up the suspense of the scene. The adulterous woman prostrates herself at the feet of a silent Christ, who allows the Pharisees to fantasize the woman’s stoning but refuses to write the words of pardon in the ground until the accusers truly threaten action: Longtemps! La paix est intenable. Les coeurs durs dont le ressentiment est la gangue, ce calme les fait trembler dans leur alvéole de fer. Jésus, les yeux baissés, comme par jeu dessine des figures d’enfant sur le sable (PC, 25) [Such a long time! The quiet is unbearable. Those hard hearts held in a matrix of resentment, this calm makes them shake in their alveolus of iron. Jesus, with lowered eyes, draws, as if he were playing, childish figures in the sand].

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The story includes, but does not end with, the words of the gospel: “Que celui d’entre vous qui n’a jamais péché lui jette la première pierre”6 [He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her]7 (John 8:6–7). As the Pharisees disperse, the adulterous woman transforms herself into a temple virgin who dances in thanksgiving to Christ. Emmanuel does not allow himself or the reader to savour this moment, however. The last lines imagine the crucified Christ mourned by the Magdalene, another forgiven female sinner forced to confront the cost of her redemption. In “La Femme adultère” [The Adulterous Woman] Emmanuel considers which human failings admit of redemption. The Pharisees are the least interesting characters because their obsession with the law and their certainty of moral superiority have petrified them spiritually, a condition symbolized by the rocks they grasp to stone the prostitute. The woman incarnates sexuality, which Emmanuel regards in this poem as natural but unacceptable; her pleasure with her male companion is mixed with shame even before the Pharisees appear. She offers her naked body to Christ, but before she can approach her saviour she must be cleansed of desire. In this initial poem, erotic love cannot co-exist with love of God. Christ, a brooding figure, ever aware of the cross that awaits him on Golgotha, remains distant and silent until the moment when he writes in the sand the phrase that saves the adulterous woman. This god of few, but highly effective, words represents the poet Emmanuel aspires to be. The imagery of the poem is simple, drawn predominantly from nature. Trees, birds, earth, and rocks play an important role in this and all of Emmanuel’s poetry. He also uses technical terms – here “gangue,” the worthless mineral matter joined to the ore of more valuable metals, and “alveolus,” the cell of a beehive – to express the exact nuance of spiritual rigidity and isolation. His tendency to assimilate human characters to nature can be confusing. The adulterous woman first appears as a garden; her undulating hips are trees and her hair, algae floating on a pond. The faces of the Pharisees surface like bubbles in mud. Christ is an orchard swept by wind. This type of imagery, which evokes movement and metamorphosis, recalls French baroque literature, especially the poetry of the seventeenth-century French poet St Amant. It also demonstrates that in refusing to separate the physical from the spiritual, Emmanuel is equally a poet of nature and of religion.

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In the Gospel of John, the raising of Lazarus prefigures the resurrection of Christ. The seven poems of the second section, “Lazare ressuscitant” [Lazarus Rising from the Dead], focus less on the return from the grave than on the experience of dying. The initial piece, “O Arbre limoneux” [O Tree of Clay], draws upon the tradition of biblical exegesis that links the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden to the cross of the Crucifixion. The “limon,” or clay, referred to in the title is not earth but death, which has turned the created world into a graveyard over which first Lazarus, then Christ, must triumph. In a conceit reminiscent of Donne or T.S. Eliot, Emmanuel imagines the Christ who walks into Judaea to revive his friend Lazarus (John: 11) as an Olympic swimmer advancing through the waves of a sea formed by gravestones, his pulsing blood illuminating the dark surface of the sea-cemetery: Nageur, avec le mol assentiment des ombres et porté par le rythme aboli de son coeur jusqu’aux crêtes des monts écumeux qui se brisent sur les temples inachevés et les tombeaux frêles barques emplies de sang très haut sombrées il avance à brassées mortelles vers le Jour (PC, 31) [Swimmer, helped by the passive consent of the shadows and carried by the suppressed rhythms of his heart to the very crests of the frothy mountains that break on unfinished temples and tombs fragile boats filled with blood, plunged from on high into the depths by mortal breaststrokes, he moves toward the Day]. If the first poem is optimistic, the following ones are morbid and violent. Lazarus, the “délégué de Christ en agonie” [Christ’s delegate in agony] (PC, 33), must experience the full horror of death, which includes the separation of soul from flesh followed by a dizzying plunge from the upper world into dark silence: “Alors Lazare bute au vide et meurt sans fin” [Then Lazarus stumbles over the emptiness and dies endlessly] (PC, 36). Christ, who appears in the fourth poem, “Béthanie au matin” [Bethany in the Morning], seems unaware of the immensity of the task to which he is called: Lazarus’s sepulchre forms part of a peaceful desert landscape, as if to suggest that death is part of the natural order. Only when Christ utters Lazarus’s name in “Christ appelle le sang” [Christ

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Calls Forth Blood], does he realize that he challenges death itself. In a nightmarish vision of his blood dripping from the sky onto earth and sea, Christ recognizes the full significance of his impending crucifixion: pleure pleure car je vais naître de mon Sang pleure car je suis mort et couché en mon Sang je ne reconnais plus en mon Sang mes os rouges d’entre les rouges os de cet antique mort (PC, 39) [weep, weep, for I am going to be born of my Blood cry, for I am dead and laid in my Blood in my Blood I can no longer distinguish my red bones from the red bones of this ancient dead man]. These poems are noteworthy for the irony and paradox Emmanuel brings into play. The lush garden landscape of the graveyard contrasts sharply with the darkness and silence that Lazarus experiences inside the tomb. When Christ calls upon Lazarus to return to the world, he actually calls death upon himself. In one of the most surprising moments, the embrace that Christ accords the Lazarus he has just resurrected turns into a hostile clutch: Lazarus passes on a sentence of death, which Christ angrily resists: Tout se passe en de féroces profondeurs. Qui donc consommera le crime, de Lazare ou de Christ? La haine entre eux chante lorsque debout ils s’étreignent au petit jour de la vie neuve ils s’éteignent dans leur ténèbre dévastée Christ blafard figurant un mort et la senteur de Ses péchés étant si forte qu’Il tressaille Lazare consumant la cire de sa mort et cherchant à tatons le soleil (PC, 42–3) [Everything takes place at savage depths. Which one will consummate the crime, Lazarus or Christ? The hatred between them sings out when, erect, they clutch each other at the daybreak of this new life they fade away in their ravaged shadow Christ pale, looking like a dead man, and the smell

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of His sins so strong that he winces Lazarus burning up the candle of his death and groping for the sun]. This battle between Christ and Lazarus clarifies the title of the final piece of the section, “Résurrection imparfaite” [Imperfect Resurrection], for any single triumph over death is meaningless until death itself has been eradicated, and such a miracle requires Christ to die. Emmanuel often uses puns, in a manner reminiscent of Donne in the Holy Sonnets, to explore the theological implications of a scene. Thus, Lazarus sees Christ as a mirror of “le vieux christ” [the old Christ], Adam. The fifth poem, “Unique nom la mort” [Unique Name of Death], ends with the word “l’Amour” [love], suggesting that the death resulting from original sin will be conquered by the divine love granted to humanity on Golgotha. Irony and paradox not only increase the drama of the meditation but are essential to Emmanuel’s interpretation of the Passion: if Christ truly became human he must have approached death humanly, in confusion and terror, and with great reluctance. At times Emmanuel’s images metamorphose rapidly and seamlessly. In the initial poem, “O Arbre limoneux,” the hands of the saviour-swimmer cutting through the waves become the roots of vegetation in the garden cemetery. Christ’s pounding heart in “Christ appelle le Sang” becomes a hot red sun flooding the graveyard with terrifying light. Among the numerous recurrent images, trees and blood are the most common. The tree symbolizes Adam’s sin and the redemption of this sin; at the same time it symbolizes Christ and, to some extent, Lazarus. In “Résurrection imparfaite,” the dual tree formed by the embrace of Christ and Lazarus symbolizes the struggle between flesh and spirit, the simultaneous but contradictory attractions to death and life. Blood represents sacrifice, but it also suggests resurrection. Emmanuel’s choice of imagery underscores the richness of the paradoxes and ambiguities of the gospel story. The following three poems, titled “Gethsémani” [Gethsemane], are a meditation by Christ, who has now become the central figure and narrator. As an agitated Christ reviews the history of sin, a cypress catches fire in a prefiguration of the immolation on Golgotha. The trees, rocks, and mountains surrounding the garden change into aggressive beasts ready to devour Christ. The night winds tear away Christ’s clothing to leave him naked against the night sky, which dawn finally slits open as if with a sword. Auditory imagery accompanies the visual. Emmanuel recreates

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Christ’s groans of pain and his imprecations against heaven; blood throbs angrily through his veins. Christ’s internal anguish is vivified by the contrasting black of night and reds of blood, fire, and minerals. In this dramatic recreation of the agony in the garden, Emmanuel heeds the counsels for successful devotional practices offered by Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises, forcing himself and the reader to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch through the sensual imagination the biblical scene whose significance he attempts to understand. As with Loyola and Late-Renaissance devotional poets, Emmanuel’s goal is not simply to recall biblical events but to experience the Passion along with Christ, “to feel and relish things interiorly,” as Loyola explains in his Spiritual Exercises.8 To treat the Bible otherwise is to fall into the fallacy of the modern Pharisees, among whom Emmanuel places Christian intellectuals who have “humanized” the gospels and drained them of their power. As Emmanuel indicates through the title of his volume, Le Poète et son Christ, he seeks a saviour whose psyche resembles his own, who has already lived through the poet’s psychological torments. The Christ of “Gethsémani” is plagued by doubts about the potential usefulness of his impending crucifixion: can one death actually atone for the history of human sin? His main conflicts, however, concern his relationship with God the Father, a presence who oversees the son’s agony but never answers the son’s pleas for comfort or enlightenment. Like the Freudian dream-analyst or the Surrealist poet, Emmanuel’s Christ explores his own psyche by conjuring up a series of seemingly unrelated images, all of which express in some way his fear of or anger toward the Father. He sees the moon over Gethsemane changing into the condemning paternal eye (PC, 54); the father appears as a sluggish sea-beast, “l’énorme loutre de sommeil et de souffrance” [the enormous otter of sleep and suffering] (PC, 52), a figure of fatigue, or perhaps indifference. The Father even becomes transformed into a cross ready to soak up the son’s blood (PC, 52). Emmanuel’s Christ experiences no real resolution of these conflicts, apart from a realization of the ambivalence of the Creator’s relationship with the creation; for God is both love and absence, Pascal’s deus absconditus [hidden god] and a “doux seigneur” [sweet lord] (PC, 52), the source of life but also of the death feared by the poet and his divine protagonist. The fifth section, titled “Golgotha,” describes the Crucifixion. Christ’s voice disappears to allow the testimonies of the apostle John, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin Mary, who recount their individual experiences of

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The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel

Christ’s death by means of interior monologues. These poems are obsessive in their repetitive phrasing and their recurring imagery of blood. Emmanuel introduces himself into this tableau in the initial poem, “Rédemption,” one of the first two poems he wrote, which he later included in Le Poète et son Christ. This poem fits well with the preceding meditation on Christ’s death. By reliving with Christ the events leading to his death, Emmanuel attains an awareness of the Crucifixion as the supreme act of love, to which he responds by a desire to join Christ on the cross: Mon sang est remonté si loin dans l’éternel que mes membres des Tiens se distinguent à peine mon Christ! ô corps plus lourd que le monde ô blancheur insoutenable et crispée sur l’origine jusqu’à ce que la nuit même soit calcinée et terrible la nudité de la mémoire! … je meurs infiniment de Son péché je suis le rachat de la ténébreuse faute du seigneur je pleure mon dieu mort et veux pécher sans fin pour être le bois éternel où l’Amour saigne (PC, 57–8) [My blood has flowed so far back into eternity that my limbs are hardly distinguishable from Yours my Christ! o body heavier than the world, o whiteness unbearable and contracted over the beginning to the point that night itself is burned up and the memory of nakedness becomes terrible! … I die endlessly of His sin I am the redemption of the dark sin of the lord I cry over my dead god; I want to sin forever so I can be the eternal wood on which love bleeds]. This poem corresponds to the last phase of Late-Renaissance devotional practice, the colloquy or prayer that expresses the meditator’s

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resolve to change his life. Emmanuel comes to see sin as the force that binds him to the saviour,9 because it is only by recognizing his complicity in evil that the poet can claim any right to redemption. The evocation of the poet as Christ’s shadow in the final lines expresses the interdependence of Christ and humanity in the process of salvation. The exclamations, the wish to die in Christ, and the connection between death and love are traits reminiscent of the Spanish mystical poetry of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. Much of the beauty of “Rédemption” derives from its simplicity – rare for the young Emmanuel – coupled with a depth of feeling that suggests the poet has found the spiritual regeneration he sought in the opening poem, “Soliloque d’un Pharisien.” More than the Crucifixion itself, however, what interests Emmanuel most in the Passion story is the time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, a period passed over by the evangelists. The poet imagines Christ “souffrant d’une angoisse extrême, comme s’il lui fût également impossible d’être un vivant ou un mort” [suffering from extreme anguish, as if he found it equally impossible to live or to die] (Aut., 191). As he explains in his autobiography, he identifies himself closely with Christ sojourning in the grave. For Emmanuel the tomb symbolizes adolescence, a time fraught with family conflicts, suppressed fears, obsessions, and failed efforts, from which he is uncertain of re-emerging as an adult (Aut., 192). The next two sections, “Christ aux enfers” [Christ in Hell] and “Le Tombeau” [The Grave], make up almost half of Le Poète et son Christ. The eight pieces of “Christ aux enfers” recount the story of the Harrowing of Hell, when, according to Christian legend, the crucified saviour reclaimed the souls of Adam and Eve, as well as those of the faithful Hebrews, from Limbo. Emmanuel creates a dramatic scene to tell the story of Christ’s transformation from victim into hero. In “Monde inverse” [Upside Down World], Christ falls from the upper world like a bolt of lightening to penetrate the nether regions and answer the dead souls’ call for help. He enters hell as a conqueror, “sublime violateur de ces contrées … vêtu de majesté mortelle et le front vaste / glorieux parmi les monts” [sublime violator of these regions … dressed in mortal majesty, with a vast forehead / glorious among the mountains] (PC, 82–3). He comes to vanquish death, imagined as an attacking beast, just as Hercules tamed the three-headed Cerberus to escape the underworld. In the third poem, “Arbre” [Tree], Christ’s cross becomes the axis of history, and the Crucifixion the watershed between the Fall and the Redemption:

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The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel

Ô Temps fluant de tout Ton poids vers l’Origine Ô Temps coulant de tout Ton sang vers le futur Tu renoues par un vide immémorial l’histoire et forces le néant de Ta nature en dieu tandis que vie et mort épouvantées s’inversent (PC, 84) [O Time flowing with all Your weight toward the Beginning O Time flowing with all Your blood toward the future You reconnect history through an ancient emptiness and force the nothingness of Your nature onto god while life and death, terrified, reverse themselves]. To make the theological import of Christ’s death explicit, Emmanuel concentrates on a single visual image, the cross on the hill that separates dark from light, past from future, heaven from hell. He sustains the emotional intensity of this vision by means of exclamations and the repetition of words. He insists upon the scene’s paradoxes: through the flesh Christ belongs to the past history of sin, but his redeeming blood introduces a new era. Finally, playing up the contradiction between appearance and reality, Emmanuel invites the reader to witness the Crucifixion from a dual perspective, the external view of the bystander and a view as if from within Christ’s psyche: Là-bas, où Ton cadavre illimité gravite énorme tourbillon ramenant vers l’Oeil creux la lumière non résolue dans la matière Tu exultes en désespoir axe dément entre Tes pôles ennemis Être et Néant (PC, 84) [Over there, where Your dead body revolves without limits gigantic whirlwind that brings back to the empty Eye light unresolved in matter You exult in despair crazed axis between Your hostile poles of Being and Nothingness]. Whereas the bystander sees only a body drooping against the sky, the Christ who gazes upward from the underworld understands the Crucifixion as the climactic event in human history.

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Before reaching Adam and Eve, Christ must pass through Limbo, imagined by Emmanuel as a fallen city, perhaps the Sodom of the Hebrew Bible or a European metropolis shattered by bombs. “Cité du bas amour défaite pierre à pierre” [City of base love, undone stone by stone] (PC, 85), it is permeated by the smell of phosphorus and the tears of forgotten souls. When Christ meets Adam, the father of humanity greets the son of God with the sign of the cross, thereby demonstrating his fealty to this new lord. Emmanuel calls Adam alone the “couple infini” [infinite couple] because Adam is father of both life and death, at once the progenitor and destroyer of mankind. It is sufficient for Christ to bless Adam to ressuscitate him, but Eve presents a greater challenge since she has practically returned to the earth from which she was formed. Her salvation requires that Christ wash the mother of mankind in his blood, that he become a womb that gives birth to the first woman. With the recreation of Adam and Eve, Limbo dissolves in light. Still, Christ must pass through the tomb, as the final piece of this section, the volume’s briefest poem, attests: Christ S’abandonne enfin au sépulchre à l’attente à l’angoisse des vers (PC, 92) [Christ Finally abandons Himself to the sepulchre awaiting the anguish of worms]. Any notion of victory is absent from “Le Tombeau,” where fear and anger dominate the poet-meditator’s attitude. In “La Pierre du sépulchre” [The Tombstone], Emmanuel becomes fixated on the stone covering Christ’s grave. The stone acts as a barrier between Christ and humanity, but it also symbolizes the lethargy of the flesh and a past the poet would like to forget. It represents too the Catholic Church founded by the apostle Peter, which in the twentieth century has refashioned Christ into a bland saviour and suppressed the spiritual impulses of modern humanity: O Pierre Eglise dévastée malgré tes saints porte à jamais murée porte à jamais ouverte

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The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel

Enfer et ciel à deux battants! Que tu es vaine fausse mort écrasant Christ sous tes raisons (PC, 101) [O Rock Church devastated despite our saints door always nailed shut door always open Swinging both ways into heaven and hell! How vain you are false death crushing Christ under your reasonings]. Moving from the exterior to the interior of the grave, the next poems, grouped under the title “Christ au tombeau” [Christ in the grave], imagine Christ trying to bring about his own resurrection by shouting his name and willing his blood to flow. In a surprising conclusion, the poet discovers that the Resurrection never really took place, or at least did not take place with the finality accorded it in the gospels. Rather, Christ remains in the grave, suspended between being and nothingness, assured only that the Redemption is an ongoing process lasting as long as creation: c’est l’absolu scandale et le ferment du gouffre mais l’unité ensanglantée Son nom est Christ entonné par les buccins des anges! Et le tourment de dieu est infini tant que l’homme-sang demeure (PC, 108) [it’s the greatest scandal and the ferment of the abyss but this bloodied unity, played by the trumpets of the angels His name is Christ! And god’s torment is infinite as long as the man-blood lives]. In his autobiography, Emmanuel claims that “Christ au tombeau” was the poem that began his career and inspired the pseudonym Pierre Emmanuel, a name suggestive of the tensions between flesh and spirit that the young man explores in his poetry (Aut., 197). Christ in the tomb becomes a surrogate of Emmanuel because, like the poet, Christ knows erotic desire, animosity toward his parents, and the anguish and uncertainty of late adolescence. As the Word made flesh (John 1:14), Christ

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represents the poet, who attempts to translate his inner struggles into language. “Christ au tombeau” also insists upon the contemporaneity of the Passion. Like Pascal, Emmanuel implies that “Jésus sera en agonie jusqu’à la fin du monde: il ne faut pas dormir pendant ce temps-là” [Christ will be in agony until the end of the world: we must not sleep during that time].10 For Redemption to take place, the cooperation of all humanity is necessary. Emmanuel makes this idea explicit in four sonnets, “Mort et Résurrection” [Death and Resurrection], written in 1945 but included in this section. If the Resurrection has been postponed indefinitely, it is because of the twentieth century’s indifference to the gospels: O vivant! si leur voix ne te trouble dans ton exil de terre C’est que tu es vraiment de ce monde, un absent un mort-né qui survit à son ombre. Le temps cette coutume invétérée de ne pas être Ayant séché d’oubli ton dieu, ton corps est seul deux soeurs sombres tirant ta vie comme un linceul sur ce dieu mort auquel tu défends de renaître (PC, 112) [O, You who live! if their voice doesn’t bother you in your earthly exile It’s because you really are of this world, an absence a stillbirth that survives its own shadow. Time that inveterate custom of non-being Having dried up your god with forgetfulness, your body is alone two dark sisters pulling your life, like a shroud, over this dead god you forbid to be reborn]. Although “Christ au tombeau” is the climax of this meditation on the Passion, Emmanuel writes two final groups of poems to reiterate that Christ’s resurrection from the tomb was not the final resurrection. “Noli me tangere” repeats Christ’s admonition to Mary Magdalene, found in John 20:17, not to touch him. Christ’s reason is not a newly achieved

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purity but rather the fact that he still conceives of himself as a dead man: Ne me touche pas car je suis mort ma chair pourrit dans la matière (PC, 124) [Don’t touch me for I am dead; my flesh rots in matter]. As in the poems of “Golgotha,” the tone here is emotional, almost sentimental. Emmanuel presents Mary Magdalene first in tears before the open sepulchre, then trembling with joy as she dares to recognize Jesus. In line with the earlier associations of woman with earth and fluids, Christ transforms the Magdalene from “mer” to “mère” [sea to mother], a vessel of hopeful flesh content to wait until the Second Coming for full redemption: que vie et Mort en elle immensément tuées fontaine de néant elle soit rescellée jusqu’à ce que le Verbe armé brisant les âges la rende abrupte à la lumière (PC, 122) [may she be resealed, this fountain of nothingness in which life and Death have been killed immensely until the armed Word, shattering time, renders her abruptly to the light]. In the final poem of Le Poète et son Christ, “Emmaus,” the apostles become the male counterparts of the Magdalene. Christ’s hands extended in benediction form a dove, which calls forth the Holy Spirit in each soul. Granted an understanding of the Redemption, the disciples’ tears metamorphose into the blood of the saviour: Ils voient enfin! Et leur regard sans ombre illuminé de pleurs, va droit au dieu absent et déridant les plaies violentes, devient Sang (PC, 130) [They see finally! And their unclouded vision illuminated by tears, goes straight to the absent god and, smoothing out violent wounds, becomes Blood].

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Le Poète et son Christ retells the familiar gospel story with suspense, providing new interpretations of familiar events and original treatments of events such as the sojourn in the grave, which are given little attention in the gospels. He builds realistic scenes and creates psychologically complex characters, especially the Christ of “Gethsémani” and “Le Tombeau.” Emmanuel is a philosophical poet, and his preoccupation with the possibilities of living the Christian faith in a secular age connect him not only to Pascal, but to the contemporary Christian thinkers Karl Barth, who warned against secularizing the gospels, and Søren Kierkegaard, the philosopher of irrational religious faith. In Le Poète et son Christ, Christ portrays the dilemma of the twentieth-century artist haunted by erotic impulses and strong emotions. Emmanuel calls the hero “his Christ” because he recognizes in the Passion an allegory of the poetic experience, in which, as Joseph Chiari noted in his comments on the volume, “Resurrections and artistic creations are generally preceded by a journey through Hell.”11 Although Emmanuel is not generally ranked among the French poets most influenced by Freud, his poems closely resemble Freudian dream analyses. Emmanuel either focuses on a single image, such as blood, stone, or the cross, to exhaust its symbolic content, or he links seemingly unrelated images as if in a play of free association. In line with the typological tradition of symbolism, he uses imagery that brings together several realms of human experience – the natural world, the Bible, Catholic liturgy, and literature – so that the reader has the impression Emmanuel is constantly making connections between the personal and the universal, the biblical world and twentiethcentury intellectual life. He even expresses this universality of the spiritual quest through punctuation. He does not capitalize the word “god” because, as he writes in an epigram at the conclusion of Le Poète et son Christ, “dieu est le seul vrai nom commun” [god is the only true common noun] (PC, 132) and should not be distinguished from other nouns even by a capital letter. Emmanuel also demonstrates a broad range of language in this volume – at once sensual, intellectual, and emotional. At times, he presents himself as a preacher, using a forceful voice to castigate his readers for their failings or to proclaim his faith in Christ; at other times, he speaks as a mystic seeking a too-long delayed union with his saviour. He prefers a twelve-syllable line of poetry, but his is not the alexandrine of classical French poetry, which has a break, or caesura, after the sixth syllable. Emmanuel’s line often

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has no discernible break at all and dramatically delays any pause until the end of the line. In poems that transcribe the characters’ interior monologues, very short lines, sometimes of only one syllable, introduce the longer lines and give the impression of immediate experience. Emmanuel also shows his skill with the sonnet in “Mort et Résurrection.” Le Poète et son Christ ranks among the most original collections of French religious verse of the twentieth century. In common with T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins, two other modern poets who find inspiration in the Bible, Emmanuel has returned to the style of the English Metaphysical and French baroque poets. Joseph Chiari, one of the first English-language critics to write about Emmanuel’s poetry, considered Tombeau d’Orphée [The Tomb of Orpheus] (1941)12 to be the conclusion of Le Poète et son Christ because of the volumes’ similar preoccupations with Christ, alienation, and desire.13 In the final lines of “La Pierre du sépulchre” in Le Poète et son Christ, there is a mention of Orpheus, while Christ and God the Father appear frequently in Tombeau d’Orphée. In the 1946 edition of Tombeau d’Orphée, moreover, Emmanuel includes three poems composed in 1938, two of which, “Résurrection imparfaite” [Imperfect Resurrection] and “Le Troisième jour” [The Third Day], refer to the Passion. Since Tombeau d’Orphée was published the year before Le Poète et son Christ, it seems that Emmanuel may have worked on both volumes concurrently. Why would a religious poet choose to recreate a classical Greek myth? In one sense, Emmanuel simply exploits a myth already extremely common in mid-twentieth-century French literature, from Cocteau to Jouve.14 In his autobiography, Emmanuel cites as important influences Valéry’s Charmes, poetry based upon classical themes (Aut., 83–91), and Jouve’s Sueur de sang and Matière céleste, two volumes of heavily eroticized verse, in the second of which the poet appears as a contemporary Orpheus mourning the loss of a beloved woman (Aut.,122–7). Emmanuel also found in the Orphean myth a reflection of his own emotional turmoil caused by an unhappy love affair (Aut., 124) coupled with doubts about his abilities as an artist. The story of Orpheus, the greatest singer of Greek legend, who descended to the underworld in an attempt to resuscitate his dead bride, provided an excellent mythical framework for the exploration of these preoccupations. As Emmanuel tells us in his Introduction to Bosquet’s study of his poetry, Tombeau d’Orphée was the manuscript that launched Pierre

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Seghers’ career as an editor. The success of Tombeau d’Orphée – Emmanuel comments that this volume turned him into “le poète à la mode” [the fashionable poet]15 – probably had more to do with the poetry’s frank eroticism than with the French reading public’s comprehension of this difficult work. The variety of possible interpretations of Tombeau d’Orphée attests to the poem’s richness and complexity. For Joseph Chiari,16 the main subject is sexual desire, while William Calin focuses on Thanatos, the death instinct.17 Eva Kushner suggests that the poem takes place on three levels: it examines Emmanuel’s own divided psyche, human suffering in general, and the historical alternation between periods of catastrophe and renewal.18 Emmanuel is interested, above all, in exploring the contradictions between erotic and spiritual desire, and the function of desire in the formation of the poet. The notion of contradiction in itself accounts in part for the poem’s subtitle, Fragment, because the problems of desire cannot be resolved completely or definitively. These contradictions are fundamental to the inspiration of Tombeau d’Orphée and explain why this poem is much harder to decipher than Le Poète et son Christ. On nearly every page the reader finds conflicting views of the poet and of God. The protagonist Orpheus alternates between self-pity and self-reproach, grief and anger, inaction and violence. Confusion arises in regard to the identity of the speaker. Although various characters – Eurydice, God the Father, the Maenads – seem to address Orpheus, it is possible that all these conversations take place in the protagonist Orpheus’s mind. Whether the poem actually transcribes a series of dramatic dialogues or one, long inner monologue, Tombeau d’Orphée is dialogical because it recreates the Greek myth from multiple perspectives. Emmanuel structures the seven sections of Tombeau d’Orphée according to the Ovidian interpretation of the Orpheus legend contained in Books X–XI of The Metamorphoses.19 In the opening section, “Noces de la Mort” [Death Wedding], we find Emmanuel’s protagonist grieving for the lost bride and deciding to defy the gods by descending into hell to retrieve her. In the second, “Enfer” [Hell], a long and very dramatic section, the actual descent to the underworld is described. Here, although Orpheus finds Eurydice, he must challenge the deity for her possession. He loses the battle and finds himself in mortal danger. Parts III and IV, “Mémoire” [Memory] and “Sommeil” [Sleep], reproduce Orpheus’s song, an elegy to Eurydice as well as to all human love, which eventually wins

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the hero’s release from hell. “Paysage” [Landscape] brings the hero back to the upper world, where he vows his eternal fidelity to the memory of Eurydice. In Part VI, “La Mort” [Death], Orpheus is destroyed by the Maenads, the frenzied female worshippers of Dionysus, who cannot accept his refusal to love other women. As in Ovid’s text, the Maenads tear apart Orpheus’s body, throwing his head into the sea. Only in the final section, “Tombeau d’Orphée” [The Tomb of Orpheus], does Emmanuel deviate significantly from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In these concluding pieces, Orpheus becomes Christ in the grave between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, eventually experiencing resurrection. As well as situating the poem in the Orpheus legend and the Passion, Emmanuel brings in references to other Greek myths, such as those of Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the Argonauts, Persephone and Pluto – and there is more than a smattering of Freud, especially in allusions to the Oedipus complex. In this work, which is thematically interlaced with the Freudian approach-avoidance conflict, the protagonist Orpheus feels the greatest ambivalence toward the beloved woman. The opening section of Tombeau d’Orphée, “Noces de la Mort,” presents Eurydice at once as overwhelmingly sensuous and as a Magdalene figure that holds out the promise of reconciling desire and sanctity: Accablé de dieu que je t’aimais dans les transfigurants étés ô madeleine très nue les seins taris par tant d’âpre beauté et tant d’impétueux soleil entre tes jambes et à ton flanc deux larges plaies d’odeur (TO, 13)20 [Overwhelmed by god, how I loved you in the transfiguring summers, o Madeleine so naked, your breasts dried up by so much raw beauty and such an impetuous sun between your legs and in your side two wide, odorous wounds]. Orpheus feels this ambivalence not only toward the woman but also toward the city where he has known Eurydice, a city modelled after the Lyon of Emmanuel’s university days. Like woman, the city is a chaotic mixture of beauty and ugliness, where cathedrals exist alongside cemeteries and bordellos, and where the dweller is as likely to encounter hatred as love:

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Que j’ai suivi longtemps la Mort sous tes arcades que de rues j’ai pétries de mon pas de souffrance que de sang j’ai mêlé à l’huile des pavés que j’ai cherché le crime pur atrocement parmi les meurtres discordants les agonies l’amour (TO, 14) [So long have I followed Death under your arcades so many streets I have kneaded with my suffering footstep so much blood have I mingled with the oil on their cobblestones so often have I sought out crime, atrociously pure among the discordant murders death throes love]. Since Orpheus acknowledges that Eurydice is dead, why does he take on the impossible task of resurrecting her? In part, he is not yet prepared to relinquish the woman, and he recognizes the value of erotic love in the spiritual quest. While they loved, Eurydice connected Orpheus to Christ: Seigneur Tu me cherchais dans les eaux désertes d’une femme (TO, 16) [Lord You sought me out in the deserted waters of a woman]. Yet she also absorbed the lover’s attentions so fully that the gods punished Orpheus through her death: O dieux jaloux quel est mon crime? je l’aimais Elle était une épée de fureur entre nous jadis, mais morte qu’a-t-elle encore à ma semblance cette roche d’oubli meurtrie par les baisers? (TO, 17) [O jealous gods, what is my crime? I loved her She was a furious sword between us in the past

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but now that she is dead, how does she resemble me this rock of forgetfulness bruised by kisses?]. In the conclusion of this introduction, Orpheus enlists Christ’s aid in the recapture of Eurydice. Two sons, they will defy the injustice of the father-gods, even at the price of their own destruction: Toi Seigneur, marche au crime! parmi les détonations de l’âme et les géants éclatements de profondeur, hâte le dénouement profane ou la ténèbre ou la résurrection qu’importe! (TO, 18) [You Lord, march forward to this crime! among the detonations of the soul and the giant explosions from the depths hasten the profane dénouement, whether darkness or resurrection, it doesn’t matter!]. The second, lengthy section, “Enfer,” evokes the descent to the underworld and the encounter with Eurydice. As in Le Poète et son Christ, Emmanuel here dramatically recreates the fall into hell. Orpheus tumbles from the sky, his journey followed by “l’Oeil tranquille” (TO, 21), the indifferent gaze of God the Father. He finally lands on the wet, spongy surface of a subterranean graveyard. Far from experiencing fear during his descent, Orpheus is fascinated by the experience of vertigo, the silence of the cosmos, and the beauty of the earth he passes. Once in hell, however, his search for Eurydice suddenly pits him against the saviour he had solicited as a companion in this adventure. As Orpheus tries to embrace his beloved, he is appalled to discover himself actually making love to Christ: il croit cerner les reins mais l’abîme dans la moiteur remue il est très loin et cependant étreint le Christ! il est plaqué comme l’orage au corps du Christ horreur! …

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Orphée en désespoir contre la Face jouit et tremble: il est lépreux il fouille en vain l’odeur la fade odeur du Christ et reconnaît un sexe aimé (TO, 24–5) [he thinks he encircles her loins but the moist abyss starts to move; he is far away and yet he embraces Christ! he is flattened like the thunderstorm against Christ’s body, oh horror! … Orpheus in despair, pressed against the Divine Face, climaxes and trembles: he is a leper, in vain he examines the odor, the sickening odor of Christ and recognizes a sex he has loved]. Orpheus is not angry at Christ’s intrusion, however. In fact, he decides in these early lines of the poem to surrender Eurydice to Christ, accepting, moreover, to limit his own sexual satisfaction to the pleasure he receives from contemplating his beloved in Christ’s arms: Qu’importe: elle perdue toujours, elle adorable absence! il l’a livrée au ténébreux époux pour le sang noir d’une journée d’amour: Orphée la couche entre les bras du jeune Christ – et vus d’en-haut il les aime, et jouit de sa mort qui les crée il jouit! (TO, 26) [No matter: she is forever lost, she, the adorable absence! he has given her up to the shadowy bridegroom for the black blood of a day of love. Orpheus lays her between the arms of the young Christ – and, as he sees them from above, he loves them, he takes pleasure in his death that creates them he climaxes!].

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These lines, coming from an avowedly Christian poet, are not meant simply to shock. Emmanuel patterns his development of the Greek myth after a dream in which everyday objects can metamorphose into menaces, while fears and desires normally suppressed by the conscious mind surface freely. Like Jouve, who stated in the preface to Sueur de sang that the poet must have the courage to bring to light the darkest recesses of the unconscious,21 Emmanuel makes explicit the conflicts he experiences between sexuality and spirituality. Although it is impossible to offer a precise interpretation of these love scenes, they certainly suggest a Christian version of the Oedipus complex, in which Christ plays the role of the father forbidding access to the woman. By the end of this encounter with Christ in hell, Orpheus no longer claims sexual rights to Eurydice, hoping instead that Christ will impregnate the beloved and allow him, Orpheus, to be reborn from this mating between woman and divinity, a prayer which perhaps reveals the poet’s desire to reconcile the sexual and the spiritual once and for all: “Seigneur qui es couché sur le mont de ma mort engendre à cette femme un enfant de blasphème de certitude et de pardon qui serait moi de nouveau” (TO, 27) [“Lord You who lie on the mound of my death beget in this woman a child of blasphemy of certainty of forgiveness who would be me once again”]. Orpheus’s initial struggle with love and death is not so easily resolved, for he must contend not only with Christ but also with Eurydice. Once he arrives in hell, he discovers that the beloved is far more resistant and hostile than he imagined on earth. She refuses to return with him to the upper world, and, like a perverted Ariadne, the mythological heroine who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur’s labyrinth, she leads Orpheus ever deeper into the maze of hell: je prolongeais ta quête aride, déroulant les fantômes autour de toi comme des voiles (TO, 34)

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[I prolonged your arid quest, rolling out the phantoms that surrounded you like veils]. In the second group of poems of “Enfer,” titled “Les Plaintes d’Eurydice” [Eurydice’s Complaints], the woman presents her case for remaining in the underworld. She accuses Orpheus of several crimes, the most important of which is sexual, for she experienced his desire as a rape that brought about her death: où ton chant terrible m’a-t-il criée … mes yeux saignent minés par ton Âme: la nuit emplit l’espace entre mes seins de ton absence et jusqu’au dur triangle où la Mort est inscrite jusqu’aux lèvres de ton destin mon corps se fend sous le coin d’un brutal seigneur (TO, 28–9) [where has your terrifying song called me forth? … my eyes, eroded by your Soul, bleed: night fills the space between my breasts with your absence and all the way down to that hard triangle where death is inscribed my body splits open all the way to the inner lips of your destiny under the wedge of a brutal lord]. Orpheus’s present refusal to leave the dead woman in peace – his insistence on imposing his desire upon her – is simply a continuation of his sexual aggression during her life. Ironically, Eurydice also accuses Orpheus of the opposite sin, that of rejecting her sexual nature in order to turn her into a means of reaching the divinity: je fus reprise et forcée d’un pur blasphème jusqu’à dieu jusqu’à vêtir de vérité le corps de dieu à suer en éternité l’horreur de dieu à porter en amour le poids de la colère (TO, 37) [I was taken up again and forced by an act of pure blasphemy into god’s presence

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to clothe the body of god in truth to sweat the horror of god throughout eternity to carry lovingly the weight of anger]. Having been forced into God’s arms, Eurydice now prefers to remain there: dieu m’aime et me veut seule en Lui ne reviens pas ton chant te trompe si tu crois entendre ma voix (TO, 38) [god loves me and wants me to live alone in Him don’t come back your song deceives you if you think you hear my voice]. Not even the “terrible chant” [terrifying song] (TO, 28) of this legendary poet can tempt her back to life. As if to emphasize the unreasonable character of Orpheus’s love, Emmanuel pictures his hero dragging Eurydice’s lifeless body through the underworld in defiance of Eurydice and God. If Orpheus cannot bring Eurydice back to life, he can hope for his own resurrection from the hell created by his unfulfilled desires. In “Résurrection imparfaite” he attempts an initial escape from the underworld by invoking God’s aid. This resurrection is imperfect because Orpheus is still obsessed by his love for woman: j’appelle en vain à dieu! J’aime et je suis damné la tête en bas je crie mon dieu dans les sépulcres. (TO, 41) [I call out to god in vain! I love and I am damned with head hanging, I cry over my god in the sepulchres]. The speaker of the final poem of this section, “Ordre” [Order], may be either Christ or Orpheus. The order referred to by the title is a command to leave the underworld, too contaminated by eroticism, and to under-

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take a second journey back across the river Styx, ferried by Charon, the boatman of Hades, to the land of the living. There Orpheus must now come to terms with God and the natural world, but, most of all, with the reality of Eurydice’s death: Quitte quitte le corps vorace de la Mère cherche le styx en ton vrai sang, et dans tes eaux la soif! et sens le vieux passeur peser en toi de sa profonde rame (TO, 42–3) [Leave, leave this voracious body of the Mother look for the styx in your true blood, and thirst in your waters! And feel within yourself the weight of the old ferryman with his deep oar]. The five poems of “Mémoire” [Memory] describe the return voyage. In “Prière d’Orphée” [Orpheus’s Prayer], the hero bids farewell to the land of the dead, recognizing the knowledge he has gained from the failed quest, and turns his glance to the upper world of air and sun. Naked, Orpheus travels along the Styx past dreamscapes. Some are innocent visions of nature, but most are nightmarish scenes of skies turned red by poisonous planets (TO, 51), and grain fields where women are cut down by scythes and warring armies spring up in place of trees (TO, 52). Through imagery highly reminiscent of the late nineteenth-century visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre” [The Drunken Boat], Emmanuel transforms Orpheus into the boat that moves through the river until it founders upon the edge of the upperworld: l’hallucinante floraison des gouffres bleus des bouches roses des phalènes des papillons suffoquant l’air de leurs couleurs jusqu’aux rives de sang vert jade et d’innocence criarde (TO, 54) [the hallucinating flowering of blue abysses, pink mouths, night moths butterflies suffocating the air with their colours up to the shores of the river of jade-green blood and garish innocence].

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Eurydice is most prominent among the characters in Orpheus’s memory, especially in the fourth poem, “Orphée devant Eurydice” [Orpheus Stands Before Eurydice]. Here the hero proclaims his endless love for his lost bride, wishing at times to die with her rather than live in a world she has abandoned. As the poem’s subtitle, “Elégie” [Elegy], indicates, “Orphée devant Eurydice” is truly an elegy that mourns not only the loss of this woman but the loss of love in general: Que je commence avec Elle, tous deux aveugles l’un l’autre et ennemis l’un l’autre anéantis dans la présence adverse tous deux morts et vivants tous deux être et néant tous deux sachant de science douce le passé affaibli par l’écho des nonchalantes ombres et le futur tari par les larmes des morts entre nous un présent infini puisqu’Elle est morte (TO, 59) [Let me begin with Her, both of us blind and each one the enemy of the other each one destroyed in the opponent’s presence both of us dead and alive, both of us being and nothingness both knowing the past from sweet experience a past grown weak through the echo of listless shadows and the future dried up by the tears of the dead between us only an infinite present because She is dead]. This poem occurs immediately after the bizarre, hallucinatory imagery of the River Styx and demonstrates the unusual variety of language used by the young Emmanuel. In the verses quoted above, all is simplicity. Union and separation are conveyed by the progression from the pronouns “l’un l’autre,” which suggest two distinct identities, to “tous deux” and “entre nous,” which convey a sense of shared experience that reaches beyond time into infinity. “Orphée devant Eurydice” is Emmanuel’s first love poem. It extols the uplifting nature of the love between man and woman in a manner reminiscent of sixteenth-century Neoplatonic poetry; as Orpheus proclaims in the poem’s conclusion, such love is our only opportunity on earth to transcend our mortal condition:

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Mais quiconque un seul instant peut subsister dans une telle absence de soi-même est éternel (TO, 60) [But whoever can live for a single instant in such absence from the self is eternal]. As many readers of his early poetry have pointed out, consciously or unconsciously Emmanuel revives the Platonic myth of the androgyne,22 which sees man and woman completing each other, with erotic love performing the religious function of uniting opposites and restoring a wholeness to human relations destroyed since the passing of a mythical golden age. Evidence of Orpheus’s desire to unite with Eurydice abounds throughout Tombeau d’Orphée, beginning the hero’s determination to recapture the bride from the underworld through lovemaking. In “Orphée devant Eurydice,” the urge for union becomes so strong that the lover actually imagines himself metamorphosing into the beloved woman, becoming “Femme, Celui qu’il est en Eurydice” [Woman, The One he is in Eurydice] (TO, 57). Yet, Orpheus also fears such a metamorphosis, seeing himself as a clownish hermaphrodite, oversexed rather than sexless and even more attached to the erotic instincts that haunt him: Mais homme il se voit nu criant sa honte d’être femme, seul dans l’extatique horreur de ce passé qu’il aime et par les pores de la lumière aspire jusqu’au sang. Il voit le sexe peint le lait, l’humeur, et la flore d’un sein funèbre en gloire sur des puanteurs de fleurs fanées (TO, 58) [But, as a man, he sees himself naked shouting out his shame at being a woman, alone in the ecstatic horror of this past that he loves and that he breathes in through the pores of light until it reaches his blood. He sees the painted sex organs the milk, the bodily fluids, and the flora of a funereal breast lying in glory on the stench of faded flowers].

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The horror Orpheus expresses in these verses indicates that union with the woman is a false solution actually masking a desire to deny the distinctiveness of each sex, or the urge to dominate or even eradicate the other sex. A true resurrection from the hell of loss and culpability would allow Orpheus to recognize himself as man in need of woman. Since Orpheus cannot accomplish this feat alone, he calls out to Christ for release: Seigneur, quand déchirant ma double identité Tu m’absoudras de cette chair qui me tourmente et Tu me donneras d’être homme devant Toi (TO, 62) [Lord, when you rip apart my dual identity You will absolve me of this flesh that torments me And You will allow me to become a man in Your presence]. The price Orpheus must pay for absolution is yet another voyage to the underworld, where he himself dies. In the poems of this section, “Sommeil” [Sleep], Orpheus renounces the active stance he adopted in the beginning of Tombeau d’Orphée and descends into the tomb to re-enact in dream his love affair with Eurydice. This time, passivity and silence bring lucidity – both self-knowledge and an understanding of love. Orpheus comes to see his soul as a microcosm of the human condition marked by contradictory impulses and a lack of harmony. As he exclaims, “tout doit être / déchiré parce que je suis” [everything must be / torn apart because I am] (TO, 69). Love, the quintessential human experience, is similarly fraught with oppositions – the desire to merge with the other but also to remain distinct, aggression and submission, the masculine and the feminine: Un double enchantement liait en un seul corps deux contraires violences, deux sciences science d’enfantement et de soumission enseignée inlassablement par les montagnes et, signifiée par le couteau d’un sexe mâle science de mort ou criminelle adoration (TO, 66) [A double enchantment held together in a single body two opposing types of violence, two types of knowledge

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knowledge of creating life and of submission taught tirelessly by the mountains and, another signified by the knife of the male sex, science of death or criminal adoration]. “Sommeil” is the most mystical section of Tombeau d’Orphée. Emmanuel employs a language of paradox and the imagery of light penetrating darkness to explain that rebirth can only take place after the death of the old self. It is necessary to “se diviser pour se reprendre” [cleave oneself in order to pull oneself together] (TO, 66). In the tomb, Orpheus feels happiness and is able to face the loss of Eurydice, “cela sans peur et avec joie” [and to do so without fear and joyously] (TO, 69). This descent into the tomb not only signals the acceptance of loss but also allows a type of recuperation of the dead beloved. Although Orpheus cannot recreate the physical Eurydice, her memory will henceforth shape his daily life. He imagines her shadow at the turn of each city street; she is everywhere reflected in the natural world: Eurydice est alors la frêle agitation des fleuves dans les feuilles la pierre en ondes élargie jusqu’aux confins ou sur la crête bleue des vents un pin sacré très noir auprès d’un mausolée de roses blanches (TO, 105) [Then Eurydice is the frail agitation of rivers through leaves the rock that expands into waves all the way to the water’s boundaries or, on the blue crest of the winds, a sacred pine so black next to a mausoleum of white roses]. Emmanuel’s Orpheus succeeds where his mythical counterpart failed; he rescues the dead bride, and the fidelity he vows is not to a ghost but rather to a living presence. The section devoted to Orpheus’s death, “Mort” [Death], admits of contradictory explanations. It is possible to interpret the Maenads as projections of the destructive sexuality that torments the hero in the poem’s early section. As in the Ovidian myth, these “filles du vorace amour”

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[daughters of voracious love] (TO, 101) kill Orpheus because his fidelity to Eurydice demands his celibacy. Here, however, the murder permits the final liberation of Orpheus from the obsessions of the flesh. After death, he returns to the underworld, joining Eurydice in an act of love no longer tainted by violence or eroticism: le suaire l’eût embrasé de ses feux blêmes si de vastes fluidités n’avaient baigné la triste chair exsangue: l’Amante l’enlaçait comme jadis après l’amour! heureuse et lasse (TO, 111) [the shroud would have consumed him with its pale flames if vast amounts of fluids had not bathed his sad, bloodless flesh: the Lover embraced him as she used to after love! She was happy and tired]. If we insist too much on the erotic dimension of the poem, we ignore the more complex treatment of love that develops in the second half of Tombeau d’Orphée. For a young poet, Emmanuel succeeds admirably in conveying the lasting power of an early emotional experience, the way that a first passion can stimulate our spiritual aspirations, and our desires for wholeness and self-understanding, all of which constitute a triumph over loss. In Emmanuel’s poem, the Orpheus dismembered by the Maenads will be resurrected. Through his protagonist, Emmanuel initially demonstrates the same ambivalent attitudes toward Christ that he has toward woman. Especially in “Noces de la mort,” Orpheus experiences Christ as a rival for Eurydice. Yet, at other moments, Orpheus begs Christ to protect him from the desires that have made him idolize woman and turn away from Christ: “délivre-moi de la Femme que j’ai criée” [Deliver me from the Woman I have cried out] (TO, 41). While Orpheus recognizes that there is a link between carnal and spiritual love (“Seigneur Tu me cherchais / dans les eaux désertes d’une femme” [Lord, You sought me in the abandoned waters of a woman] [TO, 16]), he often expresses the conviction that sexuality will only separate him further from God. “Résurrection imparfaite” states that erotic passion works against the salvation of the soul. The capitalization of “Toi,” “Tu” and “Ton,” all of which refer to passion, suggests that passion is an exclusive deity:

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Toi passion farouche! Tu m’inscris dans ma mort et le délire de Ton sexe, j’appelle en vain à dieu! (TO, 41) [O You, wild passion! You inscribe me in my death and the frenzy of Your sex, I call out to god in vain!]. In the second half of Tombeau d’Orphée, however, Emmanuel concentrates on the similarities between the love Orpheus feels for Eurydice and the love for humanity that impelled Christ to give his life on the cross. In the poet’s view, the Christian saviour, like the Greek hero, was overwhelmed by feelings of division and was pulled in opposite directions by the flesh and the spirit, by the desire to unite with the other as well as by the fear of losing the self. Such is the complex nature of all desire: tant dieu Se haïssait d’être double – et soudain Se désirait avec fureur en Se niant par la coupable invention de quel semblable autre pourtant! Pour les combats que veut l’amour (TO, 67) [god so hated Himself for being dual – and suddenly desired Himself passionately while denying Himself through the guilty invention of one similar yet other! For the sake of the combats required by love]. In the poem’s final sections, Emmanuel identifies Orpheus with Christ, since both are martyrs to love, and the legends of these two fabled lovers merge into one and the same story. This identification is especially strong in the concluding section, also titled “Tombeau d’Orphée,” where Orpheus’s mangled corpse metamorphoses into the body and blood of the saviour: Et le sang émerveillé sous les feuillages modulant l’étendue chante l’heureux combat sur la dépouille du seigneur! (TO, 113) [And the wonder-struck blood beneath the leaves warbling thoughout the countryside, sings about the happy combat over the remains of the lord!].

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Unlike Le Poète et son Christ, where Emmanuel seems particularly aware of the conflicts between erotic love and love of God, the ending of Tombeau d’Orphée offers the possibility of reconciling erotic and spiritual desire. The protagonist of Tombeau d’Orphée is reborn both as a lover and as a poet. In the first pages of the volume, Emmanuel presents his Orpheus, the greatest singer of classical mythology, the servant of Apollo, whose harp could animate rocks and silence wild beasts, without an effective voice. Orpheus strums a “harpe d’outrage / dont les cordes brisées luisent dans le vent noir” [a harp of outrage / whose broken strings shine in the black wind] (TO, 28), or utters only fragments of song, or even discovers that his throat has dried into silence. An important subplot involves the recovery of this voice through successive stages that parallel the quests for love and self-knowledge. Orpheus’s first solution, to sing his anger and pain over the loss of Eurydice, achieves only limited success. Especially in the pieces of “Mémoire,” where he recognizes the impossibility of recovering the dead bride, he admits that words often lack the power to communicate emotional experience: Rien n’en peut être dit fût-ce à dieu. Car les mots sont si étranges qu’ils se brisent en sa gorge (TO, 61) [Nothing about this can be said, not even to god. For words Are so strange that they break apart in his throat]. A significant breakthrough occurs in “Sommeil,” the section describing the hero’s sojourn in the grave. By letting go of rational control, he recovers connections with Eurydice and the natural world; he also discovers a language to convey this newly found unity: Je connus ces terribles mots de l’intérieur sans comprendre, tout étant simple autour de moi élucidé dans une attente solennelle. Mais un langage de ténèbres circulait dans les souffles de la terre respirante, et du paysage organisé en chant fatal un drame atrocement serein levait ses ombres (TO, 69)

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[I heard those terrifying words inside myself without understanding them, since everything around me was simple and had been elucidated in solemn expectation. But a language of shadows was circulating in the breaths of the living earth and from the landscape organized into a fatal song an atrociously calm drama lifted its shadows]. Emmanuel incorporates his own early experience as a writer into Orpheus’s adventure, and this description of a language that bursts forth from the soul in full-blown images and rhythms is much like the description found in his Autobiographies of the composition of his first poem, “Christ au tombeau.” There, he interprets the genesis of the poem as a schism of the psyche, by means of which reason and willpower are abandoned so that the subconscious can speak: “Un jour enfin, j’affrontai de nouveau la page blanche: J’étais comme hors de moi, un automate presque; les mots qui me venaient à l’esprit n’avaient aucun rapport avec ceux d’autrefois” [Finally one day, I faced the blank page again: I was out of control, almost an automaton; the words that came into my mind had nothing in common with those I had used in the past] (Aut., 187–8). For Emmanuel, as for his protagonist Orpheus, artistic creation is a quasi-mystical experience, akin to erotic love or spiritual transcendence. The problem of writing does not end with the discovery of a language. Orpheus must also find an appropriate subject for his songs. He does this in the poem’s concluding verses, when he rises from the tomb: Le pur poète né du Christ et de l’aimée dans la fruition d’une aube effroyable, franchit le seuil de la durée incorruptible (TO, 113) [The pure poet born of Christ and the beloved woman crosses in the fruition of a frightening dawn the threshold of incorruptible time]. Born of both Christ and Eurydice, that is, of spirit and of flesh, he will

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give voice to the eternal contradictions of the soul and the complex fabric of human emotions. Because Le Poète et son Christ and Tombeau d’Orphée were written during the same period, 1938–41, they are in many ways similar. Both narratives recount a hero’s adventures and recreate the scenes of these adventures in dramatic detail. In both, Emmanuel prefers a twelve-syllable line without regular breaks or rhyme. While Le Poète et son Christ remains largely faithful to the chronology of the Gospel of John, Tombeau d’Orphée deviates in several ways from its source in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Emmanuel’s Orpheus wages battles with Christ and Eurydice in the underworld, crosses and recrosses the Styx, travels to the seashore, where he is murdered, enters the grave and rises from it. Since most of the scenes take place in the underworld, Emmanuel sets the stage in shadows. He uses imagery more tactile and auditory than visual. Orpheus becomes dizzy as he plunges from the upperworld into hell; his feet slide on the unstable, spongy surfaces of graves; he feels the humidity of the underworld and hears the screams of both Eurydice and his own angry throat. Tombeau d’Orphée is certainly as dramatic as Le Poète et son Christ, but it is less didactic and seldom slips into a sermonizing tone. One of Emmanuel’s noteworthy successes in Tombeau d’Orphée is to have composed a poem that alternates between the recreation of a myth and the expression of passionate love. As he did in Le Poète et son Christ, Emmanuel combines unrelated, seemingly incompatible patterns of imagery in Tombeau d’Orphée. In the sections dealing with the passage through hell, the imagery often recalls that of Surrealist poets and painters in its deformation of normal objects and unexpected juxtapositions. This is especially true in “Mémoire” and in such pieces as “Théâtre d’Orphée” [Orpheus’s Theatre]. Curtains become animated, trees spring forth from graves as armed soldiers, and flowers and butterflies expand to suffocate the sky in colour (TO, 54). Throughout Tombeau d’Orphée, the images are especially vivid: tombs turn into ships, hair tresses metamorphose into rivers, and tombs and sidewalks are so often placed side by side that it is difficult to tell if the underworld is the land of the dead or a modern city. Yet, imagery drawn from the Bible with liturgical or sacramental associations also appears frequently, particularly in the final pages of the poem. The references to Orpheus’s blood suggest his identification with Christ; the tears he sheds evoke the notion of penitence necessary for his spiritual rebirth. As Orpheus prepares to rise from the tomb, morning dew becomes a

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flood over which the dove of Noah’s ark flies to signify the advent of peace: eau calme saluée par les pétrels de l’aube, et franchie par la colombe ayant au bec un rameau de l’aimée, humide un peu au bord (TO, 112) [calm water greeted by dawn’s petrels, and crossed by the dove carrying in its beak a branch from the beloved woman, a bit humid at the edge]. These associations between Christ and Orpheus are altogether consistent with the typological tradition. Dante, as well as the seventeenth-century French poet Jean de la Ceppède, often compared Christ to Greek mythological heroes such as Hercules. The connections between blood and tears, or dew and flood, exemplify the tropological, or moral, level of typological symbolism. They invite the reader to understand the individual sinner’s repentance as an imitation of Christ’s sacrifice, and dew as the Creator’s eternal promise of renewal after catastrophe. Given the emphasis on erotic love, it is not surprising to find sexual imagery. Orpheus’s blood is described as a penetrating phallus; “sang acéré” [sharp blood] (TO, 22) cuts into the flesh of Eurydice’s corpse. Eurydice herself is often imagined as a threatening female, a vagina dentata “montrant les dents azurées de la Mort” [showing its bluish teeth of Death] (TO, 31), or as spongy earth ready to envelop the male in quicksand. These images, associated with Freudian dream analysis, are counterposed by Bachelardian archetypal imagery evoking the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water.23 Eurydice appears most often as earth, Orpheus as fire. Both share the characteristics of water: Eurydice because of her omnipresence, Orpheus, because of his potential for transformation:24 le secret de la femme et de l’eau c’est que l’eau n’est jamais lasse d’être femme, que la femme a de l’eau la perfide et fluide ubiquité (TO, 86) [the secret of woman and of water is that water never tires of being woman and that woman has the perfidious and fluid ubiquity of water].

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Beyond the archetypal images of the four elements, Emmanuel employs many images drawn from nature – all varieties of rocks, plants, animals, and heavenly bodies. He differs from other twentieth-century poets such as René Char and Yves Bonnefoy, who celebrate the physical world, because he regards nature neither as a lost paradise nor as a locus of transcendence. For Emmanuel, nature is a living entity, like humanity, that experiences conflicting impulses. Yet, nature has the ability to maintain a stable position between time and eternity seldom experienced by the human soul. In verses reminiscent of Alfred de Lamartine, one of the great French Romantic poets of nature, Emmanuel sings the praises of a free, open world where earth, sea, and sky meet and welcome humanity in a fraternal embrace: Ô majesté de l’âme et des plaines quand dieu dresse l’homme d’aplomb dans l’ivresse du large parmi les peupliers fraternels et les vents: regard libre, tu es l’unique firmament de celui, tel l’oiseau, qui n’est que dans la flèche du passage, et l’immuable azur du mouvement où jamais l’âme n’en finit de se rejoindre dans la vaste unité qui n’est plus tout à coup que la pointe d’une souffrance insoutenable (TO, 83) [O majesty of the soul and of the plains when god raises man to stand erect in the drunkenness of the open sea among the fraternal poplars and winds liberated gaze, you are the unique firmament of the being who, like the bird, is only a passing arrow, and the immutable blue of the sky where the soul endlessly returns to itself in the vast unity which suddenly is no more than the focal point of untenable suffering]. Although in Tombeau d’Orphée Emmanuel does not specifically promote nature over civilization, he obviously considers nature resilient in a way that the modern city is not, perhaps because plants and animals succeed better in confronting their mortal condition than do human city-dwellers. In one of the poem’s most emotional moments, Emmanuel

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offers a tree growing in the desert, a living being triumphing over nothingness, as a model to Orpheus: A toi qui ne veux pas savoir ce qu’est la joie Je dis: la joie est l’arbre unique du désert, Quelle effusion en le voyant et quelle absence t’emplit, ô voyageur! Aimeras-tu jamais assez pour comprendre l’audace de cet arbre enfin pur du tourment d’être seul, et grandi par le tacite éloignement du ciel d’automne jusqu’à se mirer nu dans le regard de dieu? (TO, 84) [To you who refuse to know what joy is I say: joy is the only tree in the desert. What effusiveness when you see it and what a sense of absence fills you, o traveler! Will you ever love enough to understand the audacity of this tree finally free of the torment of being alone, and rendered great by the tacit withdrawal of the autumn sky to the point that, naked, it can see itself reflected in god’s gaze?]. Tombeau d’Orphée marks Emmanuel’s début as a poet of nature and, like the legendary Orpheus whose adventures inspire him, he manages to give a voice to the birds and to make the rocks and trees sing. Tombeau d’Orphée is the most important volume of Emmanuel’s poetry based on the Orphean myth, but the others are also of note. His first published work, Élégies25 [Elegies] (1940), for which he won the Prix de Poésie [Poetry Prize] awarded by the Cahiers des Poètes catholiques [Notebooks of Catholic poets] in Brussels, contains poems on Orpheus and Eurydice and also on Christ, the Hebrew Bible and contemporary European poets. No narrative thread links these poems; they are connected only by the theme of mourning and the blend of eroticism and religious language. Later, in Orphiques [Orphics] (1942),26 Emmanuel treats in separate, short poems the song of Orpheus, Orpheus as poet of the human soul and of nature, and the identification of Orpheus with Christ. The Greek myth of Orpheus remained a preoccupation even as Emmanuel turned his attention to a different singer, the Classical German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, in Le Poète fou [The Mad Poet] (1944).27

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Emmanuel may have been attracted to German poetry during the war years through his friendships with Pierre Jean Jouve, who had published a French translation of Hölderlin’s late poetry, and with the Swiss literary critic and Resistance sympathizer Albert Béguin, whose L’Ame romantique et le rêve [The Romantic Soul and Dream] of 1937 studied Hölderlin’s contribution to modern poetry. By1943, Emmanuel had developed a strong enough interest in Hölderlin to write an essay, originally published as “Sur une traduction de Hölderlin” [On a Translation of Hölderlin] and later as “Le Christ de Hölderlin” [Hölderlin’s Christ], on a recent French translation of Hölderlin’s works. In both this essay and a second essay, “Hölderlin et l’histoire” [Hölderlin and History] of 1945,28 he outlines the elements of Hölderlin’s life and writings that stimulated his own thought. Like the German poet, Emmanuel was interested in myth and the use of myth to interpret history. Hölderlin celebrated Ancient Greece, the era of the gods and godlike humans, as the golden age of Western culture. However, his early religious upbringing led him to conflate pagan antiquity and Christianity and to portray Christ as a divinity who followed in the footsteps of the Greek gods – a rapprochement similar to the proximity Emmanuel had seen between Orpheus and Christ in Tombeau d’Orphée. Emmanuel also found in Hölderlin the resonance of his own fascination with Orpheus and erotic love. Diotima, Hölderlin’s dead beloved, is not unlike Emmanuel’s Eurydice. An additional circumstance drew Emmanuel’s attention to Hölderlin in the early 1940s. The German poet’s vision of history as ebb and flow, his conviction that the world had fallen into chaos but that Germany had the potential to regenerate European civilization, made him a favourite with the Nazis. His work thus became for Emmanuel an example of a poetic vision that had led to the destruction rather than the regeneration of civilization. The fact that Hölderlin was declared mentally ill and spent most of his adult life confined for this illness certainly made Emmanuel reflect upon the difficult situation of the poet who assumes the double mission of expressing humanity’s spiritual aspirations and the will of the gods. Like Le Poète et son Christ and Tombeau d’Orphée, Le Poète fou is a narrative poem. In thirty-six brief pieces, few of which exceed twenty lines and several of which are in the form of Petrarchan sonnets divided into two quatrains and two tercets, Emmanuel recreates Hölderlin’s poetic adventure. Like Hölderlin’s vision of history, these poems transcribe a series of intellectual and emotional high and low points. The speaker in most of the poems is Hölderlin. In the introductory pieces, the speaker

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conceives the ambition to invent a pure poetic language. Discouraged by his awareness of the decay of civilization as well as of the division between the artist and common humanity, he turns to love as a means of personal salvation. After an initial mental breakdown, he recovers his intellectual powers, a recovery that culminates in the composition of his great hymns to Greece, Christ, and Germany. Even these moments of exaltation, however, are interrupted by a steadily progressing insanity. In the final pieces, Hölderlin, confined in a tower, contemplates his failures and upcoming death. In the two concluding pieces, Emmanuel honours the mad poet, whom he recognizes as a martyr of modern poetry. In Le Poète fou Emmanuel makes frequent reference to specific landscapes, characters, and concepts from Hölderlin’s most important works, “Brot und Wein” [Bread and Wine], “Germania,” “Patmos,” and “Friedensfeier” [Celebration of Peace]. The landscapes are initially pastoral, with mountains, seacoasts, villages, and shepherds reminiscent of ancient Greece. Later pieces evoke the ruins of Greek architecture and European castles to represent the low points of history. Many pieces are set in the tower of the mad poet’s emprisonment. Emmanuel refers to the poet as “le voyageur” [the traveller], a term taken from “Bread and Wine,” where the poet is compared to the travelling priest of Dionysus, or to a singer, song symbolizing for Hölderlin a perfected language. The sleeper, “le dormeur,” stands for ordinary humanity awaiting renewal by the poet. Emmanuel also introduces Hölderlin’s Diotima, the god Dionysus, and the eagle of Zeus, including these allusions to anchor the reader more firmly in Hölderlin’s thought and life.29 Emmanuel again writes, almost exclusively, in verse lines of twelve syllables without regular breaks and, except for the sonnets, without rhyme. As in the previous volumes, he relies heavily on contrasts – between the poet and the common man, memory and forgetfulness, sky and valley, sun and shadow. In addition, he employs a lot of auditory imagery to underscore the notion of poetry as song, and brings in light effects to suggest the gods’ presence. Poems I–IV constitute the introduction. From a mountain a shepherd [“un pâtre”] surveys a village surrounded by valleys. A lone eagle reminds him of the presence of the gods, and, as evening falls, he remembers the grandeur of a lost golden age, which he contrasts with the sluggishness of contemporary humanity. Past glory has been erased from communal memory: “Des villes cependant monte une rumeur faible / pareille au souvenir éteint des passions” [Nevertheless a weak sound rises from the cities / similar to the extinguished memory of passions] (PF, 48).30

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Emmanuel’s “voyageur” first wishes to use his talents to revive the era when the gods ruled and when “l’âme est vision pure” [the soul is pure vision] (PF, 51), unsullied by the decadent course of history. A singer, like Orpheus, he strums his “harpe étrange / que le regard jusqu’aux lointains fait résonner!” [strange harp / that the gaze causes to echo into the distance!] (PF, 51). In the twilight he notices a “dormeur tranquille près des vignes” [tranquil sleeper near the grapevines] (PF, 51). The indifference of the sleeper reminds the travelling shepherd that civilization seldom welcomes prophets and that death will eventually efface his efforts. The importance of creating an authentic language arises in the very first lines where the shepherd-poet reveals his ambition to translate the gods’ will to humanity in a simple, comprehensible manner: Peindre, dans le langage simple aimé des dieux dans ta lumière ô langue seule universelle … peindre en leur rêve essentiel les choses nues l’arche d’un pont sur la mémoire, une eau d’enfance l’ombre des flots sur les années, le courant frôlant les rameaux las de l’âge (PF, 47) [To paint, in the simple language loved by the gods in your light o single universal tongue … To paint naked things in their essential dream the arch of a bridge over the memory, a water from childhood the shadow of waves on the years, the current brushing against the weary branches of old age]. Yet, the shepherd seems convinced that only classical antiquity can offer him pure and elevated poetic models. The eagle that appears in the conclusion of the first piece and is identified as “l’aigle haut, l’esprit cruel qui plane en dieu” [the high-flying eagle, the cruel spirit that glides in god] (PF, 47) suggests that the gods present the artist with an impossible task. They require him to remain faithful to the contemporary world while reviving the past. The shepherd further wonders if he owes allegiance to the gods or to humanity and if poetry should find its basis in Dionysiac inspiration or in the everyday world. Echoing Hölderlin’s awareness that ordinary experience cannot be discounted, that “Bread is the fruit of the

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Earth” (“Bread and Wine”), the travelling shepherd prays for the ability to reconcile the human and the divine: “Que j’apprenne à manger le pain comme je mange / ce ciel” [Let me learn to eat bread the way I eat / the sky] (PF, 49). Poems V–XI, rather than building on this first intuition of the value of concrete, everyday experience, evoke the hidden presence of the gods in the natural world. In his description of European mountain landscapes similar to Mount Olympus, Emmanuel is especially close to Hölderlin, who speaks of the divine Alpine sources of the Rhine: the divinely built The fortress of the Heavenly, But where, determined in secret Much even now reaches men. (The Rhine, transl. Michael Hamburger) Throughout his meditations on the Maine and Neckar rivers, Hölderlin feels himself transported to the Greek countryside. Similarly, Emmanuel’s narrator senses the gods’ power permeating a landscape that is both Western Europe and Greece, composed at once of high mountains, forest, and sea. Poem XI opens with an inspired description of mountaintops that stand as living temples to the gods of antiquity: Ces deux tours plus majestueuses que le vent dressent à l’infini classique des nuages amarrés en d’étranges ports vers le Ponant (PF, 60) [These two towers more majestic than the wind stand tall against the classic infinity of clouds moored in strange ports in the direction of the Setting Sun]. Into this landscape, Emmanuel introduces Diotima, who, like Hölderlin’s character of the same name, appears as a fusion of earthly and heavenly beauty: “La grande rose maternelle au coeur du monde / Diotime nocturne aux pétales d’éther” [The great maternal rose at the heart of the world / nocturnal Diotima with ethereal petals] (PF, 54). Unlike Hölderlin’s muse, whose arrival signals a period of regeneration, Emmanuel’s character changes from a harbinger of redemption into “un impossible amour” [an impossible love] (PF, 61). The narrator’s pessimistic attitude

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toward love extends to nature. In the second stanza of Poem XI the shepherd demotes the mountains he admired in the poem’s opening lines to the status of ruins, which stimulate the desire for a lost perfection but deny satisfaction: tes frontons ailes puissantes qui s’éveillent de la pierre ont la mélancolie des Idées, et l’ironie au sein parfait arque ses songes sur l’ombre de tes lacs profondément brisés (PF, 60) [your pediments powerful wings that rise out of stone have the melancholy of Ideas, and irony, whose breast is perfect, arches its dreams over the darkness of your deeply shattered lakes]. Poems V–XI range in tone from the melancholic to the morbid. All speak in some way of death, either of classical values or of Diotima. Poem VI evokes the dual deaths of nature and the woman. The mountains metamorphose into “un château figurant la Mort” [a castle foreshadowing Death] (PF, 55), a mausoleum where Diotima, like a dead Sleeping Beauty, lies eternally under the cold gaze of the heavens. Poetry undergoes a similar devaluation. In Poem V, the speaker optimistically feels capable not only of understanding the gods but even of translating their mysteries to mankind through the power of the poetic word: J’ai surpris les dieux nus dans le grand jour des fables, leur essence indécise en ses jeux souverains je la drape de transparences de mémoire voiles tendres d’un Chant où baignent des contours tout frémissants d’ineffables métamorphoses si fluides aux doigts qui les voudraient saisir (PF, 53) [I surprised the naked gods in the full light of fables, I drape their essence, vague in its sovereign games, with the transparencies of memory tender veils of Song in which bathe

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the shivering contours of ineffable metamorphoses so fluid for the fingers that want to grasp them]. Poem VII, however, acknowledges the impotence of poetic language in the face of death. Like the calls of migratory birds, words only faintly pierce the silence: un lac, ou ce silence étrange que les mots (triangle d’oiseaux noirs rêvant à la dérive) ombrent à peine de leurs cris dans l’air vacant (PF, 56) [a lake, or this strange silence that words (a triangle of black birds drifting in a dream) scarcely cast a shadow on the vacant air with their cries]. In Poem IX, an allusion to the legend of Deucalion and Pyrrha suggests the impossibility of regenerating culture through poetry. This allusion is especially significant since the Greek hero and heroine are called upon to fathom the gods’ mysterious dictates as well as to create a new, superior race of humans by sowing rocks in the soil. In Le Poète fou, words replace rocks but hardly have the same solidity: the words vanish as soon as they are cast over the would-be creator’s shoulder. Other references to Greek mythology include the song and lyre of Orpheus, although here the song turns into a screech strummed on an untuned lyre with bloody hands. Allusions to Greek mythology ironically underscore the folly of Hölderlin’s ambitions and portend the madness that overtakes him. By the final lines of Poem XI, the shepherd, or traveller, has clearly become the mad poet: dans la nuit de tes mains errantes, ces aveugles rompant très haut la corde d’or sous le chant noir d’un impossible amour comblé dans la folie (PF, 60–1) [in the night of your wandering hands, those blind players, breaking from high above the golden strings, under the dark spell of an impossible love overwhelmed by madness]. Emmanuel nevertheless recognizes that the poet is in some sense superhuman, comparable in deeds to the heroes of Greek legend because

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he accepts impossible tasks on behalf of his fellow humans. In Poems XII through XVIII, poems that present Hölderlin as already mad, Emmanuel balances the cruelty of the crazed artist’s dilemma with the honour of his sacred mission. The poet is a modern Icarus with only words between him and the abyss of meaninglessness (PF, 67), or an Atlas who must not only support the earth but raise it to the heavens (PF, 66). There is no intimation that the poet commits any sin of pride; rather, he cannot avoid his mission or the suffering that accompanies it. His consolation lies in the assurance that there can be no future progress without his intervention. Emmanuel calls the poet a watchman (PF, 65), a guide, the singer who best expresses all human voices through his own: un choeur auguste d’arbres religieux délivre une douleur sanctifiée à l’unisson des voix sereines. Et le Poète au milieu d’elles, tête nue lié au sol selon l’argile qui le fonde mais les muscles bandés dans le Chant, fait monter à la hauteur d’un regard d’homme un ciel sévère médité par la terre en pleurs depuis toujours (PF, 66) [an august choir of religious trees sends forth a sanctified sorrow in unison with serene voices And the Poet in the midst of these voices, with his head uncovered bound to the earth by the dust from which he was formed but with his muscles flexed in Song, raises to the level of the human eye the severe sky on which the earth has meditated tearfully since its beginnings]. In these lines, Emmanuel returns to the image of the tree found in Le Poète et son Christ and Tombeau d’Orphée. The tree now symbolizes the fulfillment of the poetic mission. Just as the tree digs its roots into the soil but stretches to the sky, so also the poet, firmly rooted in the human condition, reaches for eternity. As the tree changes rainwater into sap, the poet transforms tears into song, thus giving meaning to human suffering.

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Imagery of rocks, thunderstorms, clay, and bread occurs frequently in the second half of Le Poète fou to signal Emmanuel’s new-found understanding that any truly spiritual language has its roots in nature and everyday life. The narrator of Le Poète fou intuits this importance of the ordinary but rejects it, preferring to remain faithful to his mission of reviving a mythical era of innocence and spiritual vigour. The mad poet fears that anything but the creation of a “Verbe pur” [pure Word] (PF, 71) would cheat humanity of its aspirations. In Poem XXI, the mad poet justifies his reasoning by decrying history as a struggle between mind and body, in which common words, unequal to the task of linking mankind to the gods, actually place mankind more firmly in the grip of mortality: Bien que les mots aient faim depuis que l’homme pense la vraie famine à jamais juste et sans pitié tu l’invoques sur les moissons, blancheur cruelle de ce torse attirant l’éclair. Le sentent-ils les pauvres, les terreux, que leur parole est terre et qu’ils cuisent leur propre argile au lieu de pain? (PF, 71) [Although words have been hungry ever since mankind has been thinking the real famine, always just and without pity, is the cruel whiteness that you, Poet, call forth on the harvest with your torso that attracts the lightening. Do they feel it these poor, earthbound souls, do they understand that their word is dust and that they bake their own clay instead of bread?]. Poems XIX through XXXII alternate between visions of a renewed golden age and stark avowals of failure. The speaker imagines storms that could submerge the earth under a purifying deluge (PF, 75), or the arrival of the virgin goddess Diana who could release the poet and humanity from inaction, but only by wounding them and causing blood to flow (PF, 78). He evokes Apollo through references to the sun and to song. Every new project brings with it the certainty that no renewal will take place, for the Greek gods themselves have succombed to madness. The image of “Apollon fou sur les ruines du futur” [crazed Apollo on the ruins of the future] (PF, 74) concludes Poem XXIV, a prayer for the purification of the earth. Diana “sent / l’odeur de fausseté marcher à pas profanes /

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mimant des rites inventés” [smells / the odour of duplicity walking with profane steps / pantomiming invented rituals] (PF, 76) and refuses to participate in the poet’s pseudo-religious endeavours. Poem XXXII shows the villages of the introduction untouched by the poet’s adventure, dominated not by the ruins of temples but by simple boulders, symbols of mortality and physicality: “Et le destin / sous son poids d’âme qui s’aggrave au long de l’âge / les éboule dans l’ombre morte au bas des monts” [And fate / under its soul-weight which gets heavier as the years go by / causes the boulders to slide into the dead darkness of the mountains] (PF, 82). In one of the volume’s most poignant moments, the speaker alludes to Rimbaud’s sonnet Voyelles:31 l’O pourpre et noir cerclé d’épuisement il croit mugir l’orage unicorde – le vide avec fureur sort de sa face ô rire impur (PF, 73) [the O crimson and black encircled by exhaustion thinks it can howl the single-stringed thunderstorm – emptiness with furor comes out of its face o impure laugh]. In Rimbaud’s poem, the vowel “O” represents “l’Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux” [Omega, the purple ray of Her Eyes], the gateway to a vision of the gods; for Emmanuel’s mad poet, the crimson letter is an eye bleary from a futile vigil as well as a mouth contorted into an insane laugh. Many pieces of the volume’s second half recall late Renaissance poetry by their themes and imagery. Emmanuel brings into play motifs common not only to devotional poetry but to baroque poetry in general, especially the passage of time, death, the disintegration of the body, the vanity of human endeavour and the opposition between appearance and reality, all expressed through metamorphosing images or conceits. For example, Emmanuel imagines the poet’s mouth, which should give forth song, transforming itself into “l’atroce tuba qui profère les morts” [an atrocious tuba that blasts out the dead] (PF, 72). Poem XIX begins with the celebration of the human potential for spiritual growth: – l’homme! né de ses pas dont l’écho fonde un temple d’air simple, plus léger que le bond, et plus dur

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Musique avec rigueur de sa gangue jaillie mais souple, en pur language infléchissant le temps un corps brûle, renaît, s’invente en l’harmonie (PF, 69) [– man! born of his own footsteps whose echo is the foundation of a temple of pure air, lighter than a leap, yet tougher Music that has sprung forth from its ore with severity yet supple, in pure language that bends time to its purpose a body burns, is reborn, reinvents itself in harmony]. The interconnected images of temple, music, ore, and flame suggest that the human soul is capable of transcending the body, of creating pure language – Hölderlin’s Song – or of being reborn, like the legendary Phoenix, from its ashes. The concluding stanza, however, reverses this optimism by transforming the flame of enthusiasm into a cosmic brazier, where the human spirit stirs up false ambitions: rythme inexhaustible ou Corps qu’attise en un brasier sans nombre au sein des astres l’esprit mortel, sûr architecte des désastres (PF, 69) [inexhaustible rhythm or Body that a limitless blaze stirs up in the midst of the stars mortal spirit, certain architect of disasters]. Poem XXX builds a condemnation of human folly from a single comparison, that of a man to a sundial. As its point of departure the sonnet evokes a man standing erect at midday. The man belongs at once to earth and to heaven because he stands “dressé au centre de son ombre” [erect in the centre of his shadow] (PF, 69), directly facing the sun so that his actual form and his shadow are one. A subsequent allusion to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave then shows this man unable to tolerate the light and forced to regard only the sun’s shadow moving across the earth: Voyait-il le soleil décrire l’arc du monde non! le poids d’un front las tenait baissés toujours Ses yeux (PF, 80)

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[Did he see the sun describe the arc of the world no! the weight of his weary forehead made him keep forever lowered His eyes]. Lacking vigour and understanding, the man allows himself to forget that he is witnessing his own life unwind. Inevitably, night falls and the sundial can no longer register time. God’s hand, which proves far more accurate than the sundial, writes large the summons to die. Such an ironic, carefully constructed sermon on human presumption recaptures the force and excitement of seventeenth-century devotional poetry and compares favourably with the sonnets on death by Jean de Sponde or the Spanish poet Quevedo. While the Christian element is far more muted in Le Poète fou than in either Le Poète et son Christ or Tombeau d’Orphée, several allusions to Christ do appear in the poem’s conclusion. At times, Emmanuel refers ironically to the mad poet as a false Christ, a “Verbe” [Word], but one whose high conception of poetic language has no power against evil. This “Verbe béant” [gaping Word] (PF, 73) becomes the body and blood of a travestied Eucharist. Emmanuel does, however, grant his protagonist a new religious awareness before death; Poem XXVII offers a vision of Christianity as the foundation of a new golden age. Salvation comes not from the gods above but from the people, as the workers of the fields join in song at the altar: et les coeurs simples se recueillent dans ton Chant comme au jour du Seigneur, à l’église: sachant ces petits! d’une humble science souveraine Quel dieu demeure en l’hymne et les convie à Lui (PF, 77) [and the simple hearts meditating on your Song as they do on the Lord’s day, in church: realizing, these little ones! by their humble sovereign knowledge What god lives in the hymn and invites them to His table]. The mad poet finally recognizes Christ as the double who haunts his ambitions to redeem history (PF, 81) and, thanks to this recognition, he

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experiences death as a liberation. In the final poem, Emmanuel evokes the mad poet’s grave as “le plus humble entre les humbles” [the humblest of the humble] (PF, 88), ignored by all but a few admirers. Yet, the sun touches the dead poet’s body as a sign of redemption: mais à peine es-tu couché la face à nu dans le tombeau, le rayon confondant vient toucher ta paupière éveillant le soleil scellé de l’au-delà (PF, 88) [but hardly are you laid to rest, your face uncovered in the grave, the confusing beam of light touches your eyelid awakening the sealed sun of the hereafter]. Although he specifically recreates the life of Hölderlin in Le Poète fou, Emmanuel also has in mind French poets whom he considers heirs of both Hölderlin and the German Romantic tradition. The ennui troubling ordinary people recalls Baudelaire. The mad poet’s worship of the sun and his hallucinatory visions of goddesses and gods suggest Rimbaud, while the scenes of the poet locked in a tower, pressing his face against windows to satisfy his hunger for an impossible ideal, are obvious references to Mallarmé. None of these nineteenth-centuiry artists, whom Emmanuel reveres for their ambitions and sacrifices, can any longer serve as models for the twentieth-century poet. He must anchor language in concrete experience to speak for the community. No longer defiant like Prometheus, artists must now conceive of themselves in organic terms, as trees bridging the distance between earth and heaven. Or they must imitate Christ, working to reconcile flesh and spirit. In this respect, Emmanuel includes an obvious reference to his own poetic trajectory in Poem XXXIV. Making a pun on his pseudonym, “Pierre Emmanuel,” he explains that he could not speak until he united the two parts of his being, body and soul. His words gained substance when “Emmanuel,” a Hebrew name meaning “God is with us,” breathed life into “pierre” [stone]: j’aurai lutté toute ma vie contre mon nom qui se brisait aux dents serrées, quand la Parole tentant de l’insuffler en ma bouche, criait à susciter une âme aux pierres (PF, 84)

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[I would have fought my whole life against my name that shattered against my clenched teeth, when the Word trying to fill my mouth with breath, cried out loud enough to resuscitate a soul from these rocks]. Surely Emmanuel intends the reader to conclude that he has experienced the rebirth forbidden to Hölderlin and that he has discovered the means of realizing the mad poet’s dream of “un langage simple aimé des dieux” [a simple language loved by the gods] (PF, 47) evoked in the introduction. Le Poète fou introduces several new themes, which appear in Emmanuel’s war poetry and in his verse of the early 1950s. His fascination with the origins of the world, with the end of time, and with the poet as interpreter of human history all appear in this volume dedicated to Hölderlin. Emmanuel also meditates on the whole tradition of modernist poetry that begins, in France, with Baudelaire and continues to the Surrealists, some of whom he had befriended while in Southern France during the Occupation. He concludes that madness is not an asset to the poet; nor is a language disconnected from the common experience appropriate for a poet who wishes to engage all of humanity. The poet-shepherd of Le Poète fou will become the hero of Emmanuel’s most important epic poem, Babel (1952), while Diotima is the first incarnation of woman as love and wisdom, an idea that dominates in Sophia (1973). The two essays that introduce the poems of Le Poète fou are the first examples of the prose commentaries that Emmanuel would continue to use throughout his career to help readers understand his often difficult verse. This does not mean that Le Poète fou differs fundamentally from Le Poète et son Christ or Tombeau d’Orphée. All three volumes are written by a poet who sees himself, above all, as a storyteller. In all three works Emmanuel loves strong imagery that enables the reader to feel Christ’s agony, or Orpheus’s plunge into the underworld, or Hölderlin’s descent into madness. Through conceits, specialized vocabulary, and even punctuation, he forces the reader to become intellectually engaged, to search out the poem’s meaning. These volumes are full of exclamations and questions that convey Emmanuel’s emotional investment in the subject he treats, whether theological, aesthetic or personal. Finally, although Le Poète fou does include several sonnets written in rhymed alexandrines that respect the caesura after the sixth syllable, all three volumes are written primarily in twelve-syllable, unrhymed lines of verse that seem to

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spring as spontaneously from the pen of the young poet as his professions of love for Christ, his complaints over unfulfilled desire, or his understanding of the responsibilities of the poetic life. It is no wonder that such an original, energetic voice, emerging at a time of national catastrophe, excited the French public.

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2 War Poetry

Given the interest in the Second World War that dominates French cultural studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is surprising that more attention has not been paid to the role of French poets in the Resistance. Only the poet and publisher Pierre Seghers, in La Résistance et ses poètes,1 attempts a comprehensive study of the intellectual and political engagement of French poets between 1939 and 1945.2 This lack of recognition is due in part to the poets themselves, unwilling as they were to boast about their individual roles in what they regarded as a communal effort. Pierre Emmanuel was among those self-effacing writers. In L’Ouvrier de la onzième heure, the second volume of his autobiography, he wrote that his role in the Resistance consisted of acts of “simple humanité, n’ayant pour but que de cacher des proscrits ou de leur procurer de fausses cartes. Le tout relativement facile, presque à ciel ouvert” [acts of simple humanity, whose purpose was only to hide outlaws or procure false identity cards for them, all of which was relatively easy to do. It could almost be done out in the open] (Aut., 264). In truth, Emmanuel played a significant role in the French Resistance, even if he participated mainly as an intellectual whose courage took the form of writing and publishing seditious poetry. Seghers recognizes Emmanuel as one of the most important of the Resistance poets, ranking him with Aragon and Eluard. Henry Rousso, in The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, includes Emmanuel among the eminent members of the Resistance establishment who would continue to influence French politics into the 1980s.3 A more sinister tribute came from the collaborationist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who denounced Emmanuel in the Nouvelle Revue Française of October 1942 as a “furious Swiss and, moreover, a

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Jew and a communist” (Aut., 264). With characteristic modesty and irony, Emmanuel commented that even the condemnation of an important Nazi sympathizer could not get the police to arrest him, and that he felt flattered by Drieu La Rochelle’s attention. Ill health kept Emmanuel from active military service. In 1940, he lived with his first wife, Jeanne Crépy, in the Paris suburb of Pontoise, where he taught philosophy. Shortly after the fall of Paris to the German troops in 1940, with the help of Pierre Jean Jouve, Emmanuel moved south to the unoccupied zone of France, to the village of Dieulefit. He remained there as a secondary-school teacher for most of the war. In his autobiography,4 Emmanuel praises this Protestant town, which doubled in size with the refugees it sheltered during the Occupation and where a spirit of duty and fraternity trumped any fear of Nazi reprisals for hiding persecuted Jews. While in Dieulefit, Emmanuel made important connections with older poets engaged in overt and covert political activities, particularly Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Pierre Seghers, and René Char, all of whom believed in poetry as a form of active resistance. Another result of his association with the Resistance was the opportunity to publish his poetry, under his own name5 and without censorship, with Swiss presses such as the Cahiers du Rhône and Editions de la Baconnière, with the publishing house Charlot in Algeria, and with presses that began as organs of resistance, most notably Editions Seghers. Of the fifteen volumes of poetry Emmanuel published between 1940 and 1946, only five deal specifically with the war itself:6 Jour de colère (1942), Combats avec tes défenseurs (1942), La Colombe (1943), La Liberté Guide nos pas (1945) and Tristesse, ô ma patrie (1946).7 These volumes earned Emmanuel significant fame. As Albert Béguin explains in Poésie de la Présence: “Ce fut l’instant où l’art difficile d’Emmanuel lui valut, assez paradoxalement, une brusque gloire: non pas qu’un public étendu pût entendre le sens profond de poèmes d’expression malgré tout hermétique, mais parce que ses poèmes avaient aussi une signification momentanément accessible à beaucoup de lecteurs” [This was the moment when Emmanuel’s difficult art earned him, rather paradoxically, sudden glory: not that a wide public was able to understand the profound meaning of these poems, which were, after all, hermetic, but because his poems also had a meaning that was temporarily accessible to many readers].8 The Resistance poets, many of whom were Communists and atheists, thought they recognized in his verse an echo of their own political convictions, and Emmanuel’s other readers focused on the patriotism of this verse. In

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truth, Emmanuel’s main preoccupations in his war poetry were no different from those of Le Poète et son Christ, Tombeau d’Orphée, and Le Poète fou: the Bible, death and rebirth, the poetic word. Only now, given his belief in the liberating power of poetry and his wish to serve his suffering countrymen, he developed these intense interests in the context of the war. Jour de colère [Day of Wrath] best represents Emmanuel’s early attitude toward the war, which Seghers describes as one of anger mixed with righteous indignation: “un jeune homme mince, noir et ardent me rend visite. Un jeune Savonarole avec des accents de Grand Inquisiteur” [a thin, brooding and ardent young man pays me a visit. A young Savonarola with accents of a Grand Inquisitor].9 Individual poems are loosely grouped under four headings: “Sang” [Blood], “La Sainte Face” [The Holy Face], “La Nuit Tressaille” [Night Quivers], and “Aube” [Dawn]. Many are dedicated to fallen friends and poets who inspired Emmanuel – “A Federico García Lorca” [To Federico García Lorca], “Suite Funèbre de l’âme après la mort” [Funeral Suite of the Soul After Death]; some honour other Christian poets – “A Pierre Jean Jouve” [To Pierre Jean Jouve], “Jean de la Croix” [John of the Cross]. And there are poems on the people and countries who were victims of the war – “Juifs” [Jews], “Réfugiés” [Refugees], “Espagne” [Spain], “Je crois” [I Believe]. Several of the poems of this volume evoke actual historical events, such as the German invasion of France [“Invasion”], Hitler’s Final Solution, “Camps de Concentration” [Concentration Camps], and the execution of French patriots by Nazi firing squads, “Mourir” [To Die]. Like other Resistance poets who also celebrated the bravery of the French people, Emmanuel plays the role of a “témoin,” a witness to the sufferings of his contemporaries.10 However, he distinguishes himself from other Resistance poets by his use of the typological tradition to interpret contemporary history. He often relates the war to the Crucifixion, using the image of blood to draw a parallel between Christ’s sacrifice and that of his compatriots. In “Réfugiés,” he identifies the Nazi persecutors with the Pharoah of Exodus; in “Juifs,” the pogroms of Eastern Europe re-enact the fall of Jerusalem under the Romans. The volume’s title, Jour de colère, a reference to the “Dies irae,” the Latin hymn on the Last Judgment sung at the Roman Catholic mass for the dead, evokes the Last Judgment and the end of the world foretold in the final book of the New Testament, The Revelation of John the Divine.

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Seghers frequently mentions that the Resistance poets were inspired by the Châtiments (1853) of the exiled nineteenth-century poet Victor Hugo.11 They identified with Hugo’s condemnation of tyranny, his championship of the French people suppressed by Napoleon III’s régime, and his message of hope for a new era of freedom. Like Hugo, Emmanuel sympathizes most with “les petites gens” [the little people], who are Christ-like. He uses sermo humilis, the simple vocabulary of ordinary conversation that Hugo uses in his evocations of the suffering working classes: Seigneur Ta chair est la douleur de notre peuple Ta chair est la vivante Eglise où nous prions sang à sang nous avons bâti Ta cathédrale sang à sang nous T’avons muré en notre chair la Croix est érigée absurde sur la mer le peuple-Christ poussé par ses bourreaux s’avance (JC, 13)12 [Lord Your flesh is the pain of our people Your flesh is the living Church where we pray blood for blood we have built Your cathedral blood for blood we have enclosed You in our flesh the Cross, absurd, is erected over the sea the people-Christ pushed by its executioners moves forward]. In “Eli Lamma Sabactani” [Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me?] the people of Spain exhibit their wounds to the crucified Christ as they cry out for justice: nous, Seigneur! abandonnés nus à Ton sang nous qui avons reçu le sang comme salaire nous qui avons sué tout le sang interdit nous qui avons crié le sang par tous nos pores nous dont les veines ont charrié l’ultime Nuit nos plaies nous les ouvrons sur un pays sans larmes (JC, 19) [We, Lord! abandoned naked to Your blood we who have received blood as our wages we who have sweated all the forbidden blood we who have cried out blood through all of our pores

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we whose veins have carried on our waters the ultimate Night we open our wounds onto a land without tears]. In Les Châtiments, Hugo presents the end of tyranny in terms of light conquering darkness. We see this most clearly in “Stella,” where the morning star becomes “l’ange Liberté … le géant Lumière” [the angel Liberty … the giant Light].13 Similarly, Emmanuel imagines the upcoming liberation of his countrymen as the triumph of light as well as a moment of spiritual reawakening: que le regard intérieur révèle enfin le naissant infini d’où l’âme se retire et que je m’en remette à ce regard Seigneur pour affronter le jour de Ta miséricorde (JC, 107) [May the interior gaze reveal at last the nascent infinity from which the soul retreats let me put my trust in that look, Lord so that I can confront the day of your mercy]. The great sixteenth-century Protestant poet Agrippa d’Aubigné also serves as a model for Emmanuel in this period. In 1946 Emmanuel published an abridged edition of d’Aubigné’s epic, Les Tragiques, which condemned the Catholic slaughter of Protestants in 1572 on St Bartholomew’s Day. Emmanuel’s war poetry often adopts d’Aubigné’s sarcasm, insults, and aggressive tone. In “Eli Lamma Sabactani,” Emmanuel reproves the pope for his betrayal of the faithful: Ce murmure d’encens vieillot est-ce ta voix Père? cette ombre lasse et monotone est-ce le geste du pasteur qui réunit le troupeau dispersé par les chiens infidèles, ces mots que l’âme n’entend plus, est-ce le Verbe la terrible leçon de Paix que l’homme attend? (JC, 16) [This old-fashioned murmur of incense, is that your voice Father? This listless and dreary shadow is that the gesture of the shepherd who brings together the flock separated by the infidel dogs,

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these words that the soul no longer hears, is this the Word the unbearable lesson of Peace that mankind awaits?]. This address to the pope resembles d’Aubigné’s portrait of the false Jesuit preacher in Les Tragiques: il habille en martyr le bourreau des fidèles Il nomme bel exemple une tragique horreur Le massacre justice, un zele la fureur.14 [he clothes the executioner of the faithful in martyr’s robes He calls a tragic horror a beautiful example He calls a massacre justice, and zeal fury]. In the second and third sections of Jour de colère, Pierre Jean Jouve stands out as Emmanuel’s primary influence. In the late 1930s, Jouve had composed Kyrie,15 a volume of short poems that predicted the Second World War and interpreted the impending war as the Apocalypse prophesied in The Revelation of John the Divine. Jouve’s Kyrie is filled with the symbolism of the Apocalypse – the four horses bringing war and plagues, the avenging angels, and the Lamb of the Seven Seals – as well as stark landscapes suggesting the end of time. In Jour de colère, Emmanuel introduces the same symbols: “L’agneau” [the lamb] represents Christ at the Second Coming; the beasts that exterminate humanity in the final chapters of Revelation fuse into a singular “Bête” [beast], the Nazi army; the Great Whore Babylon of Revelation 17 appears as a “pute affreuse” [horrible slut] (JC, 41). In Jouve’s Europe, no catastrophe had yet occurred, but Emmanuel’s urban and rural settings were already devastated by war, its buildings ruined, the soil pockmarked by bullets and blood. Emmanuel’s vision is decidedly darker than Jouve’s. Whereas Jouve’s verse emphasizes the New Jerusalem that will follow Armageddon,16 Emmanuel gives more weight to divine vengeance than to the end of human suffering or Christ’s final resurrection. In some pieces, he actually expresses his impatience for the end of time: Notre corps saturé de jour n’aspire plus qu’à dissoudre ce jour amer en Ta ténèbre et terre devenir comme au commencement avant Celui formé de jour que tu fis homme (JC, 40)

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[Our body saturated with light aspires only to dissolve this bitter day in Your darkness and to return to dust as in the beginning before the One you made man was formed of light]. In others, he asks God’s mercy for the last generation of humanity as it faces the final days: Pitié pour nous Seigneur Tes derniers survivants car Tu nous as donné ces morts en héritage nous sommes devenus les pères de nos morts. … nous tremblons de mourir et nous tremblons de vivre nous sommes pour toujours en deçà de la Mort (JC, 42) [Lord, take pity on us Your last survivors for you have given us these dead as our inheritance we have become the parents of our dead. … we tremble about dying and we tremble about living we are still on the wrong side of Death]. This relentless vision of destruction explains, in large measure, Emmanuel’s reputation as an apocalyptic poet.17 In Seghers’s words: “Une foi de poix fondue, une colère à la fois prédicante et visionnaire paraissent l’animer” [A faith with the texture of molten pitch, and an anger that was both preachy and visionary seem to animate him].18 In Jour de colère, this apocalyptic perspective serves a patriotic function, as Emmanuel demonstrates in the most beautiful and most quoted poem of the volume. “Hymne de la liberté” [Hymn to Liberty] first appeared in Jour de colère and was later published in the clandestine volume L’Honneur des poètes on 14 July 1943. This moving poem begins with a world rendered mute by its subjection to tyranny and war; neither God nor mankind remembers the dead who have given their lives in the cause of freedom. Then, the memory of the dead breaks the silence like a hymn of hope: Mais pendant que les dieux grimacent dans leur nuit et que le mal barbouille de haine les visages (le corps à corps dans la noirceur est sans merci

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le sang a de l’enfer l’odeur inextinguible) tu montes au nadir du monde inverse et nu et voici que dans notre nuit médite encore la musique de tes astres bienheureux, voici que notre sang s’émeut de nostalgie comme si ta douceur lui était révélée au fort de son acharnement à se connaître, au plus cruel de sa colère contre soi (JC, 93–4) [But while the gods frown in their night and evil smears faces with hatred (the hand-to-hand combat in the darkness is merciless the blood has the inextinguishable odour of hell) you rise to the nadir of the bare world turned upside down and so it is that in our night the music of the blessed stars meditates once again now our blood stirs with nostalgia as if your sweetness revealed itself to our blood when it most relentlessly tried to know itself, during its cruelest anger with itself]. This memory resurrects the dead for the poet and assures him of the inevitable triumph of freedom, because no earthly tyrant can undo our redemption from sin accomplished by Christ’s crucifixion. The poem concludes with a vision of nature, the dead and the living, including prisoners of war, joining in cosmic prayer and a celebration of universal liberation from evil: Par-dessus les tyrans enroués de mutisme il y a la nef silencieuse de vos mains par-dessus l’ordre dérisoire des tyrans il y a l’ordre des nuées et des cieux vastes il y a la respiration des monts très bleus il y a les libres lointains de la prière il y a les larges fronts qui ne se courbent pas il y a les astres dans la liberté de leur essence il y a les immenses moissons du devenir il y a dans des tyrans une angoisse fatale qui est la liberté effroyable de dieu (JC, 95)

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[Above the tyrants who are hoarse from their silence there is the quiet church nave formed by your hands beyond the pathetic order imposed by the tyrants there is the order of the clouds and the vast skies there is the respiration of the bluest mountains there are the free horizons of prayer there are the wide foreheads that refuse to bend in submission there are the stars whose essence is liberty there are the immense harvests of becoming there is in tyrants a fatal anguish which is the appalling liberty of god]. “Hymne de la liberté” is Emmanuel’s tribute to his countrymen, an affirmation of his patriotism and his Christian faith. The rhythm of the patriotic poems of Jour de colère, such as “Hymne de la liberté,” differs strikingly from that of Le Poète et son Christ, Le Poète fou, and Tombeau d’Orphée. Although he still avoids rhyme, Emmanuel often writes in classical alexandrines, that is, twelve-syllable lines with a perceptible break after the sixth syllable which divides the line into two equal parts. This return to what Mallarmé termed, in Crise de vers, “la cadence nationale” [the national cadence]19 is out of step with the general preference for free verse and prose poetry in twentieth-century France, but not unusual for poetry of the Resistance. Most of Aragon’s patriotic poetry of the 1940s is written in classical alexandrines and often in rhyme. The most famous patriotic poem of the 1940s, Eluard’s “Liberté” [Liberty], uses repetition of the initial words of each line and a refrain to imitate the stirring rhythm of a national anthem, the same effect Emmanuel creates through the repetition of “il y a” in the conclusion of “Hymne de la Liberté.” This return to the classical alexandrine and the metrical patterns of political hymns reflects the Resistance poets’ conviction that poetry could be an effective weapon in the struggle for liberation if it appealed to the general French public, whose grandparents had been moved two generations earlier by Victor Hugo’s rousing metres. The appearance of such poetry during the worst national catastrophe of twentieth-century France also suggests that, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, eloquence resurfaces whenever French poets of passionate conviction – d’Aubigné, Hugo, and now Emmanuel – write in defence of the human spirit. Combats avec tes défenseurs (1941) [Fights with Your Defenders, 1941] was also published in 1942, but, as the date in the title indicates, this vol-

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ume contains Emmanuel’s earliest verse on the war. The title comes from the sixth stanza of La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, in which the goddess Liberty is called upon to fight hand-in-hand along with the soldiers defending her. Combats avec tes défenseurs is organized as a series of visions, beginning with the onset of war in “Soir de l’homme” [Twilight of Humanity], followed by a prophecy of both tyranny and resistance in “Prophétie sur les nations” [Prophecy for the Nations], the triumph of evil in “Ménades” [Maenads], an avowal of the poet’s complicity in “Je me suis reconnu” [I Recognized Myself], and ending with a promise of liberation in “Rhapsodie du Vendredi Saint” [Good Friday Rhapsody]. Each section is a single poem from five to nine pages long in unrhymed twelve-syllable lines not separated into stanzas. In essays composed between 1937 and 1946, later compiled and published under the title Poésie raison ardente (1948), Emmanuel explains the dilemma he faced as a Resistance poet who was also a Christian, a dilemma he confronts in Combats avec tes défenseurs. He refused to condemn Germany or to see the war as the result of contemporary historical forces (PRA, 24–6).20 Rather, he wanted to make his readers aware of their true place in the trans-historical struggle between good and evil that had begun in Genesis and would conclude with the Second Coming of Christ. He felt that non-Christian poets who ignored Christian history and portrayed the current catastrophe as the result of economic, political, or social forces would only reduce their readers to despair and in turn lay the groundwork for the victory of future tyrants (PRA, 26–8). In Combats avec tes défenseurs, Emmanuel engages in an argument with his Marxist and Existentialist colleagues over the meaning of the war. To their materialistic interpretation of events, he opposes a vision of the human soul as a microcosm of the battle between sin and redemption. Albert Béguin understood the meaning of Combats avec tes défenseurs: “le débat des forces déchaînées sur l’Europe et le monde a le même sens que le drame qui se déroule en chacun de nous, l’un éclairant l’autre” [the crisis caused by the forces unleashed on Europe and the world has the same meaning as the drama that takes place inside us all, each one illuminating the other].21 Other Resistance poets, such as Seghers, however, interpreted this volume as nothing more than an expression of Emmanuel’s anger at the enemy, “[une] vie intérieure ardente criant le drame qui l’entoure” [an ardent inner life, screaming out the tragedy that surrounds it].22 Working again in the typological tradition, Emmanuel conveys his

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cyclical notion of history through allusions to cataclysms in the Hebrew Bible: Noah’s flood, the plagues Moses called upon Egypt, the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah. The Maenads of Greek mythology work well with these biblical allusions because the female murderers of Orpheus suggest the irrational, frenzied destruction of war. From the New Testament, Emmanuel brings forward the symbol of the Crucifixion. A complex pattern of interconnected images buttresses this vision of a world tottering between catastrophe and redemption. Along with contrasts of light and dark, ascent and fall, we find many evocations of ingestion or imprisonment. Birds, grass, and the ruins of churches evoke liberty. Human speech appears in the form of “le Chant” [Song], a sign of faith and freedom, but also as “la Voix” [the Voice], or the distortion of language in the service of tyranny, and “la Parole” [the Word], or Christ. Hands are a common image related to speech and can signify the tyrant’s torturers or, more positively, the prayers of the faithful. In addition to these patterns, Emmanuel engages in realistic descriptions of torture and murder, in the manner of d’Aubigné, to accentuate the actual sufferings of the French people. “Soir de l’homme,” the opening poem of Combats avec tes défenseurs, presents a world on the point of succumbing to its destructive instincts: O Chant! une aile ultime à l’Orient des morts monte, baignant les monts dormants d’une ombre rose, et – chaude encore de la paume du néant – tressaille au timbre transparent de l’altitude: entends frémir l’oiseau invisible! ô entends le battement de la fraîcheur frôlant l’abîme (CT, 9)23 [O Song! a final wing rises toward the East of the dead, bathing the sleeping hills in pink shadow and – still warm from the open hand of the abyss – thrills at the transparent tones of the altitude: listen to the invisible bird shiver! oh listen to the beating of the fresh, cool air brushing the abyss]. Emmanuel conceives of this turning point in history, much as Freud does in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), as a time when the death

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instinct has overtaken the life principle and healthy sexuality has turned sadistic. He imagines the night as an evil feminine force ready to engulf the masculine sky, into which freedom (“le Chant,” “l’oiseau”) has already disappeared: la Nuit nue, pâmée de lueurs, la Nuit nubile se retourne en tes chairs moites avec langueur et noirement s’éveille, hélas! à quel obscène commerce avec l’azur (CT, 9) [naked Night, swooning in light, nubile Night turns languidly in your moist flesh and somberly rouses herself, alas! To what obscene commerce with the sky]. But the sky is not innocent; it finds all spiritual aspirations a burden and remembers nostalgically the time before the Creator infused matter with life: Las d’une chaste liberté il aspire à la Mort entre deux cuisses dures: qu’au bas du temps l’enfer entr’ouvre ses verdures et tout s’infond en la nostalgie de ce vert … ( CT, 9] [Weary of chaste liberty he aspires to a Death between two hard thighs: let hell, at the lower limit of time, give a glimpse of its green pastures and everything succumbs from nostalgia for this green world]. This rejection of the spirit includes a rejection of humanity’s unique promise of liberation from all evil, Christ, the victim of Calvary, ”ce Mont d’ancien regard et de larme” [this hill of ancient aspect and tears] (CT, 10). It permits the birth of the tyrant, first perceived as “une Voix ravageant le monde” [a Voice ravaging the world] (CT, 10), a cruel song that replaces “le Chant” of the opening line. Emmanuel then turns his attention to the torture of prisoners of war, a contemporary example of sadism that recalls both the excesses of the Inquisition and the scientific inventiveness of the Nazis:

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O Nuit, Nuit de torture aux somptueux apprêts, salle voûtée d’horreur qui supportes le monde Chambre de Paix féroce où rêvent les bourreaux où le Trépied sinistre éclaire des machines humaines, inventées pour des cris inouïs (CT, 11) [O Night, Night of torture with your sumptuous finishing touches vaulted chamber of horror, you bear the weight of the world savage Room of Peace where the torturers dream where the sinister Mounted Camera exposes machines made of human beings, invented to produce unbelievable screams]. In the concluding stanzas, the prisoners’ screams become a call for help that will be carried by a simple sparrow from the prison, through the bulletsprayed sky, into the “ether insaisissable” [the elusive atmosphere] and the “future irrévélée” [unrevealed future] (CT, 12). The poet speaks also of the bird’s possible return to punish the torturers; and so ends the first vision, with a faint hope for freedom and justice. The books of the Old Testament prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah form the context for the second and longest poem, “Prophétie sur les nations.” Both Isaiah and Jeremiah foretold the destruction of Israel by foreign powers, ancient political catastrophes that Emmanuel associates with the Second World War. Like the Hebrew prophets, and in the same angry, sarcastic voice, Emmanuel evokes the sinfulness of cities and political leaders, and the death, hunger, violence, and suppression that the chosen people will endure. Both Old Testament prophets, however, blame the unfaithful, idolatrous Hebrews for calling forth God’s vengeance. In Emmanuel’s poem, quite to the contrary, it is God who is at fault for deserting the people: “dieu Se terre avec les hommes / sous le ventre du ciel peureux” [god burrows along with mankind / under the belly of the frightened sky] (CT, 15). What the poet calls “le mutisme assourdissant des cieux coupables” [the deafening muteness of the guilty skies] (CT, 17) has left mankind without hope and advantaged the tyrant. The prophet is an advocate for Christ, “la Parole” [the Word] (CT, 19). Christ is the source of the song in the individual soul and the community’s protection against the tyrant’s voice. Like Isaiah, this prophet condemns the leaders of society, seeing the humble as those closest to God because they imitate Christ through their suffering:

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Mais la Voix véritablement crucifiée qui donne au corps pécheur sa figure éternelle et tend ses bras dans l’exigence de la Croix nul ne l’entend à travers soi sinon le Pauvre (CT, 19) [But the Voice that was truly crucified which gives the sinner’s body its eternal form and stretches out its arms to the measure of the Cross no one hears it within except the poor]. Soldiers and political leaders refuse the notion of salvation, preferring to consider original sin to be mankind’s permanent condition. Unable to counterbalance damnation with redemption, unable to allow “la Parole” to make itself “quotidienne / au plus secret de leur péché” [common / in the depths of their sin] (CT, 19), these rulers have reduced themselves to a collection of alienated, disoriented individuals resembling those scattered by God at the fall of Babel in Genesis 11, although it is now their guilt rather than the divine hand that brings down civilization. A linguistic crisis naturally results. The prophet alternatively imagines human language as animalistic grunts and as a “dialogue de sourds” [dialogue of the deaf], in which “chacun crie / son secret sans l’entendre” [each one cries out / his secret without hearing it] (CT, 19). This crisis sets the stage for the triumph of the tyrant, the supreme manipulator of language. Imitating the Creator of Genesis, the tyrant calls evil into existence by pronouncing four words. “Amour” [love] produces a vision of sexual frenzy that turns love into torture. “Pain” [bread] evokes both physical hunger and the need for community, which, when unsatisfied, leads to the false satiety of violent political action. “Sang” [Blood] conjures up battles, while “Liberté” [Liberty] offers a vision of the tyrant’s bunker, a subterranean prison resembling an insect colony, where a colossal spider-web lurks to trap the masses. The word “joy” alone resists perversion: Mais il dit “Joie.” Et nous les hommes sans visage témoins de l’homme en son anéantissement nous nous réjouissons car dieu montre Sa Face … le Signe nous suffit sur les plateaux cinglés d’oubli, où le silence intact attend les hommes d’une église enterrée à demi dans les blés (CT, 23)

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[But he says “Joy.” And we men without faces witnesses of mankind in this moment of our annihilation we rejoice because god shows His face ... the Sign is sufficient for us on these plateaus whipped by the winds of forgetfulness, where the intact silence of a church half-buried in the wheat awaits humanity]. As with so much of his vocabulary, Emmanuel takes the word “joy” from the Bible, where it appears frequently in the psalms, and in the stories of the Magi at the Nativity (Matthew 2:10) and of Mary Magdalene at the Resurrection (Matthew 28:8). Chiari suggests that “Joie” stands for “the real Christ,” who “comes, with his outstretched arms, symbol of reconciliation and bliss.”24 As found in the Psalms, joy is the emotional equivalent of song. Recalled by the few witnesses able to recognize the saviour’s face reflected in the pain of the tyrant’s victims, joy presages the resurgence of a true Christian community at the end of the war. The third poem, “Ménades,” attempts a dual theological and Freudian analysis of war very much in line with Jouve’s thought expressed in Sueur de Sang. Emmanuel refers to the Maenads as fallen angels: “les anges / damnés dans un enfer d’ailes démésurées” [condemned angels from a hell of over-reaching wings] (CT, 27). One Maenad has an ecstatic vision of the earth as a giant grave overflowing with stinking, pus-filled cadavers. A “Furie sereine” [serene Fury] (CT, 31), she copulates upright with “le Roi” [the King], who, encased in armour, steadies his feet in rotting entrails. She becomes the whore of the cities, modern Babylons engaged in idol worship and blasphemy of Christ (CT, 30, 32). The cities’ inhabitants are punished by the loss of an effective language and puppet-like manipulation by the tyrant: Que reste-t-il de l’homme vidé de son silence mâle et de son dieu? Un sac bourré d’une sciure de paroles, une frénésie froide et morne de regard, des gestes que ranime ou freine par saccades le sang artificiel injecté par la Voix (CT, 29) [What is left of man once he is emptied of his viril silence and his god?

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A sack stuffed with word-shavings, a cold and somber frenzy in his gaze, movements jerkily halted or revived by the artificial blood the Voice has injected into him]. Given the failure and corruption of language, the refusal to speak now serves the function of resistance to tyranny. The faithful imitate Christ through their willing acceptance of suffering, which becomes a liberating force: Cependant les vrais morts se taisent, leur silence est la respiration tranquille du futur. Ils insufflent sept fois leur courage à la Terre et leur printemps chantant à tue-tête revient, l’herbe grandit au fort du carnage, les pousses sortent des plaies longtemps vivaces des tués les pommiers ont fleuri tout l’enfer, et très tendre est la Face de Christ lavée des pluies d’avril (CT, 30) [Yet, the true dead keep quiet, their silence is the peaceful breathing of the future. They inspire the earth with their courage seven times over and their springtime, singing at the top of its lungs, returns, grass grows in the midst of carnage, new shoots emerge from the still painful wounds of those killed apple trees cover all of hell with their blossoms, and very tender is the Face of Christ washed by April’s rains]. The silence of the faithful serves as a corrective to irrationality. It overwhelms the din of tanks and guns. The prophecy that silence will lead back to “le Chant” also offers the hope that eros will eventually return to its rightful function of procreation. In the fourth poem, “Je me suis reconnu,” Emmanuel condemns himself and his contemporaries for the tyrant’s success: Je suis cet homme mon nom est la syllabe muette de son nom, et toi aussi tu es cet homme! tu jouis de sa haine comme d’une âme toute neuve,

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il te suffit d’ouvrir les yeux et d’écouter et tu es le tyran, tu es le Mal en marche ton visage est le microphone de la Voix! (CT, 38) [I am that man my name is the mute syllable of his name, and you, you too are that man! you take pleasure in his hatred as you would in an innocent soul, just open your eyes and listen and you will see that you are the tyrant, you are Evil on the march your face is the microphone of the Voice!]. The tyrant enjoys no autonomous existence. He lacks individuality because he is simply the expression of society’s complete entrenchment in sin. The tyrant is the tower and humanity the stones that form him. As in Genesis, humanity now tries to equal God in power. This time man challenges not God the Father, but Christ, by elevating to power an evil leader who incarnates the refusal of grace. Given that language has reached an impasse, Emmanuel reiterates that the masses communicate through violence: notre monde où le meurtre est langue universelle notre monde où l’on ne se tait que pour tuer et tasser ensuite les mots sur les cadavres (CT, 36) [our world where murder is the universally understood language our world where we stop talking only to kill and then pile words on top of corpses]. Going further, he connects the loss of speech with a loss of touch. Hands are an essential element of human communication with nature, other people, and God. Hands reveal the solidity of nature, caress loved ones, and join in prayer. Here, the tyrant looks at his bloodless, frail hands as if they belonged to someone else, while his followers raise stumps in salute. This loss of touch furnishes more evidence of humanity’s alienation from God, who formed Adam and Eve with his hands from the earth. In Emmanuel’s view, man’s creative energies may have evaporated, but God still holds man accountable for the failure to sustain creation:

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“Où sont vos mains” dit dieu. Rien ne répond que l’eau sourde obstinée qui leur monte à la gorge seule leur bouche ouverte émerge du néant (CT, 41) [“Where are your hands,” says God. Nothing answers except the obstinate, deaf water that rises in their throats only their open mouths emerge from the emptiness]. “Rhapsodie du Vendredi-Saint,” the concluding poem, echoes the confidence expressed by Jacques Maritain in his Foreword to Combats avec tes défenseurs that “le volume du mal n’est pas infini” [the volume of evil is not infinite] (CT, 7). The evening of the first poem changes into Good Friday. Mud and water subside under the growth of spring vegetation. The poet awakens from his dream of destruction to become a witness to Christ: Fais donc rage, immobile Coeur de la détresse ceux-là savent qui dans le Mal sont assurés que Tu es la seule permanente catastrophe, Christ, ô printemps unique ô chancre exubérant (CT, 48) [Rage, then, unmoving Heart of our distress those who suffer are assured that You are the only permanent catastrophe, Christ, o unique spring o exuberant canker]. The immensity of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection, his redemption of all sin, will overcome any specific manifestation of evil. The tyrant and his followers, the poet exclaims ironically, fear this presence, which will soon bring their reign to an end. The book finishes with a vision of the redemption of history, when humanity will be transformed into “le Chant.” In Combats avec tes défenseurs, Emmanuel combines several myths – the story of Orpheus, the Redemption, Freudian life and death instincts, Victor Hugo’s view of history as a progressive spiritualization of matter and, one we haven’t yet examined, the Tower of Babel. Babel is the war itself, a time of confusion and alienation from God. For Emmanuel, mankind wages war out of pride in its capacity for evil; man challenges God,

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attempting to reverse creation by destroying it. In Genesis, the Babel story follows the account of the Flood and signals another false start for humanity. Emmanuel’s thought in Combat avec tes défenseurs offers a variation on this theme. The war takes place at a time when humanity has regressed to a pre-human form and lost the stamp of God’s image. Mankind nevertheless retains an instinct for salvation that Emmanuel feels will inevitably conquer our lower nature, especially when we recognize war as simply another episode in the struggle to overcome sin through the acceptance of Christ. Language has undergone several negative transformations. As in Genesis, people have lost the ability to communicate through words and gestures. The sounds they utter are screams of anger, cries of pain, or blasphemy. While Emmanuel brings up the perversion of language in “Prophétie sur les nations,” he is interested mainly in the idea of language as an instrument of destruction. He counterbalances this fallen tongue with “le Chant,” which initially represents man’s spiritual potential but evolves into a symbol of the Incarnation. Emmanuel brings into play another important element of the Babel myth, one that does not appear in Genesis 11 but which figures in interpretations of the myth from St Augustine to Victor Hugo; namely, the presence of an evil giant. Emmanuel’s tyrant is an ambivalent character. While he obviously represents a modern military leader, he stands less for political repression than for contemporary humanity’s predilection for the flesh, its erotic and destructive instincts gone off kilter, its fascination with death. Fittingly, the tyrant is a communal creation, without personal power. As Christ’s cross reasserts its authority, the tyrant disappears because, in Emmanuel’s view, Christ liberates the human psyche and this inner liberation holds the promise of society’s regeneration. Combat avec tes défenseurs is declamatory in tone; that is, Emmanuel addresses his reader directly, expressing his anger and repeating his ideas to emphasize his point, much as a politician or a preacher might do. Léon-Gabriel Gros recognized the oral quality of this volume, and suggested that these poems were meant to be read aloud and would work well at a public rally or even broadcast over a loud speaker.25 In La Colombe, a poem in four parts published first in 1943 and later included in La Liberté guide nos pas under the title “Ah! si j’avais les ailes de la colombe,” Emmanuel adopts the role of orator even more resolutely. Pierre Jean Jouve, in his Foreword to this volume, praises the poetry of the Resistance, particularly Emmanuel’s poetry, not only for its ability to

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speak frankly of the political catastrophe but also for keeping alive the promise of liberation. Emmanuel dedicated the poem to Jean Cayrol, another Resistance poet then imprisoned in an Austrian concentration camp. Both the Foreword and Dedication demonstrate the active role Emmanuel played as a poet for the Resistance. The opening passages of La Colombe remind us of Combats avec tes défenseurs: we again encounter a war-ravaged landscape, an evocation of a regressed mankind, and an image of a bird against the sky: Que l’ombre de leurs mains en plein vol te capture Colombe, et qu’ils te clouent au ciel inférieur! Il le faut. Car le sang et les armées débordent la chair retourne à son limon, l’âme se perd sel de discorde, en l’eau muette qui recouvre les vestiges de l’homme vieux. Le ciel est bas les grands vautours rageurs s’assomment aux parois et les reflets du sang font rougeoyer les astres: le sang emplit l’étendue toute de l’esprit il pénètre la pulpe amère de ce monde, déjà règne ta molle odeur, extase immonde ton vertige, cloaque tendre! et dieu n’est plus (Col., 27)26 [May the shadow of their hands capture you in mid-flight Dove, and may they nail you to the lower sky! This must happen. For blood and armies overflow flesh returns to dust, the soul, discordant salt disappears into the silent water that covers the vestiges of ancient mankind. The sky is low great angry vultures crash into the mountainsides and the reflection of blood turns the stars red: blood fills the whole horizon of the spirit it penetrates the bitter flesh of this world a sickly sweet odour already dominates, filthy ecstasy delicate cesspool provoking dizziness! and god is no more]. Using imagery from the story of Noah and the flood, Emmanuel brings to mind the dove that brought the olive branch to the ark as an assurance of God’s reconciliation with mankind. The dove that humanity seeks to capture and nail to the sky in sacrifice is also a figure of Christ. Although the sea of blood recalls the war, it also suggests the creation story at the

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moment before the waters were divided from the land to permit life. In relation to the Flood, blood also suggests purification and regeneration. The phrase “dieu n’est plus” [god is no more] indicates a time of insecurity when humanity, finally emerging from catastrophe, pleads with God to make his presence known. The hands reaching from the sea of blood are the first signs of a community, which has not yet found a united voice but can gesture and pray. The ensuing verses introduce a New Testament source, the description of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit of John 14:26, sent by God the Father after Christ’s ascent into heaven as a reminder of his love for his people: Voici le temps venu de l’unique Colombe elle seule peut sans ciller te soutenir ô Nuit du sang! Mais haut dans le Père, elle plonge en la suave indifférence. ah! que des mains sacrilèges, des mains de mourants gonflées d’ombre ramènent le néant hautain comme un filet et la saisissent éperdue, froissant ses ailes les brisant presque dans leur joie de la tenir … Et qu’elle soit clouée en nargue au sang qui monte l’arc de son corps bandé jusqu’à rompre en l’effort de s’arracher absurde à ses ailes, son Ombre en sa folle agonie soulevant tout le sang (Col., 28) [Now the time has come of the unique Dove it alone, without blinking, can hold you up o Night of blood! Sent from the Father on high, it plunges into the exquisite indifference. ah! let sacrilegious hands, the hands of the dying swollen with darkness pull in the haughty emptiness like a net and seize the startled bird, crumpling its wings almost breaking its wings in their joy at holding it … And may it be nailed up in protest against the rising sea of blood the arch of its body stretched to the breaking point in its absurd attempt to pull away from its wings, its Shadow in its crazy death throes lifting all of the blood]. As in traditional Christian iconography, the dove is pictured descending from the Father in the heavens. The dove evokes the role of the Holy Spirit,

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promised at the Last Supper (John 16:7), as the advocate that would strengthen the disciples against the hostility of the world. The shadow is also a symbol of divine protection and comfort in the Hebrew Bible, as in the Psalms, where David calls to God,“cache-moi, protège-moi sous tes ailes” [Hide me in the shadow of thy wings] (Psalms 17:8); or in the prophetic works, where Isaiah says of the restored Jerusalem,“elle sera un toit de feuillage pour donner de l’ombre pendant la chaleur du jour” [And there will be a tabernacle for a shadow in the daytime from the heat] (Isaiah: 4:6). Emmanuel proclaims the dove’s ascendance over the tyrant, who, as in Combats avec tes défenseurs, figures as an anti-Christ trying to fashion humanity in the image of his hatred. The tyrant will fail and the earth will experience a new creation: sur tant de chair bourrelle et martyre à la fois sur tant d’étals de haine où jouit la victime sur tant de corps en rut que couvre le tyran et sur tant de tyrans assoiffés d’une image où laper quelque flaque infâme de leur sang, que la Colombe inscrive une courbe de fête … sublime d’audace, et déchirant de son Ombre le sang pour le second partage et la nouvelle aurore où les plus sombres eaux seront pacifiées (Col., 28–9) [over so much flesh at once murderous and martyred over so many butcher blocks of hate where the victim feels pleasure over so many rutting bodies that the tyrant covers up and over so many tyrants thirsty for an image where they can lap up some infamous puddle of their own blood, may the Dove inscribe a curve of celebration ... sublime in its audacity, and let it split apart the blood with its Shadow for the second division of land from the waters, for the new dawn when the darkest of waters will be pacified]. These lines caused Alan Boase to call Emmanuel France’s greatest living orator.27 The first five lines recall d’Aubigné’s Tragiques in their repetition of the initial words of each line and the use of images of butchery to intensify their invective. Emmanuel also reminds us of Victor Hugo in

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his ability to concretize the idea of liberation through images of light and flight and his dramatization of the conflict between the flesh and the spirit. Like Hugo, he betrays a fascination with birds, which, although frail, are capable of breaking free of the fallen physical world; and he imagines liberation as a cosmic occurrence involving nature, all of humanity, and the individual soul. In this first poem, the dove becomes transformed from a symbol of the end of catastrophe into a symbol of the Pentecost, as recounted in the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles, when the clandestine apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit and cast off their fear of repression to proclaim their faith openly. The second section concentrates on two elements of the Pentecost story – the inspiration by the Holy Spirit and the disciples’ acceptance of their mission to spread Christ’s word. All are set in the context of the Second World War. Images of confinement and freedom alternate. The poet adopts the stance of a prophet come to chastise his contemporaries and to announce the imminent arrival of the Spirit. The alliteration of “p,” “m,” and “l” adds urgency to his message: O peuples prisonniers de vos terreurs profondes et dont l’âme croupit dans le sang de vos morts … O peuples moribonds qui de vos mains crispées ramenez le passé frileux sur vos regards La Colombe a fondu sur vous de tout son être lacérant le linceul où vous roule la Voix: vous grelottez au matin froid de l’espérance (Col., 30–1) [O people, who are prisoners of your profound terrors whose soul squats in the blood of your dead … O moribund people who, with your clenched hands Pull the chilly past over your faces The Dove has descended upon you with its whole being Ripping through the shroud in which the tyrant’s Voice has sewn you: you shiver in the chilly morning of hope]. The dove liberates the imprisoned community as Christ revived Lazarus and as the Holy Spirit liberated the disciples when he descended in the

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form of a powerful wind at Pentecost. Hardened into indifference by fear, the people have done nothing to merit this regeneration. Only refugees and prisoners of war follow the examples of the original disciples. Through their suffering they serve as Christ’s witnesses and participate in the eternal war against “la Mort” [Death], that is, against original sin: cet oiseau de malheur qui tellement vous hante que vous n’osez lever les yeux vers le ciel dur, infléchissant son vol vers le plus bas, caresse la détresse infinie des proscrits, des captifs (Col., 31) [this bird of unhappiness that haunts you so much that you dare not raise your eyes toward the hard sky bending its wing straight down, caresses the endless distress of the exiled, the captives]. Emmanuel also thinks of the victims of the war in terms of the Communion of Saints – the spiritual fellowship of the Church Triumphant (the souls in heaven), the Church Suffering (the souls in purgatory), and the Church Militant (the living Christians who can alleviate the pains of the Church Suffering through prayer and good works). In this passage, the captives fulfill the duties of the Church Militant, offering their deaths on behalf of their compatriots, who represent the Church Suffering. Their blood calls forth the redeeming blood spilled on Calvary, now a symbol of the grace that sustains everyday life. The prisoners have received the gift of tongues, since their song is recognized by their mute compatriots as well as by nature. In the simplest sense, this “Chant” [Song] represents their free acceptance of suffering, their joy in imitating the saviour. If Emmanuel insists that their song is a hymn without words, a tranquil appeal, it is because he considers attentive silence a predisposition to inspiration by the Holy Spirit. As in Combats avec tes défenseurs, “le Chant” here signifies the incarnation of the divinity in the human soul, Christ the Word made flesh, expressed through human actions more eloquent than speech. The tyrants cannot silence this language: O lâches! cimentez leur prison de mensonge et d’opprobre leur tombe

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mettez un chiffre à leur cadavre pour tout nom et perdez-le dans vos registres hypocrites jetez l’âme à la fosse commune, étouffez sous le sable des cours le sang qui fume encore: la Colombe de Chant vous défie, plus légère d’être sans âme, sans mémoire, sans adieu futur simple échappé des jeunes mains de dieu et que la Liberté enfant, émerveillée suit des yeux dans les feux obliques du matin (Col., 32) [O cowards! seal the walls of their prison with lies and their graves with contempt put a number on their corpses as their only name and then lose it in your hypocritical record books throw their souls in a common grave, under the sand of your courtyards, smother their still-warm blood: The Dove of Song defies you, it is lighter because it is without soul, without memory, without goodbye simple future set free from the young hands of God and which liberty, like a fascinated child, follows with his eyes in the oblique lights of morning]. These lines contain references to contemporary political events – the tattooing of Jews, the mass executions, and the common graves of the concentration camps. Yet, Emmanuel takes pains to interpret the war from the larger perspective of Christian history. The torturers resemble Cain trying to conceal his brother’s blood from the Lord. The “Colombe de Chant” [Dove of Song] represents the joint workings of the Holy Spirit and the disciples, as it reorients the world’s gaze from despair about the present catastrophe to hope for the future. The “feux obliques du matin” [oblique lights of morning] suggest not only dawn but also the Pentecostal tongues of fire. Part three of La Colombe alternates between tributes to the war dead and the sarcastic condemnation of Nazi tortures: O bourreaux, j’ai pitié de vos peines … l’Enfer ne connaît point labeur égal à votre haine! N’êtes-vous donc point las de vous défigurer en vain? Que pouvez-vous haineux désespérés contre l’amour de vos victimes? La Colombe

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se joue de vous, elle est en votre âme, elle naît de vos mains torturant l’âme au-delà de l’âme (Col., 34) [O torturers, how I pity your sufferings … Hell knows no labour equal to your hatred! Are you not tired of disfiguring yourselves for nothing? You desperate haters, can you not see you are powerless against the love of your victims? The Dove is using you, it is in your soul, it is brought into being by your hands which torture the soul beyond its endurance]. Emmanuel remembers the mocking tone of d’Aubigné’s address to the St Barthélemy massacres in Les Tragiques: Meurtriers de votre sang, appréhendez ce juge, Appréhendez aussi la fureur du déluge Superbes éventés, tiercelets de géants … En un petit troupeau les petits assemblés Se jouent de la mort, pilotés par les anges28 [Murderers of your own blood, fear the judge, Fear as well the fury of the flood Proud ones whose time has past, third-rate giants … In a little group, the little people who have come together, Guided by angels, make fun of death]. Both poets understand that the enemies unwittingly prepare their own downfall. They play into God’s hands, setting up the conditions for the triumph of their victims. Nevertheless, Emmanuel is serious in his expression of pity for the executioners, because he considers their sadism a mask for their desire for salvation. The most egregious crimes serve the useful function of calling God back into the human sphere, of forcing the Creator to take charge of his creation again. All suffering, the most sincere imitation of Christ, reinstitutes the Redemption. The executioners try to destroy their victims’ identity, but this attempted eradication of individuality allows the dead to become one with the Holy Spirit in the task of ministering to the living:

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qu’importent vos visages et vos noms! Votre sang sur la terre altérée coule en un fleuve unique votre ultime soupir anonyme devient l’aile tiède de la Colombe sur vos frères aile de pleurs frôlant leur regard aux barreaux (Col., 33) [what do your faces or your names matter! Your blood flows over the destroyed earth in a single stream your last, anonymous sigh becomes the warm wing of the Dove touching your brothers a tearful wing brushing their gaze through the prison bars]. Suffering instills courage: Celui qui pleure en homme à la Face de dieu et dont les très doux pleurs lavent la Face humaine ne craint ni les crachats ni l’insulte: honteux ses bourreaux lui envient ses larmes! (Col., 34) [He who sheds tears as a man before God’s Face and whose soft tears cleanse the Face of man fears neither spit nor insults: his shameful torturers are jealous of his tears!]. Groans become song, as imprisonment gives way to freedom: Quel chant vainqueur vous préparez à la vengeance Quelle aube sur le sang, quel amour sans merci! Ne comprenez-vous pas l’imminence de l’homme êtes-vous tellement endurcis par la Peur que ce sombre éclatement d’ailes dans la pierre ce grand souffle des morts claquants autour de vous Oiseau d’irrépressible espoir! ne vous déchirent de leur futur épouvantable et rayonnant dont les seuls morts ont le secret, les morts fidèles gardiens de l’avenir en l’âme des vivants? (Col., 35–6) [What a song of victory you prepare for their revenge What a dawn surmounting the blood, what love without pity!

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Don’t you understand the imminence of mankind are you so hardened by Fear that this somber eruption of wings from stone this great breath of the dead whipping around you, this Bird of irrepressible hope! doesn’t rip you apart with its frightening and glorious future whose secret is held by the dead, the faithful dead, guardians of the future in the souls of the living?]. Once again, Emmanuel thinks in terms of the Communion of Saints, the true church that can never be destroyed even though its edifices on earth are bombed to rubble. The dead take their rightful place as the Church Triumphant, the souls who have already merited sainthood and who can act as intercessors to God on behalf of the living. Emmanuel joins Jouve in according the dead a predominant role in France’s liberation. For Jouve, the dead, purified from sin, will have the honour of inaugurating the Second Coming,29 while, for Emmanuel, the dead initiate a new Pentecost. In these lines, the dead resemble the apostles on Pentecost morning after the visit of the Holy Spirit. Just as the first disciples, freed from their fear of persecution, left the upstairs room to proclaim Christ’s message to the world, so also Emmanuel imagines the Second World War dead bursting forth from graves, their example inspiring their living contemporaries to liberate the nation. At the same time, the dead become the Holy Spirit, “l’aile tiède de la Colombe” [the warm wing of the Dove], “Oiseau d’irrépressible espoir” [Bird of irrepressible hope]. In line with the Augustinian doctrine defining the Spirit as the union of the Father and Son in love,30 Emmanuel imagines the inspiration by the Spirit as an overwhelming experience of love, faith, and hope. Such an experience renews the individual Christian internally, “en l’âme” [in the soul], and also forges the community of the faithful. The final short piece of La Colombe raises the question of the poet’s ability to give voice to the Spirit: Ah! si j’avais les ailes de la Colombe j’assourdirais la nuit de mon vol, je battrais l’air autour du tyran jusqu’à ce qu’il s’effondre et qu’au bruit de sa chute immense, l’homme nu s’éveillant au milieu de son sang répandu encore tout meurtri de mutisme et de plainte

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voie la Peur retirer ses eaux de la durée et sente s’assouplir son corps roidi dans l’Ombre à la chaleur du sang et de la liberté Mais mon Chant n’est qu’un faible écho du cri des morts: ah! que ceux seulement qui n’oublient pas l’entendent, et leur silence au moins n’aura plus de remords (Col., 37–8) [Ah! If only I had the wings of a Dove I would deafen the night with my flight, I would stir up the air around the tyrant until he fell and, at the noise of his great fall, man, naked, awakening in the midst of his spilled blood still bruised in his silence and groans would see Fear pull back its waters from the horizon and feel his body, stiffened by Darkness, become limber in the warmth of blood and liberty But my Song is only a feeble echo of the dead: ah! if only those who have not forgotten hear it, and their silence at least will no longer be guilty]. The opening line is a quotation from the 55th Psalm: Ah, si je pouvais avoir des ailes comme la colombe! Je pourrais m’envoler et me poser ailleurs [Oh that I had the wings of a dove to fly away and be at rest!] Emmanuel transforms this prayer for deliverance into an optimistic vision. A new creation takes place as the floodwaters of war subside. The tyrant falls to allow the birth of “l’homme nu,” the Pauline “new man,” reunited with Christ and regenerated by the blood of sacrifice. The Spirit, appearing again as a wind, brings release from fear, silence, and political oppression. These eloquent, yet simple verses written from the depths of catastrophe attest to Emmanuel’s profound sense of mission. His is a “littérature engagée” [committed literature] that attempts to save its readers from despair by prophesying a new age of freedom to be accom-

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plished through the dual intercession of Christ and the war’s victims. The poet ends this sequence with the humble admission that he himself has not yet received the gift of tongues. His song is not “le Chant.” At best his poetry can only call attention to the victims’ sufferings. The last two lines, however, propose a modest role for the artist: he can bear witness to the heroism of the dead and relieve the guilt of his frightened countrymen by acting as their witness. More than any other image found in the war volumes, the dove has elicited a range of interpretation. For Chiari, it stands for “the Holy Ghost, the message of God the Holy Spirit, which lies in wait in words pregnant with meaning, waiting for the poet for liberation, for the restoration of sacred meaning.”31 Boase stresses that the dove symbolizes Christ: “the Pentecostal Dove, which is not merely Grace Divine but Christ himself, whose recrucifixion can alone deliver the world from its ‘Nuit du Sang’ [Night of Blood] from the Voice born of the servile crowd.”32 Rita Vistica sees the dove as a symbol of the soul’s potential spiritual renewal, of the “life and hope … present in the very heart of the ‘bourreau’ [executioner].”33 For Kushner: “through its frailty and lightness, the Dove belongs to the Resurrection. Emmanuel returns carefully to this symbol, already charged with the hope of reconciliation in the story of Noah’s ark that reaches its spiritual apogee as the visible sign of the Holy Spirit.”34 Without explicitly saying so, Kushner understands that, through the many layers of his symbols, Emmanuel returns to the tradition of figural symbolism that views the Christ story as the central event of human history. In La Colombe, the dove of Genesis prefigures not just the Holy Spirit but also the Trinity, for the dove represents the love that continues the Father’s creation and the Son’s mediation for each successive age of human history. Through its associations with “le Chant,” the dove becomes the Christian muse, the source of true poetic inspiration. Through its connections with the war’s victims, the dove suggests the importance of the Communion of Saints in humanity’s spiritual progress. Emmanuel also links the dove to traditional Christian virtues – the faith, hope, and love that will win the disciples’ liberation, the fortitude merited by imitation of Christ, and the humility that permits the poet to forget himself as an individual and act on behalf of others. In his development of such a multifaceted symbol, Emmanuel follows in the footsteps of the great Catholic poet and dramatist Paul Claudel, starting with a simple, natural image which he enriches with scriptural and theological allusions. Em-

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manuel again recalls the great Metaphysical poets of the Late Renaissance, such as Donne or La Ceppède, in this theological meditation that is at once sensual, intellectual, and emotional, exciting the reader with its rhetorical mastery and intricate analysis. In his Foreword to La Colombe, Jouve makes the daring assertion that, in times of catastrophe, poetry is a greater defence against evil than any political action, because the politician deals only with contemporary events whereas the poet creates a comprehensive vision of human history, thus allowing his generation to understand current events in mythical terms (Col., 16–18). The New Testament account of Pentecost provides the seeds that Emmanuel elaborates into a myth, both personal and universal, of spiritual renewal. In La Colombe, Pentecost signifies liberation, that of society from oppression and of the soul from fear. This liberation results from a free bestowal of grace by God, but one that is called forth by the willing sufferings of a small group of the faithful. For Emmanuel, Pentecost is a celebration of the community, the true Church composed of the living and the dead. Actions speak louder than words, and the reader senses Emmanuel’s concern that words are an inadequate means of expressing either the experience of divine inspiration or the poet’s gratitude to the war martyrs. Even if Emmanuel does not feel he has received the gift of tongues, he has created a type of poetry more capable of reaching a wider audience than the difficult erotic meditations of Tombeau d’Orphée.35 His frequent use of repetition and exclamations create a call to action. His mingling of biblical allusions and contemporary history achieves a simple eloquence that satisfied Occupied France’s thirst for faith in the future. La Liberté guide nos pas [Liberty Guides our Steps] (1945) interprets the Second World War as a key episode in humanity’s progress from servitude to liberation, a vision of human development reminiscent of Victor Hugo’s in La Légende des siècles. In his prefatory essay, Emmanuel challenges Marx’s view of history – a view to which many of his closest Resistance colleagues adhered – on the grounds of its materialism. In his opinion, a Communist revolution would not lead to the liberation of humanity; on the contrary, it would only leave us more vulnerable to repression by concentrating on our physical rather than our spiritual needs. He expresses his hope for a renewal of the French people, in both body and soul, after the frightful alienation caused by the war,36 but he believes that such a renewal requires his generation’s recognition of

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their place in the Judeo-Christian history of sin, redemption, and resurrection. Poetry, which he identifies with “le Chant,” becomes the motivating force for individual freedom and community organization: “Or, si la fleur du langage est le chant, pourquoi ne souhaiter un régime qui soit prêt à se dépasser toujours, la vivante poussée lyrique y stimulant l’esprit d’invention de ses membres, cet enthousiasme exigeant sans lequel le sens du réel manque d’âme?” [Now, if song is the finest manifestation of language, why shouldn’t we wish for a regime always ready to move forward, with the active force of lyricism, the enthusiasm that demands so much and without which reality lacks soul, stimulating the spirit of innovation?] (LG, 11). It is the poet’s duty to help the community understand contemporary events in the context of Christian history and, further, to inspire every citizen to take up his place in that history: “le mouvement poétique entraîne tout dans sa progression, chacun se sent poussé sur le devant de la scène, protagoniste d’une action qui plonge en lui ses racines pour s’épanouir en plein espace historique, à la lumière de l’intelligence universelle des choses: car le héros est en vérité chacun de nous, libre enfin pour le corps à corps avec ses monstres – et pour la route triomphale qui s’ouvre à lui au-delà” [the poetic movement carries along everything in its development, gives everyone the feeling of being thrust onto centre stage, of being the protagonist of an action that takes root to bloom forth in the midst of history, in the light of a universal intelligence of things: because the true hero is in each of us and we are finally free for the head-on battle with our monsters – and for the triumphal road that opens beyond for us] (LG, 16). The exuberance of this preface is echoed in the poetry, some of Emmanuel’s most emotionally charged works of the war years. Emmanuel wrote the twenty-six poems of varying length that compose this volume at different times between 1939 and 1944. He arranges them according to three chronologies: the actual events of the Second World War, the change of the seasons, and the Christian liturgical year. The opening poem, “Temps de la Paix, 1939” [Peace Time, 1939] evokes France’s premonition of war as German troops advance westward across Europe. The remainder of the volume’s first half describes the German Occupation, especially the capture of French cities and the massacre of civilians. The second half of the book is set in June 1944, when the liberation of France had already begun. In terms of the seasons, Emmanuel condenses the years 1941–44 into the time of one winter, unforgettable

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because of its bareness, with winds scouring the city streets and deep layers of snow freezing the countryside. This winter eventually gives way to the warmth and fruitfulness of early summer. The poet adds a mythical dimension to the volume by placing the start of the war in Advent, the traditional Christian period of preparation for Christmas, and the concluding poems at the early summer feast of Pentecost. The volume can also be divided in another way, the first twelve poems evoking the war that already belongs to the past, the final fourteen poems speaking of the future. In the first twelve poems, Emmanuel portrays Occupied France as Judea at the time of Christ’s birth. Germany is ancient Rome, the proud builder of empires that does not realize a Messiah prepares the downfall of this earthly kingdom (“O Allemagne” [O Germany]). He likens deported Jewish children to the Holy Innocents massacred by Herod in his pursuit of the baby Jesus (“Les Saints innocents” [The Holy Innocents]). France becomes the Virgin Mother who comforts her fallen children: La Nuit, Pietà de neige immense au Christ d’ébène voit l’ombre des fusils pointée vers son fils mort l’ombre des meurtriers s’allonge sur la neige (LG, 34) [Night, immense Pietà of snow for Christ made of ebony sees the shadow of guns pointed at her dead son the shadow of murderers stretches over the snow]. The French people play the role of Christ. Their sufferings have prepared them to take up the fight for liberation, which Emmanuel imagines as the rebuilding of cities and churches (“Lamentation pour le temps de l’Avent” [Lamentation for the Season of Advent]). Emmanuel makes a point of the unity of the French people, whether Christians or Jews, whatever their political stance. In the final poem of the first part, “Otages” [Hostages], he expresses his country’s gratitude to the twenty-seven Communists who were held hostage by the Vichy government and were handed over to the Nazis as recompense for the murder of a German officer. Their slaughter in the Breton city of Chateaubriant echoes Christ’s crucifixion and is part of France’s patrimony: Ce sang ne séchera jamais sur notre terre et ces morts abattus resteront exposés

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Nous grincerons des dents à force de nous taire nous ne pleurerons pas sur ces croix renversées. … Ces morts ces simples morts sont notre héritage leurs pauvres corps sanglants resteront indivis Nous ne laisserons pas en friche leur image les vergers fleuriront sur les prés reverdis (LG, 43) [This blood will never dry on our land and these slaughtered dead will remain in our sight We will grind our teeth in our effort to remain silent we will not cry over these overturned crosses. … These dead these simple dead are our only inheritance their poor, bloody bodies will remain our common possession We will not let their image go to waste the orchards will flower in the newly-green meadows]. “Otages” is one of several poems in La Liberté guide nos pas written in stanzas of rhyming alexandrines. Emmanuel uses rhymed verse often when honouring the victims of the war or – in the second half – when celebrating the Holy Spirit. The second half of the volume takes place at Pentecost, the feast of the spirit, of language, and of liberation – and also of the earth’s renewal, when the first summer fruits were communally offered to a providential deity. Emmanuel includes the four poems of La Colombe in this section. Other poems play up the connections between the heavens, humanity, and the earth through pastoral imagery that expresses Emmanuel’s love of the French countryside and his own peasant roots, as in the following stanza from “Hymne de Pentecôte” [Pentecost Hymn]: Mais qui de vous a vu la Colombe? … Le laboureur la voit caresser de son vol la courbe de ce champ qui allaite l’aurore le pâtre aux yeux lointains la voit planer le soir sur les hameaux perdus dans la paix des clarines L’enfant détache cette feuille immaculée pour s’en faire un oiseau vivant qui lui ressemble.

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La lavandière aux draps de vent sourit de voir s’ébattre l’oiseau fou dans la blancheur des linges (LG, 79) [But who among you has seen the Dove? … The plowman sees it caress in its flight the curve of the field that suckles the dawn the shepherd with his faraway gaze sees it glide in the evening sky over the hamlets lost in the peace of the cowbells The child picks the immaculate leaf and makes of it a living bird that resembles him. The laundress whose sheets flap in the wind smiles to see the crazy bird frolicking in the whiteness of her washing]. “Viens, Esprit Créateur! Rends la Parole au monde” [Come, Creator Spirit! Give speech back to the world] calls upon the French people to take up the work of the Holy Spirit at the first Pentecost. If they have the courage of the first disciples to declare themselves witnesses of God, justice will prevail: Qu’il se nomme, et d’un vaste éclair sa ressemblance embrase à l’infini les générations. Au cœur du temps, pilier puissant de la balance où l’histoire pèse leur dû aux nations, Où futur et passé s’équilibrent sans cesse comme à l’épaule un poids en deux parts divisé, L’Arbre humain prend racine en la substance épaisse Pétrie des morts d’hier et de demain mêlés (LG, 81) [Let him say his name, and with a vast stroke of lightning his form lights up the infinite generations of humanity. At the core of time, powerful rod of the scale where history metes out justice to nations, Where future and past constantly balance each other like a weight divided into two parts resting on the shoulder The Human Tree takes root in that thick substance molded from the mingled dead of yesterday and tomorrow].

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Emmanuel is less angry in La Liberté guide nos pas than in Jour de colère or Combats avec tes défenseurs. He no longer speaks dramatically as a prophet but simply, as one who has survived the emotional turmoil of the war and looks forward to the future. In “Lamentation pour le Temps de l’Avent” [Lamentation for Advent] he admits his relief at no longer living in constant fear: J’ai peur. Je n’en peux plus d’assumer tant de Peur et de crier mon faible jour en ses ténèbres (LG, 28) [I am afraid. I am sick of bearing so much Fear and of shouting out my feeble existence in the shadows of Fear]. In “Les Dents serrées” [With Clenched Teeth] he calls upon the possibility of putting aside hatred and making room for hope: Je hais. Ne me demandez pas ce que je hais. Il y a des mondes de mutisme entre les hommes et le ciel veule sur l’abîme, et le mépris des morts. … Mais il y a Le feu sans bords, la soif d’être libres … il y a le sang qui commence à peine à couler il y a la haine et c’est assez pour espérer (LG, 42) [I hate. Don’t ask me what I hate. There are worlds of muteness among men and the spineless sky over the abyss, and the scorn of men. … But there is limitless fire, the enraged thirst for freedom … there is blood that is just beginning to flow there is hatred and that is enough to give us hope].

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As in all his war poetry, Emmanuel acknowledges the war victims, but he does so now without rancour or sarcasm. One of the most surprisingly optimistic pieces of the volume’s second part is an unrhymed sonnet titled “Fort Montluc,” written after a visit to the famous prison in Lyon where Klaus Barbie tortured French soldiers and Resistance fighters. Emmanuel concentrates on an exchange of glances between male prisoners and their families, who come at dusk to catch sight of their loved ones. The prisoners’ hands waving through the cell bars offer the poet a sure sign of victory: Sans geste, nous suivons l’envol des mains captives elles crient vers la mer, et nous pleurons! L’enfant ose un baiser vers vous, hirondelle! longtemps (LG, 64) [Without movement, we follow the sweep of the imprisoned hands they shout toward the sea, and we cry! The child risks a kiss in your direction, little swallow! for such a long time]. Ultimately, Emmanuel shares with many other French poets of the Resistance a desire to celebrate the victory. “Hymne à la France” [Hymn to France], written in twelve-line stanzas of rhymed alexandrines, is dedicated to the Communist poets Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. Sentimental imagery and exclamation bemoan France’s sufferings but also call upon the bruised nation to lead Europe into the future: “Source des nations! tes larmes retenues longtemps, les sens-tu sourdre enfin de toutes parts? … voici: la force des étoiles meut les pierres les hommes et les tours se lèvent dans le vent et liberté! profonde haleine de la terre tu soulèves d’un souffle heureux le firmament (LG, 73) [Fount of nations! You have held back your tears so long, can you feel them gush forth in all directions? … look here: the force of the stars moves stones men and towers stand up in the wind

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and liberty! Earth’s deep respiration you lift the heavens with a happy breath]. Unlike his Communist colleagues in the Resistance, Emmanuel grounds this homage to his country in the Bible. In this hymn, the nation has passed from Advent to Easter, from birth through death to resurrection. Tristesse, ô ma patrie [Sadness, O My Country] (1946) brings together heterogeneous pieces written before, during, and after the war. As in Tombeau d’Orphée and Le Poète et son Christ, there are many poems on Orpheus and the Passion, but now Emmanuel also writes about the alienation of city life, prostitution, and the distortion of language, all subjects that look forward to his Babel of 1952 and Sophia of 1971. The section entitled “Les Loups et le chien” [The Wolves and the Dog], however, deals with a very specific episode of the Occupation: the massacre of Resistance fighters by German troops in the Vercors region of southeastern France in 1944. In his Autobiographies, Emmanuel writes of his response to this event: “Ce que je pris le plus à coeur, ce fut l’organisation des secours au Vercors. Je fus des premiers à visiter charniers et ruines dont le spectacle passait l’imagination. A mon retour, muni de documents, je décidai d’aller en Suisse intéresser la Croix Rouge au Vercors” [I devoted my best efforts to organizing help for Vercors. I was one of the first to examine the death houses and ruins, a spectacle which defied the imagination. When I returned, armed with documentation, I decided to go to Switzerland and try to interest the Red Cross in Vercors] (Aut., 281). By the summer of 1944, Emmanuel was writing a daily, and then weekly, newspaper for the Drôme region (Aut., 274–5). This early experience in journalism accounts, in part, for the frank tone of the poems of this volume, which resemble a series of newspaper articles reporting the Nazi war crimes in Vercors and Vassieux. The titles of these poems – “Café de la Treille” [The Arbor Café], “Grotte de la Luire” [Luire Cave], “Dépôt de Cerceuils” [Coffin Depot], “Le Mur d’Amiante” [The Asbestos Wall] – openly indicate their subject matter: the murder of Resistance fighters by drunken Nazi soldiers in a local café, the imprisonment of French resisters in local caves, and the oven where French were burned alive. Any allusions to the Bible are obvious. The French people re-enact Christ’s crucifixion; the war-torn cities mournfully receive their dead children in imitation of the Virgin Mother accepting the Saviour’s body:

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Des croix, des croix le long des routes. Pietà sombre, Vassieux raidie n’a plus de pleurs pour ses fils morts (TP, 92)37 [Crosses, crosses all along the roads. Somber Pietà, Vassieux, stiffened in pain, has no more tears for her dead sons]. In place of irony and exclamation, Emmanuel presents, with visual accuracy and extensive detail, scenes horrible enough in themselves to arouse anger and compassion. Here is his description of a mass burial in “Dépôt de cerceuils”: J’ai vu ces caisses trop hâtives, si mal jointes que la pudeur des pauvres morts doit en frémir: les pluies les sourdes pluies d’automne les déforment déjà l’herbe pourrit dans les fentes (TP, 97) [I have seen these crates, too hastily made, so poorly put together that the modesty of these poor dead must be shocked by them: the rains, the muffled rains of autumn, deform them grass is already rotting in their cracks]. As Emmanuel explains in “Vercors and Le Mur d’Amiante,” he feels obliged to let events speak for themselves and to avoid pointless eloquence. He acknowledges that the horrors of war transcend the power of language: J’ai vu ce qui n’a pas de nom. Crier d’horreur à quoi bon, tant ici l’horreur passe les bornes? Me taire, simplement, et voir (TP, 92) [I’ve seen what cannot be named. What good would it do to scream in horror? horror here has gone beyond all limits Let me simply be silent and see]. … Ce qui doit être dit nul ne le saurait dire avec des mots si nus qu’ils ne trahissent point (TP, 99)

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[No one could say what needs to be said with words so bare that they do not betray the truth]. Emmanuel’s experience during the war was essential to his poetic development. It caused him to re-evaluate both his relationship to the community and the possibility of poetry’s contributing to communal well-being. While recognizing the limits of poetry, Emmanuel does come to believe that poetry can regenerate the community. Such a high goal for poetry can only be attained through eloquent language, which sometimes requires the use of traditional poetic forms, that is, stanzas written in alexandrines and with rhymes. But eloquence also demands an easily comprehensible language that draws its imagery from daily experience, nature, and well-known biblical myths. Such myths link the war poems to Emmanuel’s epic treatments of the contemporary human condition in Sodome and Babel.

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3 The Biblical Epics: Sodome, Babel, and Jacob

Twentieth-century French poets, beginning with Claudel and Péguy in the 1900s and 1910s, frequently composed long poems. Some of these poems qualify as epic poetry, a genre that flourished in the French middle ages and never completely disappeared from French literature. William Calin, in A Muse for Heroes: Nine Centuries of the Epic in France, studies the epics of three twentieth-century poets: the Nobel laureate St John Perse, the Communist Louis Aragon, and Pierre Emmanuel. In Calin’s view, Perse’s Anabase and Vents, Aragon’s Brocéliande and Le Fou d’Elsa, and Emmanuel’s Tombeau d’Orphée and Babel all demonstrate the common and timeless characteristics of the epic: “that it is normally in verse, of some length, in the narrative mode, fictional but based on history or legend; that it treats on a grand scale a martial, heroic subject, manifests artistic coherence because it concentrates on a single central hero or event of national significance, contains stylized ‘episodes’ [that is, descents to the underworld], and is grounded in the supernatural.”1 Emmanuel reveals his penchant for storytelling in Le Poète et son Christ, Tombeau d’Orphée, and Le Poète fou, as well as in two of the war volumes, Combats avec tes défenseurs and La Liberté guide nos pas. Three long poems based on the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Genesis – Sodome (1944), Babel (1952), and Jacob (1971)2 – are clearly conceived as epics. In them, Emmanuel consciously returns to the Christian epic tradition most powerfully exemplified by Dante’s Divina Commedia and Milton’s Paradise Lost. They are, to my knowledge, the only such Christian epics composed anywhere in the Western world in the twentieth century. All three are verse narratives set in biblical times which recount the story of pivotal events in human history and of the heroes who undertook quests on

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behalf of God and humanity; they also constantly bring together the worlds of the Bible and contemporary European history. The Christian epic is well suited to Emmanuel’s imagination, which views history as a cycle of falls and redemptions centred on Christ. The long narrative also gives Emmanuel the opportunity to display his talent in description and dramatic dialogue. The earliest evidence of Emmanuel’s interest in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is the poem “Châtiment de Sodome” [Sodom’s Punishment] in Elégies,3 his first publication by the Cahiers des Poètes Catholiques of Brussels in 1940. In 1943 he published, as a single issue of Les Cahiers du Rhône, Prière d’Abraham4 [Abraham’s Prayer], two long poems, which he then reprinted in the 1944 edition of Sodome with the titles “Prière sur Sodome” [Prayer over Sodom] and “Les Filles exposées” [The Daughters Exposed]. In his preface to the 1971 re-edition of Sodome, Emmanuel describes Sodome as a mythical work like Tombeau d’Orphée.5 Rita Vistica sees a relationship between the pillar of salt of the Sodom story and the “Ame-statue” [soul-statue] that opens Le Poète et son Christ (PC, 13), both images evoking the notion of the “isolating impenetrability of the soul refusing his presence to God and man.”6 Sodome contains Emmanuel’s first major meditation on the city, perhaps because, as Albert Béguin notes, for Emmanuel, the cities of Europe and their inhabitants bore the wrath of God during the Second World War, as did Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis: “Ces cités pécheresses et ces décombres de leur ruine, ces hommes de la louange, de l’exil, de la captivité, c’est Israël, mais c’est aussi les nations de nos guerres; c’est Sodome et c’est Paris, ce sont les ruines de Sodome et les ruines de Berlin” [These sinful cities and the debris of their ruins, these men of praise, of exile, of captivity, they are Israel but also the nations of our wars; this is Sodom and this is Paris, these are the ruins of Sodom and the ruins of Berlin].7 Sodome also contains Emmanuel’s first elaborated vision of the Fall, the event that, in his view, set history in motion.8 In the attention it gives to Adam and Eve and the origins of sin, Sodome recalls the great English epic, Milton’s Paradise Lost, which seeks to “justify the ways of God to men,”9 a goal shared by Emmanuel. Sodome is based on the story recounted in Genesis 18–19 of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain because of the inhabitants’ homosexuality. Twenty-first-century readers who are familiar with the history of the contemporary civil rights movements should not assume that Sodome is either a political statement or a condemnation of homosexuality. Rather,

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Emmanuel indicates in this poem his willingness to engage with the important intellectual issues of his day. As Stephen Schloesser explains in Jazz Age Catholicism, the Catholic Revival of 1919–33 sparked the conversion of many French artists who were homosexuals – André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and Julien Green, to name only the most prominent – and these conversions led Catholic thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s to address the ways in which homosexuality was in accord with Catholic doctrine.10 Less interested in doctrine than contemporary philosophers, Emmanuel seeks in the biblical story of Sodom the explanation of the twentieth-century psychological phenomenon of alienation. Emmanuel recasts Sodom as a symbol of humanity’s separation from God and man’s refusal to accept his dual condition as flesh and spirit. The transgression of the men of Sodom, who attack the angels of the Lord and refuse the love of women, is not so much a perversion as a dangerous inversion, a retreat from others into the self. For Emmanuel, such narcissism destroys communal life and leads to spiritual stagnation. He calls the sin of Sodom “péché de nostalgie, rêve de fusion, d’anéantissement, dans un état anté-originel de beauté” [sin of nostalgia, dream of fusion, of obliteration, in a state of beauty that existed before original sin] (S, 7). Sodom also represents the contemporary city, the scene of communal crimes where, given the coercive force of the crowd, just individuals find themselves helpless to combat evil.11 On a more personal level, the poet again struggles against his obsession with the past. The myth of Sodom, like the Orpheus myth, provides a new opportunity for self-analysis and, thus, for emotional liberation. Sodome is carefully structured to help the reader understand the complex threads of the story. It opens with a dedicatory poem and verse prologue, and concludes with a short poem titled “Final” [Final]. Emmanuel divides the poem into two main parts, simply identified as I and II, each comprising sections of shorter poems related by theme. Outlines in prose, called “arguments,” precede both parts I and II and identify the central characters as well as explain their actions. These arguments also clarify the highly hermetic symbolism. This structure is the first example of Emmanuel’s incorporation of prose into his poetry, a method that becomes standard in his future works. Sodome opens with “Dédicace d’Orphée” [Orpheus’s Dedication], a sonnet that functions as the traditional invocation to the muse in epic poetry. Orpheus is a fitting muse because he dared to enter Hades, as Emmanuel now dares to plumb the origins of sin. Like a tree whose roots

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plunge deep into the earth, Orpheus’s adventure resounds in the human psyche and reassures Emmanuel in his undertaking: Tel l’arbre aux pas profonds, aveugle de murmures secoue dans le sommeil ses nocturnes verdures où les soleils défunts mûrissent oubliés (S, 13) [Like the tree with deep-reaching movements, blind to murmurs shakes in its sleep its nocturnal greenery where dead suns ripen forgotten]. The two poems of the prologue, “Éveil de Dieu” [God’s Awakening] and “Éveil de l’homme” [Man’s Awakening], imagine the Creation. Both matter and God exist before time in a state of potentiality. Matter appears as a black hole without sound, a mass of earth, air, and water that labours in childbirth like a womb: une eau terriblement immobile, vivante d’une vie sans un souffle et farouche en travail dans l’épaisseur d’inexistence où se concentre avec une lenteur massive d’infinis le poids du Temps avant les temps (S, 17) [a water fearfully immobile, living with a life without breath and fierce in labour within the thickness of non-existence where with the massive sluggishness of infinity the weight of Time before time is concentrated]. God, “Celui qui S’ignore encore” [He who does not yet know Himself] (S, 17), does not understand his power. Creation takes place as a spontaneous act of love, as God’s gaze responds to the desire of matter. Emmanuel suggests that all could have gone well if God had stopped after the formation of the physical world, since harmony reigned in the beginning. God destroys this perfection when his hands model the first man. Drawing upon the biblical notion that man is made in the divine image, the poet stresses the spiritual paradox of such a situation: at once similar but distinct from God, Adam is cursed with longing to be one with the Father, who has forever separated himself from his human progeny:

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Et l’homme auquel dieu retire à jamais son Image ravie à l’infini des larmes, … dieu l’unit éternellement à son Image par la courbe d’un ciel étrange sur les âges par l’unique rayon de deux regards mêlés (S, 20) [And man, from whom god withdraws forever His Image, an image ravished forever by tears, … god unites him eternally to his Image by the curve of a strange sky above the ages, by the unique light beam from two mingled glances]. Part I retells the events of Genesis from Abraham’s encounter with the angels at Mamre through to the destruction of Sodom (Genesis: 18–19). Emmanuel greatly fleshes out the biblical description, which simply states that three angels appeared to Abraham at his tent. In the initial pieces, “Aube” [Dawn], “En vue de la cité” [In Sight of the City], “Belle Immonde Fermée” [Beautiful Sordid Closed], and “Mamré” [Mamre], Abraham is a shepherd who alternates his glance between the peace of nature and the base sensuality of Sodom. The three angels suggest the purity of Eden before the Fall. In “Sara, mère des hommes” [Sara, Mother of Mankind], Abraham at first gives in to despair as he realizes the impossibility of recapturing this innocence, as well as the senselessness of begetting the chosen people: Quel homme né supporterait ce monde pur où le regard d’Adam intact et bleu repose? … Les pères engendrant leurs fils, les fils leur père sans cesse l’homme naît pour renaître sans fin, et la Douleur croît d’âge en âge, unique mère d’une race toujours plus nombreuse et traquée (S, 37) [What man born could tolerate this pure world where the intact and blue gaze of Adam resides? … Fathers engender their sons, sons their father endlessly man is born to be reborn without end,

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and Pain, the only mother of a race ever more numerous and hunted, increases through the ages]. He is saved by the arrival of Sara, the first example of “L’Eve éternelle” [the eternal Eve] (S, 23), whom he accepts in love. By doing so, Abraham avoids the sin of Adam and takes on his imperfect condition. He becomes fully human, both flesh and spirit, the first just man in the eyes of God. Like the Abraham of Genesis, Emmanuel’s Abraham demands that God treat Sodom justly. He blames God for the overreaching ambitions of the Sodomites, who long only for the perfection Adam lost. Speaking as an advocate for the city and as a prefiguration of the crucified Christ, Abraham complains that life is too dearly bought: j’ose me repentir d’être né de Tes doigts de sentir à mon flanc la blessure suprême qu’effrayé de me voir parfait Tu me portas (S, 52) [I dare to rue my birth from Your hands to feel in my side the supreme wound that You gave me in your fear of seeing me perfect]. God answers by according Abraham a vision of Eden. In “Prière sur Abraham” [Prayer over Abraham], the densest section of Part I, Abraham relives Adam’s fall. As in Milton’s Paradise Lost,12 Adam and Eve experience happiness and wholeness by making love.13 Their embrace becomes the Tree of Life: Arbre, ô couple endormi debout durant l’amour ses deux fûts embrassés il commande l’étreinte il est calme il est vaste il est limpide et bleu il est plus nécessaire en ce jardin que dieu (S, 54) [Tree, o sleeping couple standing during love with its two trunks joined it controls this embrace it is calm it is vast it is clear and blue it is more necessary in this garden than God]. But Adam cannot be satisfied by Eve. He is his own tempter, and he eats the fruit as a gesture of his refusal to live with the divided condition God has imposed upon him. He sins further because he lacks the courage to

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confront the Creator’s anger and humbly accept his punishment in imitation of Christ on the cross: Eût-il, plus prompt que dieu dans le panique désarroi de la Colère avancé d’un seul pas vers l’Image, … eût-il vêtu de Christ sa nudité dernière avant que dieu l’ait pu maudire! un seul regard d’infini repentir alors l’eût accompli (S, 56) [If only, faster than god, in the panicked confusion of Anger, he had taken one single step toward the Image, … If only he had put on Christ’s final nudity before god could curse him! a single sign of infinite repentance would have resolved the matter]. By reliving Adam’s sin, Abraham learns that the Sodomites will be saved only if they open themselves to woman. He prays that God grant these sinners an awareness of their duality.14 This awareness would lead them to break out of their narcissism, repent and, through suffering, imitate Christ: Si Tu leur révélais leur Image éternelle … peut-être alors l’entendraient-ils Ta voix perdue venue de loin, d’un temps où les attend Celui qu’ils doivent pas à pas nommer de leur blessure, Seul Nom parfait car tout se raccorde en Sa Nuit … Nom éternellement blessé, vrai Nom de l’homme Christ (S, 59) [If You revealed their eternal Image to them … perhaps then they would hear Your lost voice that comes from far away, from a time when The One awaits them

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The One they must name with every ounce of their suffering The only perfect Name because everything comes together in His Night Name eternally wounded, true Name of man Christ]. Emmanuel remains faithful to the chronology of events of Genesis. In Genesis 18, Abraham questions God about the number of good men it would take to save the city of Sodom, and God answers that he will save the city for five just men. In “Prière sur Sodome,” God also answer’s Abraham’s plea for justice, but ironically – “‘Qu’ils se voient donc en Christ,’ dit le Seigneur” [“‘Well, let them see themselves in Christ,’ says the Lord”] (S, 60) – implying that justice requires their destruction just as mankind’s redemption required the Crucifixion. As in Genesis 19, the scene moves from Abraham to Lot. “Les Filles de Lot” [Lot’s Daughters] concentrates on the virgin daughters Lot offers to the Sodomites to prevent them from raping the angels. These daughters resemble Eve at the moment of her creation. They are “glaise glissante sous les doigts” [clay slipping through the fingers] (S, 61); “plus chastes que l’éveil de l’aube” [more chaste than the awakening of dawn] (S, 62). Pictured as “ce jardin fermé … clôture bienheureuse” [this enclosed garden … blessed enclosure] (S, 64), they also recall the Virgin Mary, the hortus inclusus of medieval iconography. By making love to these virgins, the men of Sodom would be like gods, as Lot argues, comparing his daughters to Leda of Greek mythology, who is ravished by Zeus in the guise of a swan: Le grand ciel écartant de l’Ile tes genoux s’incline sur tes seins frissonnant, et plonge son plumage sacré dans le sillon du songe. Il s’ébroue, et la chair profonde à son désir est une eau douce au cygne ardent qui prend le large (S, 65) [The great sky spreading your legs from the Island bends over your shuddering breasts and plunges its sacred plumage into the furrow of dream It shakes itself, and the flesh deepening in response to desire is like sweet water to the ardent swan that flees to the open sea].

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In the six pieces of “Les Filles Exposées,” Lot becomes the main character. He pleads with the city’s men to spare the angels sent by God to punish the sinful city. The Sodomites are both narcissistic and lacking in individuality, as Emmanuel suggests by presenting them in an indistinguishable mass that speaks with one voice. The eyes of the Sodomites, blinded as if by cataracts, cannot tolerate heaven’s gaze. They seek in the angels, “Hommes de plaisir pur” [Men of pure pleasure] (S, 73), a mirror of their own sensuality, which they flaunt by their lewd dress and overpowering perfumes (S, 70). Like Narcissus, they long to penetrate this mirror and reunite their fragmented beings (S, 74–5). Lot asks them to satiate their desires on his daughters rather than on the heavenly messengers, to prove that they respect the boundaries God fixed upon love when he created two sexes. He addresses them as “frères” [brothers], stressing the universality not only of sin but also of the human need for an absolute. He and they together form a community of the spiritually hungry, “cherchant l’Autre en eux sans le savoir” [who seek the Other in themselves without realizing it] (S, 77). The following poems, grouped under the title “Les Hommes devant l’Ange” [The Men before the Angel], present the Sodomites’ defence. They argue that love between man and woman only increases their sense of alienation from God. Through their attack on the angels, they reclaim their right to perfection and immortality: Ange tu es l’Epée qui garde l’Origine … Nous avons déserté le ventre de la femme non point pour inventer de nouvelles douleurs ni pour jeter au ciel un édifice infâme de gestes lacérants qui tentent le malheur Mais pour étreindre enfin l’unique ressemblance pour atteindre à la roue parfaite du silence (S, 93) [Angel you are the Sword that guards the Origin … We have deserted woman’s womb not to invent new sufferings or to throw against the sky a vile edifice made of cutting gestures that tempt unhappiness

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But to embrace at last that unique resemblance to reach the perfect wheel of silence]. Out of pity for their suffering, the angel marks them with the sign of destruction (S, 95). In the dramatic end of Part I, Christ’s face appears in the sky in a final attempt to redeem the Sodomites. Not only do they reject Christ but, in a gesture that exteriorizes their masochistic instincts, they immolate themselves. They become the fire and brimstone that annihilates Sodom. Part II condenses Lot’s escape from Sodom into a single night in the city of Zoar, “ville de sommeil et de mémoire” [city of sleep and memory] (S, 109), where he must relive the sins of Sodom before he can reach the sea, symbol of liberation from the past. In Emmanuel’s interpretation of the pillar of salt, Lot’s wife represents her husband’s emotional unwillingness to leave the city: “La femme à tes côtés mime sans le comprendre / le geste obscur de la statue enfouie en toi” [The woman at your side pantomimes without understanding it / the obscure gesture of the statue hidden inside you] (S, 114). Most of Part II is Lot’s dream. As Eva Kushner puts it, Lot must “revivre jusqu’à l’écoeurement différents épisodes du péché de Sodome … De basfonds en bas-fonds, en une descente quasi-marine, le héros finit par toucher le plus profond du péché de Sodome, et de sa propre solitude” [Lot must relive ad nauseum different episodes of Sodom’s sin … Sinking ever lower, as if he descends into the sea, the hero finally touches the depths of Sodom’s sin, and of his own solitude].15 In “La Chasse en rêves” [Dream Chase], Lot dreams of a prostitute, bearing his face, who roams the burning city in a desperate search for lovers. The following poems, “D’un lieu bas” [From a Low-lying Place] imagine the razed city as a graveyard. Here Lot discovers corpses surprised by death in lascivious poses. These dead mirror his soul, reminding him of the reconciliation of body and spirit falsely promised by pleasure that has been emptied of love. In “Métropole du mal” [Metropolis of Evil], Lot is carried back to Sodom a third time, now to witness the city’s fall. In this vision of the end of things, animal imagery predominates: Emmanuel’s familiar dove becomes a vulture; the Beast of the Apocalypse dislodges survivors from their dwellings; centipedes and ants conquer the earth. Their victory is accompanied by a chorus of crashing buildings, the screeching of humans in pain, and hearts pounding in fear. Lot must acknowledge not

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only his connections to the city, the only community he has known, but also the pernicious influence of the city on the individual: “Cette cité est le cancer qui me dévore / son feu sans fond creuse ma face de damné” [This city is the cancer that devours me / its endless fire hollows out this condemned face of mine] (S, 133). Sodom, the prototype of every city, offers the impossible alternatives of complicity in evil or moral solitude. The final episode that takes place in Zoar, “Au Christus venit” [Come, O Christ], shows Lot as a contemporary urbanite, a commuter caught between life and death, a modern re-enactor of the dilemma of the souls of the newly deceased of Greek mythology, who have not yet crossed the Styx from life to the underworld. Sodom is a city of night, alienation, fatigue – a track for trains going nowhere: L’ennui musicien, sur le clavier des gares prélude à la mélancolie des infinis: les trains, qui font trembler les vitres des banlieues sifflent en traversant les longs tunnels du songe, tandis qu’au loin l’alto des rails à l’unisson prolonge, jusqu’au soir prolonge la détresse de quelle âme au-delà de son dieu en-allée (S, 144) [The musician named boredom plays on the station keyboard prelude to the melancholy of the infinite: the trains that shake the windows of the suburbs whistle as they pass through the long tunnels of dreams, while in the distance the alto of the rails that sing in unison prolongs, into the evening prolongs the distress of whatever soul has gone beyond its god found along the path]. Lot finally praises the angel’s vengeance upon Sodom, calling the sword an instrument of God’s love (S, 142). For Lot, the second just man after Abraham, the flaming sword begins his own resurrection by cauterizing his wound, which is guilt, thus allowing his blood to flow anew. “L’Arbre de Chant” [Tree of Song] resolves the conflicts of the poem. Lot’s blood, linked to the blood of the Saviour on the cross, offers the possibility of humanity’s recuperation of the Father through Christ. The cross itself, “Arbre de vie” [Tree of Life] (S, 155), overshadows the tree of Adam and Eve’s sin. The final evocation of Christ as “la Parole” [the Word] (S, 156) leads to a vision of the reunion of man and woman. Woman will

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serve as man’s conscience; man will express this conscience through song, the human response to the divine Word: Tu chantes! la Parole est ce glorieux corps qu’a mûri le regret de ta double nature (S, 156) [You sing! the Word is this glorious body that regret over your double nature has brought to fruition]. In “Chemins du voyageur” [The Traveller’s Paths] and “Toi, ville ou harpe ou mer” [You, City or Harp or Sea], Lot must undergo a final dissociation from the past, leaving the ashes of the burned city in the desert sands as he travels from Zoar to the sea and to forgetfulness. Although Lot finds peace, Emmanuel does not promise any definitive resolution to future generations. The conclusion, “Final,” reminds the reader that the human soul cannot long remain content. The angel’s sword is poised above all of us, ready for the time when a new Sodom arises to challenge the heavens: Seul, l’Ange n’est jamais absous étant l’Epée, le squelette eternel de l’absurde Présence et l’Oeil rouillé de la Colère sur les eaux (S, 180) [Alone, the Angel is never absolved because he is the Sword, The eternal skeleton of the absurd Presence And the rusted Eye of Anger over the waters]. Approaching Sodome as an epic resolves several problems of interpretation. Early critics read the poem as a recreation of Greek or Christian myths similar to Tombeau d’Orphée. For Jean Onimus, Sodome both explores and caricatures the androgyne myth,16 while Kushner sees it as Emmanuel’s final collective myth, which, like war poetry, investigates a shared human experience.17 Yet, Sodome gives much more importance to the stories of the individual heroes, Abraham and Lot, than to the city. Their stories correspond to those of Greek, Latin, and medieval epic heroes, such as Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante. All undertake quests, interact with the gods, penetrate dangerous realms, and return as victors. The pattern of Sodome most closely follows that of the Divina Commedia because both poems end with the hero being granted a beatific vision. In

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the case of Sodome, Lot sees Christ’s face emerge from the ruined city. And, like Dante in the final cantos of the Paradiso, Lot experiences redemption both as individual and as a figura, or type, of every man.18 Critics have either found fault with or attempted to justify the jumble of imagery found in Sodome, from Greek myth, the scriptures, recent history, and even the sciences.19 Multilayered imagery of this sort is commonplace in the Christian epic, which accepts the figural tradition of biblical exegesis. This was also Dante’s method of constructing the Commedia. Emmanuel, like Dante, sees no contradiction or confusion in bringing together disparate realms of literature, religious writing, and current events because, like Dante, he believes in the unity of history, a worldview he expresses in Sodome. Like the greatest epic poetry, Sodome tells an exciting story. Lot’s escape from Sodom in the beginning of Part II, where the angel uproots him from the city’s ruins and guides him through flames and falling ash, is as dramatic as Aeneas’s escape from Troy in Book II of the Aeneid. The lurid dead whom Lot encounters in the city’s dark and suffocating foundations are drawn as realistically as the damned of Dante’s Inferno. Each of Emmanuel’s characters speaks with an individual voice. Abraham the shepherd uses the simple vocabulary of the Psalms; God answers Abraham with irony; Lot utters the single word “Frères.” The angels do not speak, but appear from beginning to end with swords, ambiguous symbols of their dual roles as agents of both punishment and redemption. The Sodomites express themselves with animal noises, shrieks of anger, or grunts of pleasure. Although the poem is principally concerned with the heroes’ adventures, the initial and final poems explain the theological issues – sin, guilt, the soul’s role in redemption – which underlie the action. Finally, Emmanuel writes in the traditional sermo gravis of the epic, the high style appropriate for great deeds and heroes. The second of the biblical epics, Babel, was published seven years after Sodome, in 1951. Emmanuel himself wrote the best introduction to Babel in L’Ouvrier de la onzième heure [The Worker of the Eleventh Hour], the second volume of his Autobiographies (1953). Here he describes his flirtation with Communism during the war, his association with the charismatic Communist poet Aragon, his trip to Eastern Europe as a journalist in 1947 and, finally, his rupture with the French Communist party, which he came to regard as too authoritarian in its pressure on French intellectuals and too subservient to Russia (Aut., 323–94). This adventure as a “fel-

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low traveller” with the Communists had profound consequences for Emmanuel’s career, creating great animosity between him and some of the most influential French writers of the 1940s, but also generating Emmanuel’s lifelong commitment to the freedom of East European intellectuals. The central theme of Babel is totalitarianism: its origins, its effect on the individual and the collectivity, and the possibilities for liberation from such regimes.20 The poem opens with a prose section on the future tyrant: Je vis un homme poser la main sur la carte du monde. Couvrant l’Europe de sa paume, il souriait. “C’est bien petit” (BA, 11)21 [I saw a man place his hand on a map of the world. Covering Europe with his palm, he smiled. “It’s awfully small”]. Emmanuel has in mind all the European dictators the twentieth century has known – Hitler, Franco, Stalin – but, above all, the Marxist dictatorships that reached the height of power in Europe after the Second World War. At a more general level, he is interested in why totalitarian regimes have proliferated in the twentieth century, a period of secularism during which humanity threw off the supposed shackles of religious authority. In L’Ouvrier de la onzième heure he asks, “Comment l’homme du XXe siècle, si fier d’avoir conquis son autonomie et de se dire enfin majeur, en est-il venu, sitôt libre, à la plus oppressive idolâtrie que le monde ait connue depuis vingt siècles?” [How could twentieth-century man, so proud of having won his autonomy and finally reaching adulthood, become prey to the most oppressive idolatry the world has known for twenty centuries?] (Aut., 357–8). This confusion in the political structure of the contemporary world is reflected in contemporary language, which Emmanuel describes as at once abstract and contradictory, an accurate indication of the shutdown of the imagination and modern humanity’s inability to love – or to feel comfortable with – nature. The story of Babel found in Genesis, because of its associations with revolt, tyranny, condemned cities, dispersion, and language, serves as an appropriate mythical canvas for this portrait of mid-twentieth century Europe. As in the war poems, Babel gives way to Pentecost in the final third of the poem. Here Emmanuel evokes the end of totalitarianism and the emergence of a true community reunited in language, the rebirth of what Kushner terms

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“‘l’homme intérieur’ capable de résister à toutes les agonies” [the “inner man” capable of resisting every anguish].22 Babel is divided into five sections: “L’Avènement” [The Advent], which relates the circumstances of Babel’s creation; “Le Bâtisseur” [The Builder], the story of the tower’s construction; “L’Orage sous la terre” [Storm Under Ground], the tyrant’s reign; “Commencement de l’homme” [The Beginning of Man], the first stages of communal revolt; and “La Chute de Babel” [The Fall of Babel]. Emmanuel alternates poems of varying lengths and forms with extensive prose commentaries spoken by a “Récitant” [Reciter], the poem’s narrator, who purports to have lived this experience as a member of the oppressed multitude. His voice dominates much of the verse as well. The “Récitant” is joined by several other speakers – the King (also called the Prince), the Shepherd, and Christ. Babel begins in an atmosphere of panic. The “Récitant,” an inhabitant of an unspecified modern European city, lives through the end of Western civilization. As he tries to escape the panicked crowds, he kills those who block his path, only to find himself crushed by a printing press that squeezes out his blood in a gushing cataract (BA, 12). This deluge carries him back to the origins of humanity. The Reciter imagines himself as a grain of sand in the deserts of Asia after the Flood of Genesis. As Kushner notes, this period after the Flood is the golden age,23 a moment when all forces – human, natural, and divine – exist in harmony. Having vented his anger on his creatures during some unspecified past, God now acts benevolently. The earth is sand and salt but holds seeds of life. Love between man and woman connects the couple to nature: Hommes et femmes nus font le vin de la nuit. Le plaisir dans la molle empreinte du déluge Est bon: et l’homme sent la terre qui répond à son étreinte sous la femme (BA, 23) [Men and women, nude, make night wine. Pleasure, in the soggy imprint of the flood Is good: and man feels the earth, underneath woman, Respond to his embrace]. As in Genesis, all humans at first speak the same language, which is intuitive and sensual rather than rational and abstract:

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un verger de langage pour tous, une pêche miraculeuse pour tous, … un vocable plaisant aux narines, – leur nom pulpeux comme un coeur (BA, 28) [an orchard of language for everyone, a miraculous peach for everyone, … A sweet-smelling word, – their name Full of pulp like a heart]. This peaceful state lasts only briefly because, as humans begin to think and question the deity, they come to fear the world around them, especially at night. They build cities to protect themselves from both the sun and the darkness, and choose a king to order the chaos they have created. In this king’s hands, the city changes into an inescapable prison. It becomes the base of the tower the tyrant will build as a monument to his pride and as a challenge to the heavens. The tower constructed in “Le Bâtisseur” resembles the totalitarian universe of Orwell’s 1984. It is a factory where endless, monotonous work has destroyed the conscience, and a laboratory where automatons carry out the King’s experiments. Newspapers and megaphones blare forth the King’s official doctrine. Having reduced his subjects to matter, the tyrant constructs a tower that embodies their materialism: a smooth block of granite with no rough edges, a sterile diamond whose radiance outshines the sunlight. The King controls everything and everyone except for one shepherd, who lives high on a mountain, and whose flute sings of beauty, love, and the human need for God. Since the King cannot lure the “pâtre” [shepherd] into the city, he climbs the mountain to meet him. In a restaging of the devil’s temptation of Christ in the desert, he asks the shepherd first to serve him, then to speak to the people of religion in incomprehensible terms and, finally, to perform a liturgy celebrating his, the King’s, divinity. Unable to conquer the Shepherd, the King crucifies him: Ils l’ont lié Au dernier pin. Le sang de l’arbre inonde l’homme, Celui de l’homme panse l’arbre agonisant (BA, 129)

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[They bound him To the last pine. The tree’s blood inundates the man, That of the man dresses the agonizing tree’s wounds]. With the death of the last singer, the King has removed every obstacle to his hatred. He vents the full force of tyranny on his mute, troglodytic subjects through war, forced labour, and threats of starvation. In Genesis, God strikes Babel down from the heavens. In “L’Orage sous la terre,” salvation must come from within the city through a combination of human and divine actions. In this third section of Babel, Christ, like Odysseus in Ithaca, enters the gates as a beggar to proclaim himself the defender of the vanquished people against the King. The King, not content with absolute power, has herded his subjects into death camps. The Reciter, for his part, opens a banned text, “le Livre” [the Book], that is, the Bible, and rediscovers the idea of freedom through his readings of the sacred words of the gospels. Although he is arrested by the tyrant’s soldiers and tortured for reading the forbidden book, the blood that moves again in his heart presages an outpouring of desire from the hearts of the suppressed masses. This blood will ultimately become a flood that undermines Babel’s foundations. In “Le Commencement de l’homme” Christ celebrates “La Messe des Ténèbres” [The Mass of Darkness] (BA, 219–30) as the tyrant’s victims, liberated from silence, take up the dead Shepherd’s song. This song brings down Babel and, in the final short episode, “La Chute de Babel” [The Fall of Babel], the King, now a grain of sand as was the “Récitant” in the poem’s introduction, feels himself sucked into the desert of time, all trace of his passage through history eradicated. Emmanuel models the King, or Prince, on the condemned angel in the opening of Victor Hugo’s La Fin de Satan [The End of Satan], another penetrator of the skies who, however high he rises, cannot glimpse the divinity.24 In Babel the King builds an ever-ascending tower to vanquish the power of nature and overshadow the sun, which symbolizes the eye of God. This ruler is also the incarnation of revolt, like Lucifer, Milton’s Satan, or the men of Sodome. Even in the poem’s final lines, as he envisages the end of his kingdom, the King asserts: “Je suis Dieu de mes dieux le soleil est mon coeur” [I am God of my gods the sun is my heart] (BA, 291). Yet there is nothing mysterious or even exceptional in the King’s character. As in the war poems, such as “Je me suis reconnu,” Emmanuel defines tyranny as ordinary evil run amok.

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The King first appears as a dreaming child: “La tête reposant sur le ciel des Idées / Un dur enfant écoute naître son orgueil” [His head resting on the sky of Ideas / A tough child listens to his pride take form] (BA, 37). His pride is simply an intensified form of the general human desire to equal God. As the Reciter explains in a prose passage, rather than finding it necessary to conquer the frightened nomads surrounding him in the desert of the poem’s opening, the King gets invited into the city by potential subjects willing to go to any length to quell their anxieties: Quand il parut, le besoin d’adorer était si fort qu’il en fut surpris luimême. Mais l’espérance des multitudes était en lui: il devint Dieu pour y répondre, et prisionnier de sa divinité (BA, 62) [When he appeared, the need to adore something was so strong that it surprised even him. But the multitudes had placed their hopes in him: He responded to them by becoming God, and prisoner of his divinity]. Through the King, Emmanuel suggests that all humanity bears the responsibility for the success of a dictator, because modern societies cannot tolerate the burdens of freedom. The tyrant is ultimately unimpressive. His sadism, Emmanuel infers, results from his boredom with playing God and his loneliness: Le Roi connut la monotonie d’une puissance sans bornes. Sous ses yeux, à perte de vue, ondulait un désert de dos courbés (BA, 66) [The King experienced the monotony of endless power. He gazed, as far as the eye can see, upon an undulating desert of bowed backs]. He cannot convince, only coerce, as his unproductive debates with the Shepherd demonstrate. Once Christ enters the poem in “L’Orage sous la terre,” the tyrant fades away, and his power manifests itself only in his henchmen’s routine acts of violence. “Le Pâtre” or “le berger” [the shepherd], the King’s adversary in the poem’s first two parts, is modelled after King David, the psalmist. At home in nature, he tends a flock of stars and speaks for the human com-

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munity, even recognizing the tyrant as his brother (BA, 116). Before the battle between the Shepherd and the King, Emmanuel suggests, the Shepherd actually represents the positive side of the tyrant’s soul, the need for happiness through the love of others, the ability to accept his own weakness that the King will suppress as he climbs to power (BA, 119). At another level, the Shepherd champions God the Creator and reminds both the King and Babel’s citizens of the unity of creation reflected in the physical world and all human endeavours: Mon Dieu? C’est l’air que je respire, c’est l’été Sur la hanche des blés roulant sa chevelure, C’est le geste du laboureur se découvrant (BA, 124) [My God? He is the air I breathe, the summer That spreads its hair over the golden thighs of the wheatfields, He is in the gesture of the plowman who bares his head]. Dead long before the worst days of Babel, the Shepherd will achieve resurrection in the words and actions of the simple people who topple Babel’s walls. The people are the real heroes of Babel. Emmanuel evokes humanity in its infinite variety, from nomadic peoples to contemporary Europeans, but he concentrates on modern urban crowds. Going further than Lot of Sodome, who recognized Sodom’s inhabitants as brothers but abandoned the city to God’s wrath, the Reciter admits: “J’aime la ville: c’est le sein” [I love the city: it is the bosom] (BA, 199). Emmanuel is especially sensitive to the isolation of city-dwellers. In a vision that repeats T.S. Eliot’s description of the London Tube in Four Quartets,25 he imagines the endless trains that dislodge commuters from their families and destroy their sense of time. Yet, because they imitate Christ through their suffering, the people have the potential to bring down Babel. Even as the “Récitant” imagines them reduced to the status of termites in the King’s cellar, he speaks of their ability to mine the monolith’s foundations. They must learn again to love. Their first resistance to the King, who has ordered the eradication of sexual differences and reduced Babel to a sterile land, is their rediscovery of erotic love between man and woman, and, through this physical union of opposites, their soul:

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Dans ce corps qu’ils ont modelé de leurs caresses Le néant sous leurs mains se fait chair: il se laisse Cerner par une gauche et hâtive douceur (BA, 202) [In this body that they have modelled with their caresses Nothingness becomes flesh in their hands: it allows itself To be surrounded by a gauche and hasty sweetness].26 Once again fully human, they can return to Christ. They partake of the Eucharist in “La Messe des Ténèbres,” a liturgy celebrated in secret in Babel’s catacombs, after which this “Christ pédestre” [pedestrian Christ] (BA, 229) walks arm in arm with the crowds through the open streets. By the poem’s conclusion, the people have become the apostles on Pentecost morning, filled with the spirit of liberation, unafraid to face the tyrant. Ils s’avancent Ivres de feu, buissons de Pentecôte, armée D’incendiaires invisibles qui ravagent La paix sinistre des sépulcres et des cœurs (BA, 252) [They come forward Drunk on fire, Pentecostal bushes, an army Of invisible arsonists who ravage The sinister peace of sepulchers and hearts]. Fittingly, their hymns of thanksgiving, like Joshua’s trumpet at the battle of Jericho, crack the walls of Babel. The Reciter holds the narration together, juxtaposing events from the Bible and repeated references to contemporary history, modern intellectual figures, and city life. The “Récitant” is Emmanuel’s persona, for, like Emmanuel, he bears witness to his own times. He also functions throughout the poem as the people’s voice, since they are quickly forced into silence by the King and only recover the ability to speak in the poem’s two final sections. Calin explains the development of the “Récitant”; he goes from a passive to an active character, from an “ironic commentator, who only distinguishes himself from the masses by his lucidity,” to “a spiritual human being, a witness in the Christian sense.”27 In the introduction to Babel, the Reciter seems selfishly determined to save his own skin:

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La fin de tout? Mais je vivais encore! Je vivrais même si l’on me tue … Une seule chose importe: avancer. Avancer plus vite que les autres. Atteindre l’issue avant eux (BA, 11) [The end of everything? But I was still alive! I would live even if they killed me … Only one thing matters: move forward. Move forward faster than the others. Reach the exit before they do]. Stuck in a position of egotistical isolation, the Reciter cannot act during the tyrant’s conquests and the construction of the tower. He simply vents his frustration through sarcastic reflections, as in this explanation of the King’s advent: Dans cet extrême désordre, l’un de nous – le plus taciturne – s’aperçut que nous n’avions pas de chef. Grande découverte, d’où date le progrès humain. Nos reins allaient bientôt l’apprendre (BA, 47) [In this extreme disorder, one of us – the most taciturn – noticed that we didn’t have a leader. Great discovery, which marked the beginning of human progress, as our backsides would soon learn]. His redemption begins when he opens the Bible and digests its words: “Je deviens une lettre de ce livre dont pas un iota ne se perd” [I become a letter of this book not one iota of which ever loses its meaning] (BA, 162). He learns first to conceive of the despair and uncertainty of his time in terms of humanity’s endless alternation between acceptance of and revolt against God, a spiritual dilemma manifested by the ancient Israelites’ adoration of false idols as well as by modern totalitarianism. He also comes to recognize Christ as the eternal mediator of the human desire for the infinite. The Reciter’s voice dominates Babel’s longest section, “Le Commencement de l’homme,” much of which is a meditation on the relevance of Christianity in the twentieth century with respect to the very real problem of human suffering. The need to find meaning in misery ultimately draws the Reciter to Christ: Et c’est pourquoi la vieille histoire du Golgotha continue de hanter les hommes. Non parce qu’un homme a souffert la croix: tant d’autres ont souffert pis encore, qui peut-être ont souhaité qu’on les

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clouât sur les portes, pour en finir de leurs tourments! Mais parce qu’un homme au zénith du monde est éternellement en agonie, parce qu’en cette heure éternelle d’il y a deux mille ans qui est la seule à n’avoir pas fui comme toutes les autres, la seule que chacun de nous éphémères vit dans cet homme éternellement, il souffre éternellement dans sa chair qui est la nôtre (BA, 232–3) [And that is why the old history of Golgotha continues to haunt mankind. Not because one man suffered on the cross: so many others have suffered far worse, and perhaps even wished that someone would nail them to doors so that their torments would be over once and for all! But because one man is eternally in agony at the zenith of the world, because during that eternal hour two thousand years ago, the only hour that has never flown by like all the other hours, the only hour that each of us ephemeral humans lives eternally in this man, he suffers eternally in his flesh, which is our flesh]. This rediscovery of Christ, the Word, leads to the Reciter’s rebirth as a poet. He will revive the Shepherd’s aspirations to sing simply of daily life. He will reside “Dans le nom des choses communes” [In the name of ordinary things] (BA, 264) to serve his fellows, making his words into an expression of their joy. Like Dante, d’Aubigné, and Hugo before him, Emmanuel employs the epic as an organ of political and cultural criticism. This poem, in the tradition of Genesis, relates the loss of a universal, unifying language. Emmanuel cites modern humanity’s propensity for abstraction as the primary factor in the fall of our civilization. The nomads who will elevate the tyrant to power already appear in the poem’s first pages as dessicated, speechless, beings, mere dust dispersed by every wind. The King builds his tower as a clear glass wall, an ironic monument to our love of flawless but inhuman abstraction. The tower also takes the form of an unblinking eye within a pyramid (BA, 94–5), a symbol of our entrapment in pseudolucidity or of the solipsism produced by unchallenged thought. Like George Orwell,28 Emmanuel fears the substitution of abstractions for a concrete, sensual vocabulary that alone can provide the daily bread of intellectual discourse. For Emmanuel, abstraction brings with it the alienation of the imagination, intuition, and senses. Emmanuel condemns modern propagators of abstract thought. He mocks Nietzsche’s idea of the death of God, but he especially castigates

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Marx, whose fatalistic worldview is far more rigid than any formerly conceived by religion. In Babel the people must recite Marxist doctrine like a catechism lesson: “Qu’est-ce que l’homme? La réponse, en caractères gras: l’homme est matière organisante organisée. Cette formule de cuistres, on la commentait avec une révérence digne des vieilles théologies” [What is man? The answer, in bold face: man is organized matter organizing. This smug slogan was discussed with a reverence worthy of old theologies] (BA, 88). The King promises bread to the masses, the reign of humanity, happiness in an ever more distant future, while he squelches all individual liberty and forms his armies. Even more than he hated Marx, Emmanuel hates the French intellectuals of his time who slavishly dedicated their talents to the justification of Communist excesses. In Emmanuel’s view, these “écrivains engagés” [committed writers] such as Sartre, whom he calls in Babel the “Menteurs du Prince” and “déformateurs de vocables” [the Prince’s Liars … deformers of words] (BA, 102), are as answerable as any political tyrant for the triumph of totalitarianism. Science and technology appear as pernicious side effects of reason because they exalt work, efficiency, and the material world. In a Chaplinesque vision of modern times, Emmanuel imagines people passing between the rollers of printing presses and turning on the cogs of wheels (BA, 12). Reduced to matter, humans become the very bricks of the tower glued together by the sweat of their meaningless and tedious labour (BA, 9). The King himself is a technocrat who uses the full resources of the media to spread his propaganda, modern systems of transportation to haul his victims to death camps, and laboratories to build war machines: une race d’automates voués au mal, mi-hommes mi-dragons, articulés et précis comme des machines, maintenus par le poids de l’Espèce dans un sempiternel état prénatal (BA, 83) [a race of automatons dedicated to evil, half-man, half-dragon, constructed with machine-like precision, kept eternally in a pre-natal condition by the weight of their Species]. This mythical Hitler or Stalin dreams of fashioning followers devoid of soul, for whom efficiency replaces morality. The King rules supreme in no small part because he controls language through technology. At first taciturn, he soon drowns out the Shepherd’s

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song and his subjects’ pleas with the noise of his loudspeakers and war engines; he takes away names so as to eliminate individuality (BA, 98); he uses catchwords or slogans to propagate his doctrines. Most seriously, he twists words so that they mean their opposite. In this city, as the Reciter explains: Ces lois nous proclament égaux: jamais nous n’avons été plus esclaves. Ces lois disent: Que chacun reçoive son pain quotidien; et jamais on ne connut plus universelle famine (BA, 133) [These laws declared us equal: never have we been more enslaved. These laws say: Let each one receive his daily bread; and never have we known more universal hunger]. This bleak picture of modern civilization disappears in the poem’s conclusion. Tyranny fails, primarily, because of the tenacity of the human spirit. “L’homme-chiendent” [the man-weed] (BA, 133) sends out deep roots that eventually crack Babel’s foundations. Humanity gains strength from suppression. When man again turns to woman for love, when the crowds trade the King’s grandiose plans for “cet enchantement banal” [this everyday wonder] (BA, 213), the joy of ordinary rituals, and when humanity recognizes God as the true object of desire, the tower disappears without a struggle. More than half a century after its composition, Babel impresses the reader by the accuracy of its prophecies. Although Emmanuel did not live to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, his poem predicted that the contemporary Babel of Eastern European Communism would give way to just such a spontaneous, communal Pentecost. The liberation in Babel’s conclusion, however, is not the end of history. Rather, it simply signals the beginning of a new cycle of sin and redemption. Tyranny will arise again, the final lines affirm, because humanity cannot resist challenging God, but also because God cannot stop himself from testing his creatures: Dieu se tait. Le jour vienne où manquera la pierre A son jeu de marelle avec l’homme, le temps! Il saura le retrouver. … Rien ne lui est aussi cruel et nécessaire Que d’être mis en question par le néant. (BA, 294–5)

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[God becomes silent. The day will come when the stone Of his hopscotch game, which is time, will be missing! He’ll manage to find it. … Nothing is more bitter but more necessary for Him Than to be questioned by the void]. Emmanuel’s characteristic imagery, drawn from nature and the Bible, is abundant in Babel. A dominant theme in the poem is the opposition between dry, hard substances and liquids.29 Babel rises in a desert. Individual people are grains of sand lost in the arid expanse or bodies trapped in clay desiccated and cracked by drought. Later in the poem, men and women become blocks of stone and columns forming the tower, which itself is described as a diamond, cutting and impenetrable.30 Yet this salty, mineral world thirsts for water, and so, even in the poem’s first sections, the Reciter predicts that a new flood will destroy the city. Later, tears and blood associated with Christ and suffering humanity join with the morning dew31 to rain upon the barren world and create a river that sinks Babel. Emmanuel also regularly alternates imagery of darkness and light. In their fear of the night, the nomads elect the tyrant, whom Emmanuel describes as “cette ombre sur les plaines” [this shadow over the plains] (BA, 73) and whose tower reaches high enough to block the sun, thus obscuring all shadow. In the conclusion, light prevails in the dual form of a conflagration within the city and the sun’s return. Emmanuel exploits images both for their theological associations and for their dramatic potential, as in his frequent comparisons of humanity to plant life. Humans are strongly rooted weeds, grain ready for sowing in fallow ground; love bursts forth as from “le bulbe d’une invisible jacinthe” [the bulb of an invisible hyacinth] (BA, 215). Such comparisons and metaphors, rich in allusions to New Testament parables, suggest the hidden strength of the human spirit. Babel, finally, contains a lot of bird imagery, both positive and negative. The King’s guards are like vultures. The masses are first an aggressive “race de l’aigle” [race of eagles] (BA, 152), reminiscent of the Nazi crest, but in the conclusion they become doves, messengers of the reconciliation between creator and creature, as in Genesis. Other sections concentrate on bizarre, futuristic images worthy of science fiction. These occur especially in the description of Babel and its

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ruler. The tower churns forth from dry ground in the form of a gigantic screwdriver. The King is ultimately suffocated as the desert changes into an hour-glass filled with quicksand. The city is populated by robots. Horrific or claustrophobic images create an ambiance of fear, as in the description of the King’s lackeys as vampire termites, who suck out their victims’ brains in order to transform them into stone: L’esprit vidé par les narines Ainsi que la cervelle inerte des momies, Les vivants étagés serrent les flancs, paroi D’yeux fixes et que l’oeil du tyran illumine Tous ensemble, d’un reflet sec (BA, 75) [The mind emptied through the nostrils Like the inert brains of mummies, The living, in stacks, squeezed against the sides, a wall Of staring eyes that the tyrant’s eye illuminates All of them together, with a tearless glance]. Babel is the realm of the macabre, where humans find themselves enclosed in coffin-like spaces or are metamorphosed into insects. In his condemnations of the tyrant, Emmanuel at times uses rot and death imagery reminiscent of the invectives of the Hebrew prophets. The King rolls in his slaves’ excrement, loves the odour of sickbeds, and feasts on carrion (BA, 176–7). His spokesman prophesies “par le bas” [through the anus] (BA, 142). While the imagery of Babel is varied, it is much more coherent than that of either Tombeau d’Orphée or Sodome, where the poet often draws imagery directly from his subconscious or brings together multiple images without making their connections clear. Kushner justifiably observes that Babel marks a change in Emmanuel’s presentation of imagery and his elaboration of symbols, a change from hermeticism to exploration. He accords, as well, a greater importance to common, everyday objects.32 The poetic forms of Babel are as varied as the imagery. Its most significant innovation is the regular alternation between prose and verse. Throughout most of the verse sections Emmanuel prefers an unrhymed twelve-syllable line in long stanzas, often as long as thirty lines, as a vehicle for description and dialogue and also for the expression of the Reciter’s emotions. “Hymne de la condition humaine” [Hymn of the

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Human Condition], “Vision des exclus” [The Outsiders’ Vision], “Hymne de l’amour humain” [Hymn of Human Love], and “La Messe des ténèbres,” all of which deal with the problems of humanity’s estrangement from God, are written in stanzas of rhymed alexandrines and often resemble the devotional pieces of Le Poète et son Christ. “Hymne de la condition humaine” strongly recalls Metaphysical poetry in its conceits, castigating voice, and paradoxes, as in its ending lines, which excoriate human ambition as a cancer: Qui veut être le jour total et l’onde mère, Mais qu’épouse à jamais une rouille de sang Cancer de ce cancer sans cesse renaissant, Parasite du sombre esprit parasitaire (BA, 106) [He who wishes to be the full light of day and the life-bearing sea But is married forever to a rust-eaten blood line Cancer endlessly reborn from this cancer Parasite of a somber parasitic spirit]. When the Shepherd speaks, Emmanuel often imitates the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible. “Cette femme nommée Sagesse” [This Woman Named Wisdom], combines the themes of love and wisdom – the themes of the Song of Solomon and the Book of Proverbs – and expresses them in unrhymed lines of different lengths, a style reminiscent of Proverbs: Jouis de la vie avec la femme que tu aimes pendant tous les jours de ta vie de vanité (BA, 209) [Take pleasure in life with the woman you love for all the days of your futile life]. “Aux Parleurs de paroles” [To the Speakers of Words], on the other hand, recalls Isaiah or Jeremiah’s stern condemnatios of the recalcitrant Israelites. This imitation of biblical texts extends to actual paraphrases of Psalms 137, “Assis au bord des fleuves à Babylone” [By the rivers of Babylon] (BA, 160–1) and 139, “Seigneur, tu sais tout de moi” [Lord, thou hast examined me and knowest me] (BA, 269–71). Emmanuel invokes these texts to emphasize the Bible’s continued relevance as a primary poetic

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text for the twentieth century. “La Messe des Ténèbres” attempts a partial re-enactment of the mass, beginning with the offertory and ending with the benediction and the priest’s injunction to the faithful to go forth and serve God: Amen. Le matin gris s’éveille dans la chair Lourde de tant de jours à naître. Mais écoute La pulsion artérielle de la mer Lancer mon sang – le tien – à l’infini des routes (BA, 230) [Amen. The grey morning stirs in the flesh, heavy With so many days yet to come. But listen To the pulse of the sea’s arteries Hurl my blood – your blood – along the boundless roads]. Jean Rousselot so admired Emmanuel’s skill with the French language in Babel that he compared him to the great dramatist of the seventeenth century, Jean Racine.33 Babel is the high point of Emmanuel’s “poésie engagée” [politically committed poetry]. As Kushner notes, he moves away from myth to contemporary history and seems more comfortable with everyday reality.34 It is also a work that attracted Emmanuel some measure of international attention. The French-American Cistercian monk Thomas Merton’s only dramatic work, The Tower of Babel, was inspired by Emmanuel’s poem and treats the same themes as Babel: the perversion of speech, propaganda, freedom, and the city.35 Albert Béguin remarks that Emmanuel comes into his own in Babel. He no longer borrows his themes from other poets but draws upon personal experience. The rhetorical excesses of the war poetry are replaced by verse forms and language capable of expressing a range of emotions.36 Rousselot also comments on the musicality of Emmanuel’s verse, calling Babel “une histoire symphonique” [a symphonic story]37 because it harmonizes so many voices and ideas. Rousselot, who judged Tombeau d’Orphée unreadable because of its “tortured” mixture of philosophy and myth, confesses his admiration for Babel, a poem that succeeds in bringing together history, biblical exegesis, satire, social criticism, and prophecy in a monumental artistic achievement.38 Emmanuel published Jacob (1970), his third epic based on Genesis, almost two decades after Babel. In spite of the nineteen years separating their

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publication, Jacob is best understood as a companion piece to the 1951 epic. In the conclusion of Babel, the Reciter prophesies the liberation of the community from the false promises of politics and science, and looks forward to a renewed awareness of our connections to nature and God. This spiritual regeneration, which the poet experienced personally after the war years and his break with Communism, is the subject of Jacob. Emmanuel reworks the story of Jacob, son of Isaac and founder of Israel, into an allegory of personal and communal redemption in what André Marissel has termed an “épopée du salut” [epic of salvation].39 In doing so, Emmanuel follows the examples of Dante and Milton, both of whom offset their respective visons of sin and damnation in the Inferno and Paradise Lost with visions of redemption in the Paradiso and Paradise Regained. Like Dante and Milton, Emmanuel set himself a much harder task in Jacob than in Babel, since it is more difficult to write an appealing narrative on the acquisition of spiritual understanding than to write about evil. The story of Jacob provides a fitting scriptural text for Emmanuel’s allegory of a fulfilled spiritual quest. It is a story of deception, family conflict, love, sex, and interaction between humans and deities that takes up the entire second half of Genesis (chapters 25–50). Jacob manifests himself at first as an anti-hero who only reluctantly agrees to the mission given to him by God and succeeds because of his refusal to retreat from conflict. Details such as Jacob’s grasp of his twin Esau’s heel while leaving Rebecca’s womb, his tricking Esau and his father Isaac, his dream of the angels on the ladder to heaven, and his wrestling match with the Angel of the Lord at Peniel resulting in a wound to his thigh all lend themselves to multiple symbolic interpretations. Emmanuel works these themes and symbols into his poem through a complicated juxtaposition of times and places that presents Jacob simultaneously as a prefiguration of Christ and a model for twentieth-century Christians. Jacob begins with “Origine” [Origin], a new version of the Creation that makes Adam responsible for the Fall. The snake-tempter comes from within Adam and symbolizes Adam’s pride in his intellect and anger at his dependence on God. Adam sins through revolt, thereby destroying the unity of the creation with the creator: Le serpent a glissé dans l’herbe … Et ma raison qui va devancer la lumière Se brise comme verre au seuil de l’infini ( J, 26)40

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[The serpent slithered through the grass … And my reason that will overtake light Shatters like glass on the threshold of the infinite]. The following sections, “Genèse du combat” [Genesis of the Struggle] and “Isaac,” focus on Isaac, son of Abraham and father of Jacob, whose transgression is the mirror image of Adam’s sin. Isaac is incapable of revolt. He submits unconditionally to God, suppressing both his own anger over his near sacrifice at Abraham’s hand and his knowledge of God’s injustice. God punishes Isaac’s weakness by having Jacob cheat his elder brother, Esau, out of his birthright and paternal blessing. Jacob’s willingness to challenge the normal order signals his passing the first test toward becoming the champion of God and the father of the chosen people: “Ce combat qu’Isaac n’a point livré, Jacob le livre à Dieu homme à homme” [This combat that Isaac refused to engage in, Jacob engages in it through man-to-man combat with God] ( J, 75). A fourth long section, “La Grande Mère [The Great Mother], recounts the events of Genesis beginning with Jacob’s escape from Esau and his vision of the ladder to Jacob’s fourteen years of servitude to his uncle Laban and his marriages to the sisters Leah and Rachel. “Nuit de Jacob” [Jacob’s Night] is devoted solely to the wrestling match with the angel, at the end of which Jacob receives the new name of Israel. Two long meditations, one on the verses of the Lord’s Prayer, “Notre Père” [Our Father], and the other on the Sermon on the Mount, “Les Béatitudes” [The Beatitudes], take up all but one page of the sixth section, entitled “La Sainte Face” [The Holy Face]. Emmanuel connects the words spoken by Christ to the story of Jacob by recalling Jacob’s twofold promise: to build a temple to the Lord on the spot where he dreamed of the ladder, and to give a tenth of his goods to this temple if God fed, clothed, and protected him on his journey to Laban (Genesis 28:22). Emmanuel thus reminds us not only that Jacob, in his struggle, prefigures Christ, but also that the obligations assumed by Jacob to pray to the Father and care for the poor and suffering apply to all believers from biblical times to the present. “La Sainte Face” provides a transition to the longest section, “Jacob n’importe qui” [Jacob Everyman], which evokes characters from the Book of Daniel and Kings, the Passion story, medieval legends, Cathar history, the contemporary intellectual scene, war resisters – even entire countries – who have taken up Jacob’s struggle. They are the real Church, “un peuple

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rassemblé d’humbles orants. Ce peuple de Foi et de la Raison illuminante” [a people brought together in humble prayer. This people of Faith and illuminating Reason].41 The concluding section, “Tu es” [You Are], draws on Jacob’s words at Peniel following his combat with the angel: “for I have seen God face to face, and my life has been preserved” (Genesis 32:30). For Emmanuel, this vision of God manifests itself in the ability to perceive the divine presence in nature and the human community. Women play a prominent role in Jacob’s quest and, by allegorical extension, in the spiritual struggle of all generations of humanity. In Jacob Emmanuel develops fully his concept of the Eternal Eve mentioned in the preface to Sodome. The Eve in “Origine” is synonymous with the harmonious, welcoming beauty of the natural world: Son regard sa langue ses doigts soie lumineuse est saveursenteur sans couture Son haleine est l’espace en bourgeon, et son ouïe corolle du corps A pour limbe l’invisible sans bord la voie lactée pour rosée d’étoiles. Un Dieu sourire lui effleure les cils au faîte vert des vents pommelés ( J, 27) [Her gaze her tongue her fingers, luminous silk, are seamless taste-smell Her breath is space in bloom, and her ear, petals of the body For limbs she has limitless invisibility, the Milky Way for starry dew. A God, all smiles, lightly touches her eyelashes at the green summit of the dappled winds]. It is Eve’s resemblance to God, in fact, that makes Adam distrust her. Rebecca, Jacob’s mother, instills in Jacob the courage to confront God that his father, Isaac, lacks: Elle n’en finit pas de le mûrir Accoucheuse d’une race théophore … C’est la mère qui engagea la bataille Genou de Dieu pressé contre son flanc ( J, 44)

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[She never finishes bringing him to term Midwife of a god-bearing race … It’s the mother who engaged in battle The knee of God pressed against her thigh]. She prefigures the Virgin Mary through her cooperation with God’s mysterious ways. It is her idea to obtain Esau’s birthright for Jacob, because the elder twin lacks the spiritual potential to be a father to Israel. In “La Grande Mère,” Jacob addresses his beloved Rachel in glowing words: O médiatrice, ma part féminine! rose de gloire où le Coeur se conçoit ( J, 102) [O mediator, my feminine part! rose of glory where the Heart is formed]. Had Jacob not loved Rachel, he might have fallen into the error of Babel’s builders – pride, revolt against the heavens, abstraction. He has erected the pillar that will permit the foundation of the Hebrew nation, but it is Rachel’s well that will make the nation fertile. Jacob’s love of Rachel, as much as his faith, serves as a ladder to the heavens and has a sacramental function. Jacob equates making love to Rachel with the Eucharist: Il faut entrer en toi comme le prêtre change Pain et vin au corps et au sang ( J, 120) [I must enter into you just as the priest changes Bread and wine into the body and blood]. Because of his respect for all love between man and woman, Emmanuel offers a positive interpretation of Jacob’s purely physical relationship with Leah. Jacob bears responsibility for the trick Laban plays on him, since he took Leah only in the flesh, never asking her name. Yet, this purely physical act was part of the divine plan, for it prepared Jacob for the fuller union with Rachel in both body and spirit (J, 115–17). Eve, Rachel, and Leah resemble Dante’s Beatrice in their role as guides and intercessors, but they are also sexual beings. Woman’s ability to give

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birth and nourish makes her more like God the Father than her male counterpart. In the course of Jacob, the womb evolves into a symbol of fruitful human institutions, such as the church (J, 102), a realm where the male and female unite to nurture and create. In “La Sainte Face” and “Jacob n’importe qui,” Emmanuel devotes individual poems to a number of female figures associated with good works: Hecate, the Greek goddess of children, dogs, and outsiders ( J, 215); Esclarmonde de Foix, the medieval Cathar heroine remembered for her care and education of girls ( J, 217); and Veronica, who ministered to Christ on the path to Calvary ( J, 211–13). “Béatitudes” is dedicated to Geneviève Anthonioz, niece of Charles de Gaulle and member of the Resistance, who spent her later years championing the rights of the poor. One of the first poems of “Jacob n’importe qui” acknowledges without reservation the exalted position in which Emmanuel now places women: “Femme quel plus beau nom donner à l’âme humaine” [Woman what better name could we give to the human soul] ( J, 214). The stories of both the patriarch Jacob and Jacob Everyman are told through passages of interior monologue by the biblical characters presented in alternation with commentaries of the poet. In the first five sections, from “Origine” to “Nuit de Jacob,” Emmanuel expands the sparse words of Genesis into high drama. The Hebrew Bible describes the birth of Rebecca’s twins simply: “Le premier qui sortit était roux. Il était couvert de poils, comme d’un manteau, et on l’appela Esaü. Après lui sortit son frère. Sa main tenait le talon d’Esaü et on l’appela Jacob” [And the first came out red, all over like a hairy garment; and they called him Esau. And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold of Esau’s heel; and his name was called Jacob” (Genesis: 25:25–6). In Emmanuel’s poem, Jacob is already conscious, as a foetus, of his dependence upon the body, represented by Esau, as well as aware of his need to transcend the flesh. He fights his way out of the womb like a warrior confronting his mortal enemy: Je me confie à l’énorme hostilité du soleil roux qui me rue à la face Qu’ainsi ô Mort j’agrippe enfin ta cheville pour passer le col utérin ( J, 56) [I give myself over to the overwhelming hostility of the red sun that kicks me in the face Thus, o Death, I finally hang on to your heel so that I can pass through the cervix].

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Similarly, in the wrestling match at Peniel, Jacob feels the weight of the angel first as the charge of a bull, then as an eagle slashing at his heart and, finally, as he gains control, as the pressure of a woman’s body: L’Ange fléchit en arrière sous l’assaut Et s’ouvre. Tout son corps est une lourde rose. Sa main au pli du genou surprend Jacob Et lui ramène la cuisse vers sa hanche ( J, 136) [The Angel bends backwards under the force of the assault And opens like a flower. Its whole body is a heavy rose Its hand at the bend of his knee surprises Jacob And guides his thigh towards its hips]. Such action scenes, as well as the use of extended similes, are common in epic poems and help sustain the reader’s interest. Dramatic scenes are usually followed by pieces written in a much simpler style. In “La Pierre de chevet” [The Rock-Pillow], for example, the dream of the ladder occurs in a peaceful, natural setting: Jacob dort. Il a mis sous sa tête une pierre Gardienne de son sommeil contre l’enfer. … Jacob dort. Il a pour rocher ce Dieu même Qui n’aura pas une pierre où reposer ( J, 89). [Jacob sleeps. He has put a rock under his head To keep his sleep safe from hell. … Jacob sleeps. He has for his rock that very God Who won’t even have a rock on which to lay his head]. This purposely naïve vocabulary recalls Victor Hugo’s biblical poems in La Légende des siècles, especially “Booz endormi” [Boaz Asleep]. Like Hugo, Emmanuel succeeds in elaborating a harmonious view of human history from the simple, pastoral imagery of Genesis and makes Jacob into a prefiguration of Christ. In “Jacob n’importe qui,” Emmanuel moves from the scriptures to the confused modern psyche, assailed by routine, the media, loneliness, and

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poverty. These poems are at times nothing more than lists of disconnected words that give the impression of someone overwhelmed by everyday experience and unable to make sense of life. “Chacun personne” [Each One No one] is an example: Chacun pour soi se débonde ensemble. Moi Je Me démêle. Me désenglue. M’extrais. Entier! Le métro me met au monde. Falaises, fenêtres, antennes, kiosque A journaux jusqu’au ciel. C’est cela voir le jour. Vietnam pilule minijupes tiercé Etre adulte Johnny drogue cosmos Mort de Dieu psychanalyse Johnny Concile sexe Vietnam Sylvie ( J, 293–4). [Every man for himself empties out at the same time. Me I I figure it out. I unglue myself. I extract myself. In one piece! The metro gives birth to me. Cliffs, windows, antennas, newspaper Kiosk all the way up to the sky. That’s what it means to be born. Vietnam birth-control pill miniskirts horse-racing Reach adulthood Johnny Halliday drugs cosmos Death of God psychoanalysis Johnny Halliday Vatican Council sex Vietnam Sylvie Vartan]. These interior monologues can also take the form of an admission of insignificance, as in “Josaphat” [Jehosaphat]: Membres épars. Mon jour finit sur un charnier. Non: un bourbier de pas brouillés. Une déroute D’ombres fuyant leur corps avant qu’il ne soit né: Telle est, quand vient la nuit, mon histoire ( J, 222) [Scattered limbs. My day ends in a mass grave.

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No: a quagmire of scrambled steps. A rout Of shadows fleeing from their body before it is born: When night falls, that is my story]. Gone are the castigating tone of the preacher and the prophecies of catastrophe found in the war poetry. Emmanuel gives voice to his generation’s spiritual decline without judging himself or others. He also balances this vision of mankind’s alienation from God with practical advice on how to shut out the chaos of modern life and discover oneself as well as God. In poems such as “Concentrer Dieu” [Concentrate God], “Le Sens clos” [The Hidden Meaning], and “Centre Je” [Centre I], Emmanuel addresses his readers as a teacher might do, offering guidance for a renewed spiritual life. As the most mystical of the three biblical epics, Jacob explores religious experiences not susceptible to rational inquiry, such as miracles, transcendent love, and the attainment of faith. The Jacob story provides a suitable framework for a mystical interpretation of the scriptures; many episodes of the story underscore the notion that God works in mysterious ways, whether by elevating the younger brother over the older or by using trickery to accomplish his ends. Even the encounter with the angel shows that the human mind cannot grasp the master plan of history. Jacob, who wished to know God’s name, received instead the new name of Israel, by which he comes to know himself. Emmanuel emphasizes the superiority of the heart over the mind as a source of knowledge. Fittingly, much of the poem’s imagery is drawn from the storehouse of earlier Christian mystics, especially John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. Darkness, fire, descents, and ascensions express the soul’s alternation between despair and exaltation. Like John of the Cross and the English Metaphysical poets, Emmanuel makes extensive use of paradox to convey the soul’s struggle. The poet learns that by relinquishing life, he clings to life: “je passe à la limite et tiens à tout par continuel arrachement” [I move to the limits and hold on to everything by continuously wrenching myself from everything] (J, 45). Blindness brings keener vision (J, 57). The name “Israel” means both “God reigns” and “a man has conquered God”: “Sens contraires, identiques” [Opposite, identical meanings] (J, 34). While Christian mystical poetry has traditionally borrowed the language of eroticism to represent the experience of transcendence, Emmanuel is unusual in the complete equivalence he establishes between sexual love and the progress of the

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spirit. He imagines the ladder rising from Jacob’s groin as an erection and Rachel’s uncovering of the well as a vagina opening to receive semen into the womb ( J, 105–6). The struggle between Jacob and the angel is presented as intercourse ( J, 136). In Jacob Emmanuel envisages eroticism, especially between man and woman, as an avenue to God. The influence of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, another long poem with a mystical bent, comes across clearly in Jacob.42 Both poets speak of the need to empty the self as a prelude to revelation and liberation; and both poets represent the purification of the intellect through imagery of fire, blindness, death, and rebirth. Eliot denies the uniqueness of the twentieth-century’s spiritual quest, believing that his own search for God reflects that of all ages of humanity.43 Similarly, Emmanuel offers Jacob as the transhistorical paradigm of spiritual struggle that prefigures our contemporary search for meaning.44 Like Eliot, Emmanuel obsesses over finding a language that can express the timeless experience of transcendence in a world bound by time, because he fears, as Yves-Alain Favre has so well put it, that “Le language qui se déroule dans le temps, ne peut pas saisir l’éternel” [Language that takes place in time cannot capture the eternal].45 Emmanuel likens his attempts to describe the deity to Jacob’s struggle with the angel, but he also evinces a strong faith in the ability of words to unite humanity and God. Isaac’s silence signifies despair, a refusal to confront his divine tormentor. In the prose passage introducing Jacob’s dream, Emmanuel equates language with the stone pillow that permits Jacob’s passage to the realm of vision: “Que sont les mots sinon des pierres précieuses, formées en nous par la contradiction de l’insondable Regard créateur?” [What are words if not precious stones formed within us by the contradiction of the unfathomable creative Gaze?] ( J, 88). Ultimately, he resolves his distrust of language by proclaiming speech as part of a trinity, the two other parts of which are man and God, with words playing the role of the Holy Spirit: Moi l’esprit la chose nommée et Dieu ensemble dans un même souffle et parole Qui déguise et identifie Sans Le nommer j’approcherai de mon Dieu en Le nommant de leur nom dans les choses ( J, 56) [Myself, the spirit the thing named and God together in one identical breath and word

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That disguises and identifies Without naming Him I will approach my God by naming Him in things by their true name]. Jacob is also the most theologically dense of the three biblical epics.46 Emmanuel fittingly cites Kierkegaard in an epigraph because, like the Danish thinker, he is interested in problems of freedom and determination, faith and reason. The poem’s third section, “Isaac,” echoes Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling in its exploration of the contradictions between the ethics of the secular world and those of the Bible. In this section, Emmanuel also investigates the apparent conflict between divine omnipotence and human freedom, deciding, like Thomas Aquinas, that the two are perfectly consistent: La merveille du franc arbitre divin est que le vouloir des hommes l’enchaîne. Chaîne et trame, tout est tissé. Même les trous, même le néant ( J, 82) [The wonder of free will is that mankind’s demands hold it prisoner. Threads and framework, all is woven together. Even the holes, even emptiness]. The conception of God as love, as elaborated by Catholic mystical writers from the German Middle Ages to the Spanish Golden Age,47 receives a good deal of discussion. Emmanuel also introduces practical moral concerns, such as the duty of the Christian to his fellow man, a concern that accounts for frequent mention in the pages of Jacob of the need to care for the poor. Like Dante in the Purgatorio and Paradiso, Emmanuel weaves theological argument into the fabric of his story. In Jacob Emmanuel returns to the meditative style of Le Poète et Son Christ. He vividly recreates separate scenes of the Jacob story and then analyses them for their philosophical or moral content. These dramatic and analytical poems are interspersed with stanzas of prayer or whole poems that are prayers, including a twenty-page paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer. This method is especially evident in the fourth section, “La Grande Mère,” which covers the events of Genesis 28:10 to 31:35, from Jacob’s flight from Esau and his dream of the ladder to his marriage to Leah. At the same time, Emmanuel establishes a connection between poetry and the visual arts. He devotes stanzas or complete poems to the

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paintings of Jacob wrestling with the angel: those of Delacroix in “Delacroix” and “Le Vrai combat” [The True Combat]48 and Gauguin in “Lutte avec l’ange” [Wrestling with the Angel]. In “Véronique” [Veronica], he criticizes the Surrealist Dalí’s “Last Supper” with its effeminate Christ; and in “Dieu au musée” [God in the Museum] he speaks against the bland religious paintings that fill most European museums. Emmanuel organizes Jacob into a gallery where, as Camille Jordens observes, the autonomous scenes come together as “une fresque épique centrale autour de la figure du patriarche” [an epic fresco centred on the figure of the patriarch (that is, Jacob)].49 In the style of a diptych, Emmanuel often presents the same scene from different perspectives. Two poems, “Auprès du puits” [Next to the Well] and “Sept ans Rachel” [Seven Years Rachel], which treat Jacob’s first sight of his beloved and then analyse the symbolism of the scene, provide one such example. Similarly, the two poems of the final section, “Dieu Vent” [God Wind] and “Chien Fou” [Mad Dog], are followed by “Variantes,” variations on the same subject. Finally, Emmanuel conceives of Jacob in terms of music, as his references to psalms, plainsong, and harmony throughout the volume make clear. The title of a prose section, “Récitatif” [Recitative], suggests that he envisions Jacob as an oratorio,50 a sung narrative on a religious subject much like an opera. Jacob appears as the culmination of Emmanuel’s attempt to return poetry to its roots in song, which was already evident in Tombeau d’Orphée and in La Colombe, where “le Chant” represents a superior but also a communal language.51 In its versification, Jacob is Emmanuel’s most complex volume to date. The majority of poems are still written, as in Babel and Sodome, in long paragraphs of twelve-syllable, unrhymed lines, and we also find more traditional forms, such as sonnets and quatrains of rhymed alexandrines. The final sections contain pieces written in very short metres, lines ranging from three to eight syllables. In addition, we find many poems intended to imitate the structure of biblical or liturgical texts – the adages of the Book of Proverbs or the alternating responses of litanies. Yet other poems are intended to imitate mental states. Lists of separate nouns without verbs portray the fragmented psyche of the contemporary urban dweller. To suggest Jacob’s passage from confusion to understanding, poems swell from a single syllable to a much longer line, as in the final section of “Né à jamais non-né” [Born Forever Unborn]:

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Où Expulsé explosant Maintenant où Suis-je … Moi qui ne suis que d’être en avant de toute chose existante avant moi ( J, 57–8) [Where Expelled exploding Now where Am I … I who only follow to be at the front of all things existing before me]. As in the other two biblical epics, prose passages are clearly separated from verse. In Jacob, the pages in prose usually invite the reader to meditate on the significance of the events narrated in the poems that follow. This complex structure allows Emmanuel to organize the entire poem as a meditation moving among dramatic recreations of the Jacob story, analysis of these events, and prayer or moral lessons. Much of the imagery of Jacob is inspired by archetypal psychoanalytic theory. The title of the section devoted to woman, “La Grande Mère,” suggests the influence of Carl Jung and his disciple Erich Neumann, both of whom signaled the associations between flowers, still waters, and domestic spaces with the feminine in the collective unconscious.52 As in Gaston Bachelard’s works, fire and breath are masculine elements, while water and earth are feminine. Although the majority of the images in Jacob are drawn from the Bible and nature, Emmanuel also uses images from contemporary culture to form conceits that make the notion of spiritual combat more relevant to the reader. He compares atheism to a bulimic devouring the twentieth century (J, 139); nostalgia for God penetrates our souls with the force of ultrasound (J, 125). Television is a metonym for pernicious media; napalm, for chemical warfare; structuralism, for the abstraction that imprisons the European imagination (J, 223–4). He draws his symbolism, however, from the story of Jacob. Foremost among these symbols are the stones Jacob mounded for his pillow as he

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journeyed from his father’s house to Laban, and from which arose the vision of the ladder in Genesis 28:18. Stone appears first as a representation of the Creation, of matter that ultimately allows the spirit encased within it to spring forth: Cri enkysté coeur épineux ô Patience Dont la gangue durcit à chaque battement Aspérité d’un innombrable frottement Esprit contre silex souffle contre silence Soudain jaillit le feu L’Être! les temps commencent ( J, 12) [Encapsulated scream thorny heart o Patience Whose matrix hardens with each beat Bump formed by an endless rubbing Spirit against silex breath against silence Suddenly fire gushes Being! history begins]. In the Jacob story, stone signifies the hero’s spiritual potential, since the ladder of angels arises from it; but it also represents his submission to Rachel’s love, since he must remove the stone from the well (Genesis 29:3) so that her flocks may drink. The pillar of stone that Jacob erects at the site of his dream becomes the Church, formed of rock but housing God. In the volume’s second half, stone symbolizes mankind, the being trapped in flesh but with spirit at its core, who struggles, like Jacob, to find an identity (“Gelée humaine”) [Human Jelly]. In the two-part poem “Choisir la Pierre” [Choose Stone] of “Jacob n’importe qui,” this identity reveals itself as attentiveness to God, patience as enduring as the original matter of creation: Mais Cela qui t’est demandé, tu le sais Deviens ton nom. Deviens la Pierre sans issue. Le gel incarcéré autour de la semence, Terre qui croit ne désirer d’autre saison Que l’ouïe si tendue qu’elle remplit l’absence, Attention qui n’attend rien que son silence ( J, 235)

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[But you know What is asked of you. Become your name. Become the rock that has no opening. The gelatinous substance imprisoned around the seed, Earth which believes that it desires no other season Than that of the ear so strained to hear that it fills up the emptiness, Attention that waits for nothing but its silence]. For his part, the poet accepts the name he has given himself, Pierre Emmanuel, which he now understands as the sign of his dual condition as matter and spirit, opposing natures that, nevertheless, work together in the quest to know God (“Choisir la pierre”) (J, 236). In the prose passage “Songe de Jacob” [Jacob’s Dream], Emmanuel states that the poet’s main task is to open the reader’s understanding to the symbolism of this story, for “Dieu, par amour, prodigue les symboles. Par manque d’amour, nous leur restons fermés” [God, out of love, lavishes symbols on us. We, through lack of love, remain closed to them] (J, 87). In Jacob, Emmanuel, a contemporary adherent to the figural tradition of biblical exegesis, opens us to an understanding of these symbols. The three biblical epics, written at different periods of Emmanuel’s life, attest to his sustained interest in the long verse narrative. Sodome is the most difficult of the three because of its mixture of biblical, personal, and erotic themes in a psychodrama. Babel is impressive for its courageous engagement with the dominant political problems of its age, its creation of a dystopia from a Christian point of view, its alternation between cultural criticism and prophecy, and its blend of high and low styles. Jacob is the most experimental of the epics in the way it brings together long and short poetry, narrative and lyrical verse, myth and theology. All three demonstrate Emmanuel’s unusual versatility as a poet and his ability to rework classical poetic forms for a modern audience.

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4 Short Poetry, 1940–1970

Pierre Emmanuel earned his reputation in the 1940s and 1950s as the poet of long, dense, and highly polemic works that concentrate on myth, contemporary history, sexuality, and the Bible. During these decades, however, he also experimented with short poetry. While war and the quest for God remain the subjects of many of his short poems, Emmanuel also writes a great deal about nature and personal experience. The first of his volumes of short poems, XX Cantos [Twenty Cantos], appeared in 1942 at the same time as Jour de Colère, Combats avec tes défenseurs, and Le Poète et son Christ. The poet expanded these twenty poems to seventy in 1944 and published them under the title Cantos [Cantos]. Then in 1947 he further enlarged the volume to two hundred pages under the title Chansons du dé à coudre [Songs of the Thimble].1 Between 1952 and the mid-1960s, Emmanuel only published books of short verse: Visage nuage [Face Cloud] (1955), Versant de l’âge [The Downward Slope of Life] (1958), Evangéliaire [Evangeliary] (1961), and La Nouvelle naissance [New Birth] (1963).2 Short poetry also figures prominently in Ligne de Faîte [Crest Ridge],3 a retrospective volume from 1966 that groups individual poems and fragments of longer poems from Tombeau d’Orphée through La Nouvelle naissance in a thematic arrangement. Writing in 1983, Eva Kushner observed that the volumes of the 1960s demonstrate an evolution in Emmanuel’s writing, a “change to inner equilibrium, to maturation, or to a deepening love of simplicity,”4 even though Emmanuel returned to the composition of long, intellectually challenging poems in the 1970s and 1980s. William Calin’s judgment that Emmanuel alternates between long poems and brief lyrics5 seems more accurate. The short poem was part of Emmanuel’s project from the

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beginning of his career. His concurrent composition of verse narrations and more personal poetry attests to the range of his imagination and technical versatility. The volumes Cantos and Chansons du dé à coudre both received high praise from literary critics. Kushner read them as Emmanuel’s first truly personal poetry, as intimate murmurs of a soul’s anguish.6 Pierre Brunel, who prefers Cantos to Chanson du dé à coudre, considered this poetry “profondément originale, pénétrante comme un parfum, émouvante, transparente” [profoundly original, penetrating as a perfume, touching, transparent].7 Joseph Chiari said of Chansons du dé à coudre: “Here we have thoughts and feelings expressed in a way in which words are given their full poetic ambiguity and creative power, here we have a sample of the cosmic imagination of the poet and of his acute consciousness of the power of words.”8 For Léon-Gabriel Gros, “on ne saurait en si peu de mots ouvrir de si vertigineuses perspectives … La pensée la plus subtile trouve ici sa plus concrète illustration” [So many vertiginous perspectives are opened with so few words … The subtlest thought finds its most concrete illustration here].9 It is nevertheless difficult to claim that the short poetry evokes a greater emotional response in the reader than the war poetry, which is consistently dramatic and vacillates between anger and joy. Emmanuel’s claim, in Alain Bosquet’s Poètes d’aujourd’hui series, that the first three of the XX Cantos were spontaneous, almost unconscious creations10 may have led critics to think that the short poems were written without forethought and involved less craft than his earlier poetry. Here again, it is useful to remember that Emmanuel claimed the same spontaneity in the composition of his first successful poems, “Résurrection” and “Christ au tombeau,” which became the foundation for Le Poète et son Christ. Many of these twenty brief pieces, such as Canto XV, imitate popular songs with their short metres, the repetition of vocabulary, and simplified syntax: Mon dieu m’as-Tu donc oublié que sans cesse je tombe et tombe de corps en corps de tombe en tombe sans songer à me relever Mon dieu je n’ai pas oublié mais voudrais-Tu me faire croire

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que ce peu de triste mémoire c’est Toi si longtemps désiré Mon dieu m’as-Tu donc oublié?11 [My god have You thus forgotten me? that endlessly I fall and fall from body to body, from tomb to tomb without dreaming of getting back up My god, I haven’t forgotten but do You want me to believe that this trace of sad memory is all I have of You, You whom I have so long desired My god have You thus forgotten me?]. Emmanuel relies on a pun on the word “tombe” [fall / tomb] and the alternation of the pronouns “je” and “Tu” [I / you] to express his feeling of abandonment, as a medieval poet might have done, or even a modern folk singer or contemporary American Country and Western bard. This poem could easily be set to music. Another frequently used device involves repetition, as in Canto IV: Couleur de soleil éteint ô Terre Couleur de sang déteint ô Mer [Colour of extinguished sun o Earth colour of faded blood o Sea]. The starting point is an impression made by light at sunset, but the focus of the poem is the rhythm, which approaches the singsong of a child’s nursery rhyme. Other poems use repetition in monotonously rhythmical patterns to create a hypnotic effect reminiscent of a litany or incantation. Canto XIII offers the best example of this technique:

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O Nuit tu es la saveur du pain sur ma langue tu es la fraîcheur de l’oubli sur mon corps tu es la source jamais tarie de mon silence et chaque soir l’aurore de ma Mort à quoi bon te chanter à quoi bon te prier puisqu’une seule larme te contient toute O Nuit [O Night you are the savour of bread on my tongue you are the coolness of forgetfulness on my body you are the ever-flowing spring of my silence and every evening the dawn of my Death why sing about you why pray to you since a single tear contains you wholly o Night]. Unlike the war poetry, in which repetitions normally add to the rhetorical force of the argument, these repetitions rely upon the calming power of words, singly and in combination. In choosing the title of this collection, Emmanuel may have been thinking of Dante’s Divine Comedy or John of the Cross’s Cánticos espirituales, or his title may simply reflect an interest in writing poetry approximating song. Aragon, Eluard, and Desnos, too, turned from free verse to traditional, short metres during the war. The short lines arranged in compact stanzas also recall several poems of Valéry’s Charmes [Charms] (1922), such as “Les Pas” [Steps] or “Cantique des colonnes” [Carol of the Columns]. Canto VI is a single, nine-line stanza composed mainly of tetrametres, which playfully evokes the assurance of divine providence: Ne rêve pas le front à nu sous les étoiles. L’ange là-haut

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vise ton âme entre les yeux: de toute éternité t’est destinée sa balle. [Don’t dream bare-headed beneath the stars. The angel on high aims between your eyes at your soul: and for all eternity its bullet has been destined for you]. Similarly, Canto night walk:

VII

La lune entre les pas, rien qu’une Ombre là bas Silence autour des pas, cadence du sang qui bat La route à pas comptés c’est toute l’éternité [The moon between footsteps nothing but a shadow below

alternates two- and four-syllable lines to suggest a

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Silence around the footsteps cadence of blood that pulses The road with measured steps is all eternity]. Emmanuel balances his visual impressions of space, light, and darkness with the sound of the speaker’s footsteps. The reader hears the beating heart of someone coming to the realization that the slow journey through life, “La route / à pas comptés” [The road / with measured steps] is itself the human experience of eternity. Emmanuel claimed in the 1971 introduction to Sodome that his first biblical epic suffered from a “certain narcissisme esthétique” [a kind of esthetic narcissism] inspired by Valéry’s “Jeune Parque” [The Young Fate].12 In XX Cantos, he embraces Valéry’s short metres but avoids Valéry’s hermeticism. Emmanuel never mentions Verlaine as a source of inspiration, but he revives Verlaine’s evocation of imprecise sensations and nuanced emotional states. Canto I begins with a series of unconnected visual and auditory images: Le roulement des roues les cahots des ténèbres les tambours qui s’ébrouent la lune aux mains de neige [The rolling of the wheels the jolts of the shadows the drums that whinny the moon with hands of snow]. The speaker seems to be travelling in a car, although the jolts and drums also suggest a war and soldiers in tanks or jeeps. The peace produced by the white moonlight contrasts with the disquieting noise of drums that whinny like startled horses. The second stanza is linked to the opening one only by a sense of unexplained uneasiness:

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Cinq heures attachés reprendront-ils racine ces arbres arrachés au coeur las de nos villes [Attached for five hours will they re-root these trees snatched from the weary heart of our cities]. The final stanza reveals that the principal cities of France are themselves the uprooted trees, while France is the orchard. The second line, “nos peines capitales” [our capitals’ pains / our death penalties], is a pun suggesting both that the mentioned cities live under the death penalty and that the poet can experience no greater pain than witnessing the destruction of France’s cities: Paris Nantes Bordeaux nos peines capitales nos vergers les plus beaux sont greffés par les balles [Paris Nantes Bordeaux our capital pains our most beautiful orchards have been grafted by bullets]. This poem is quite different from the eloquent evocations of war found in Combats avec tes défenseurs or Jour de Colère. The freshness of impression and false naïveté of this verse justify Chiari’s observation that the early short poems “express a single mood … the fleeting thoughts and emotions which flashed through the mind and sensitiveness of the poet … they seem the unartful notations of a human consciousness.”13 Both the unexplained sense impressions and the vague feelings of nostalgia and lassitude are typical of the best of Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles [Romances without Words] (1874) such as “Il pleure dans mon coeur” [It Rains in My Heart] or “Charleroi” [Charleroi], and are very different from Surrealistic imagery drawn from dreams or the subconscious.

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Emmanuel especially resembles Verlaine in the pieces that express his spiritual longing. Verlaine’s Sagesse [Wisdom] (1881) contains some of the most moving religious poetry of the nineteenth century, verse in which the poet often appears as a childlike petitioner asking for divine forgiveness, love, or comfort. Many of the XX Cantos follow this model, sometimes taking the form of a pseudo-dialogue between God and Emmanuel, as in Canto XV, “Mon dieu m’as-tu donc oublié” [My god have You thus forgotten me?], or Canto XVI: O fais que je ne meure avant de Te trouver – Crois-tu vivre à cette heure ne M’ayant point trouvé – Quand je T’aurai trouvé pourquoi vivrai-je encore – Que sais-tu de la Mort O toi qui n’es point né [O don’t let me die before I find You – Do you think that you are living now when you haven’t found Me – When I find You why should I still live – What do you know of death O you who were never born]. The prayer for spiritual enlightenment turns into a lesson on the senselessness of a life without God. The simple question-and-answer structure reveals the conflict between the poet’s impatient desire for God and his recognition of personal responsibility in matters of salvation. These poems contrast markedly with the complicated explorations of sin and desire found in Le Poète et son Christ or Tombeau d’Orphée.

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Finally, XX Cantos reveals the influence of Mallarmé, which Emmanuel fully acknowledged.14 As in Mallarmé’s sonnets and éventails [fans], several of the XX Cantos are organized around a single image which, as in Canto V, accrues symbolic associations in the course of the poem: O chanson poignardée où les couteaux scintillent Est-il plus belle tige qu’une épée pour un cœur? En moi fleurit la pierre pour que ton coeur s’ouvrît je lui donnai pour tige l’acier qui ne fléchit. Il a fleuri tout blanc près d’un étang de lune narcisse ton odeur m’emplit de nuit le coeur [O stabbed song where the knives shimmer Is there a more beautiful stem for a heart than a sword? a stone opened up in me and so your heart could flower for a stem I gave it steel that does not bend. It was all white when it flowered near a pool of moonlight narcissus your scent fills my heart with night]. The dominant image is that of a knife that wounds the song in the first stanza but then becomes a sword forming the support of the heart-flower in the central stanza. It changes into the narrow stem of a narcissus on the edge of a moonlit pond in the conclusion. Since the song and the heart

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are one, the sword comes to symbolize suffering that gives life to the heart as well as beauty and meaning to poetry. Emmanuel, like Mallarmé, is very conscious of the tenuous power of words over silence. In Canto IX, for example, he suggests that silence – Mallarmé’s “vide papier que la blancheur défend” [empty page with its forbidding whiteness]15 – triumphs over poetry: Tu es mon haleine ma main le fil de mes jours ma présence – mais pourquoi chanter l’évidence le seul silence lui convient [You are my breath my hand the thread of my days my presence – but why sing about what is obvious only silence is fitting]. The first two lines belong to a love song, but the poet then decides that even such simple and sincere emotional effusions are exaggerated and that silence offers a better means of communication. Canto X reaches the opposite conclusion: Plus silencieux que le silence (à peine un chant) les mots font des cercles immenses dans le néant Oblique, cette tige sur les nuées donne à l’âme le vertige de son identité [More silent than silence (barely a song) Words make immense circles In the emptiness Oblique, this stem above the clouds

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gives the soul vertigo when it grasps its identity]. In the opening stanza, Emmanuel implies that simple, unadorned words approximate silence. Once inscribed upon the page, however, they generate order and meaning, as do the stars and planets in the heavens. In the second stanza, words on the page become guideposts that lead the poet toward self-understanding just as the heavenly constellations direct seafarers on their journeys. The placement of “identité” [identity] in the last line clears up any misconception about the power of language. Words are the poet’s unique tools, the material of his creative activity as well as a means of establishing his identity. David O’Connell believes that Emmanuel “shares many of the concerns of those modern poets who see poetry essentially as a meditation on language and on poetry itself.”16 But Emmanuel’s treatment of the relationship between nature and poetry recalls the French Symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century much more than the writings of his contemporaries, and even shares the early English Romantics’ ambivalence about the power of art.17 Cantos, the expanded volume of 1944, treats a much broader range of subjects, not only war and Christian themes, but also the past, death, the passage of time, the speaker’s fears and hopes, and the consolation offered by the natural beauty of the south of France. Brunel suggests that Cantos was inspired by Emmanuel’s sojourn in Dieulefit, both by this Provençal village’s pastoral setting and by the relative peace he enjoyed there after leaving occupied Paris.18 Some poems focus on a single element of the landscape, as does Canto LVIII in its evocation of the sky: Lave le ciel dans le sang ô lavandière et dans les larmes rince-le pour qu’il soit bleu.19 [Wash the sky in blood o washerwoman and rinse it in tears to make it blue].

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The movement of the rising and setting sun reminds the poet of the rise and fall of cloth in a washtub. The sun is the washerwoman, who cleanses the heavens stained by sunset with the dews of morning to restore the clear colours of noon. The references to blood and tears suggest that the human soul, like the sky, will experience restoration through purification wrought by suffering. In Canto LVII the poet realizes that the mountains bordering his home mark his limitations in time and space: Monts de suave éternité à l’horizon de ma journée quand donc verrai-je en vérité dessus vos cimes se lever la parfaite, la bien-aimée Celle que nul ne sait nommer tant est secrète sa clarté en l’âme à l’ombre abandonnée (Cantos, 67) [Mountains of sweet eternity on the horizon of my day when will I truly see rising above your heights the perfect one, she whom I love dearly She whom no one can name so secret is her radiance within the soul abandoned to darkness]. The mountains have learned patience in their daily wait for the sun. Similarly, the poet, who awaits a beloved woman, or perhaps the divine presence, feels reassured that his patience will be rewarded and that the period of spiritual darkness will give way to illumination. Emmanuel devotes a good deal of attention to the individual seasons as well as to the transitions from one season to another. In Canto XLII, winter offers the assurance of spring: Ainsi quand semblent mortes les vertus du vieux sol un jeune arbre en sa force les délivre en un fol …

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honneur dont le cri tendre approfondit l’azur (Cantos, 52) [Thus when the virtues of the old earth seem dead a young tree in all its strength frees them in a crazy … gesture of respect. Its tender cry penetrates the skies]. The seasons accomplish effortlessly the transformation from death to life that the poet longs to bring about in his own soul. In Cantos, Emmanuel rejoins some of the oldest French lyrical traditions, those of the medieval troubadours and Petrarch, poets who found the expression of their emotions in the natural world. He also resembles his fellow Resistance poet René Char, another lover of Provence and advocate of the spiritual powers of nature that urban life has dulled. Some pieces are very short and reminiscent of experiments by the early twentieth-century American Imagists Ezra Pound20 and Amy Lowell in their simple metres and strong, clear imagery. Canto XXXIII, for instance, encapsulates the poet’s impressions of winter in three lines and ten syllables that recall the Japanese haiku in their concision, pictorial focus, and absence of commentary: Hiver côtes de vent moelle de fer (Cantos, 41) [Winter hillsides of wind marrow of iron]. At other times, Emmanuel uses a single stanza to create a cinematic effect, as if the poet’s eye were scanning a scene. Canto LXV imagines the natural world unfolding for the poet’s discovery: Pourquoi verte, l’éternité? O douloureuse, ô ineffable fougère encore repliée …

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Qui n’a senti en lui crier les premières feuilles des arbres ne sait rien de l’éternité (Cantos, 75) [Why is eternity green? O painful, o ineffable fern still unfurled … Those who haven’t felt the cry of the first leaves of the trees know nothing of eternity]. The ferns and the first shoots of spring make concrete the abstract concept of the eternal renewal of nature. More commonly, as Pierre Brunel21 has observed, Emmanuel’s preferred form in the poetry on nature is the assonated or rhymed quatrain, either alone or in series. The quatrain highlights sound rather than visual effects. In Canto XXVIII the dominant impression is that of rain striking windowpanes. This sound calls forth sobs, as if the poet were grieving in solidarity with nature. Both the patter of raindrops and the poet’s sobs echo through an empty house and an even emptier landscape, as the ticking of a clock marks the inexorable passage of time: Dans la demeure vide un cristal retentit Septembre qui se brise aux longs doigts de l’oubli La pluie déserte pleure aux vitres du passé un fleuve au loin descend les heures sous le ciel effacé O quelle âme sans cesse secouée de sanglots partage la détresse déchirante des eaux (Cantos, 36) [In the empty dwelling a crystal tinkles September that shatters in the long fingers of forgetfulness

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The empty rain cries against the windowpanes of the past a river in the distance moves down time under the blurred sky What soul shaken endlessly by sobs shares the heart-rending distress of the waters]. Although some of the Cantos express fear or a vague depression, these intimate reflections on suffering, isolation, and the transitory nature of life generally tend toward positive resolutions. When the war or troubling personal events from the past surface, they are treated without anguish. Kushner has called the short poems on war “autant d’hommages adressés par le poète à son pays humilié, aux victimes de la guerre, de l’Occupation, des camps de concentration; autant de cris d’espoir” [so many tributes addressed by the poet to his humiliated country, to the victims of the war and of the Occupation and the concentration camps; just as many cries of hope].22 Emmanuel reaffirms his connections to nature, language, and God. In addition, as Brunel notes, the imagery concentrates on simple objects from daily life or permanent elements of the landscape, such as mountains, water, and plants – all images that have a consoling effect on the reader.23 Chansons du dé à coudre expands Cantos to two hundred poems. Its six sections deal, respectively, with war, poetry, nature, loss, God, and the spiritual quest. Chiari believes that Emmanuel chose the unusual title “Songs of the Thimble” to indicate the fundamental simplicity of his artistic preoccupations.24 The small size of the thimble also corresponds to the brevity of the poetry. His title further suggests a newly assumed role as a weaver of words, or as a craftsman of language, which supplants his earlier stances as prophet or mythmaker. The opening fourteen poems, grouped under the title “De ma prison j’entends” [I Hear from My Prison], were written between 1939 and 1944 and evoke the war. The second section, “Sache te taire” [Learn to Be Silent], contains works generally composed after 1944 on the subject of artistic creation. Here, the poet counsels himself to let experience provide him with words, just as the sea does not seek out water but allows itself to be nourished by rain and rivers:25

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Les plus ailés des mots Traînent encore une ombre Troublant le fond des eaux Lorsque la mer Prête l’oreille Sache te taire Et la merveille Des eaux naîtra Sache te taire Et tu verras (CD, 50)26 [The swiftest-winged words Still drag a shadow behind them Troubling the depths of the waters When the sea Lends its ear Learn to be silent And the wonder Of the seas will spring forth Learn to be silent And you will see]. Section three, “L’Art de Mourir,” concentrates on nature and includes portraits of the human and animal inhabitants of the Provençal region. Many poems are little more than a single image: Violoncelle Homme-cigale Au ventre d’or (CD, 77) [Cello Man-cicada With a golden belly].

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The longer pieces of this section often rely on assonance rather than end rhyme. The poems of the final three sections fall into two categories: meditations on New Testament mysteries, especially the Nativity and the Passion, and reflections on the relationship between language and God. At times, these two preoccupations come together, as in “Noël, l’étoile” [Noel, the Star], where the poet imagines himself present at the Magi’s visit to the infant Jesus, wondering what gift he can bring the newborn king. An angel reminds him that his real first name, “Noël,” indicates the gift God requires of him: Cette poignée D’attente aride Et ce nom d’homme Noël, le tien (CD, 171) [This handful Of arid waiting And this human name Noël, your name]. At other moments, the poet concentrates on what he perceives as his most important task – finding the courage to name God: Je n’écris que pour Toi Seigneur Pour T’irriter pour Te séduire Pour Te présenter ma douleur Puis de ce tribut Te maudire … Pour en ton Nom m’anéantir Pour faire de ton Nom ma chose Pour me briser de repentir Pour Te moudre au poids de mes fautes (CD, 176) [I write only for You, Lord To irritate You to seduce You To present my suffering to You Then to curse You with this gift …

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To lose myself in your Name To make your Name my thing To break myself with repentence To mold You to the weight of my sins]. This conception of God as the poet’s “thing” that can be named with confidence, as can a familiar object, provides a fitting conclusion to a collection of poetry stressing simplicity and intimacy. Visage nuage grows out of Babel and L’Ouvrier de la onzième heure (1953), the second volume of the Autobiographies. In the conclusion of Babel, the Reciter dreams of a single language (BA, 281), at once concrete and spiritual, which offers the possibility of expressing all facets of life. The final pages of L’Ouvrier de la onzième heure explain further that this dream of unity arises from a conviction that contemporary artists have consciously separated poetic language from ordinary language in an effort to attain the ineffable. Not only are our minds and bodies split off from each other, but we do not believe we can use the same words to speak about God and ordinary life. Emmanuel does not accept such alienation. He asserts rather that the natural and supernatural are inseparable and that our understanding of God must begin with our understanding of the physical world and ordinary human experience (Aut., 468). The poet promises to be careful with his own language and to avoid the overly hermetic symbolism of his earliest poetry: “Cette attention au sens des mots est toute neuve, et nous éloigne d’un certain symbolisme qui les avaient dénaturés jusqu’à faire du langage la boîte à jeux de l’imagination” [This attention to the meaning of words is completely new for me and moves me away from a type of symbolism that had distorted words to the point of making language into a game box of the imagination] (Aut., 473). Visage nuage is the first volume of Emmanuel’s verse to take as its primary subject what Kushner has termed his “unquenchable thirst for unity”27 in life and language. This attention to words leads Emmanuel to rework old obsessions in a frank and personal way. The first section of Visage nuage, “Les Vivants et les morts” [The Living and the Dead], treats the fear of death and hostile child-parent relationships – two of the principal themes of Tombeau d’Orphée – without any mythical trappings. In “La Mort du père” [The Death of the Father], Emmanuel pictures himself baring his soul before his father’s body laid out for burial:

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Juge sévère tu es mort Je puis donc t’avouer mon crime Toi mon tyran fus ma victime Ton injustice était mon tort J’implore de tes yeux fermés L’ultime rayon de colère Maintenant que ta face, Père M’ouvre sans honte sa bonté (VN, 14–15)28 [Severe Judge, You are dead So I can now confess my crime to you You, my tyrant, were my victim, Your injustice was my sin I implore of your closed eyes The very last glint of anger Now that your face, Father Opens its goodness to me without shame]. There is a touching openness in the speaker’s recognition that father and son were inevitably enmeshed in conflicts that caused pain to both and that the father’s severity gives evidence of a love that could not be otherwise expressed. Although written in rhymed stanzas of eight syllables, these quatrains minimize rhythmic effects to give the impression of natural speech. “Benedicite” recreates in an unpitying and ironic fashion the petit bourgeois milieu in which Emmanuel spent his teenage years. Weighed down by guilt and the discipline of his elders, the poet recalls his feelings of entrapment and depression: Chaque soir plus raide au carcan Les pieds joints les mains sur la nappe Chaque soir ramené plus coupable A la table du tribunal (VN, 11) [Every evening stiffer than in a straightjacket Feet together hands on the tablecloth Every evening brought back ever more guilty To the table where I am condemned].

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In this loveless atmosphere, religious rituals such as grace before meals, the “benedicite” of the title, inspire disgust for Christianity. Reconciliation with the past extends to a reappraisal of death itself. In many poems, a dead or dying person appears, and the dead are perfectly integrated into the world of the living. “Les Volets fermés” [Closed Shutters] imagines a deceased woman, perhaps the poet’s mother, laid out in a room warmed by sunlight, scented with flowers, still loved. Emmanuel demonstrates the inseparability of the natural and the supernatural as a kiss to the corpse conjures up the vision of a protecting angel and assurances of the soul’s immortality. Death is less anguished because it takes place in a domestic setting amid the sounds of dinner at sunset. The comfort afforded by the sensations of everyday life causes the dying soul to regret only the simple pleasures it leaves behind: Un reste d’âme Passe en regret De ne connaître Le vin de l’an (VN, 20) [What is left of a soul Passes on, regretting That it will not taste The new year’s wine]. Life itself is the ultimate consolation, Emmanuel assures the reader in “Jugement.” A condemned man is granted strength in his final hour: Soudain d’une vitre anémique Le soleil jaillit sur ses mains Il emporta ce viatique Crispé dans ses doigts incertains Pour être sûr d’entrer au port A l’heure de passer la mort (VN, 24) [Suddenly through an anemic pane The sun jumps onto his hands He carried this viaticum Clenched in his uncertain fingers

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So he could be sure of finding safe harbour When he died]. The condemned man represents every human who finds existence absurd because it must come to an end and who panics at the thought of dying. He learns that such histrionics, as well as any pseudo-heroic revolt, are both unnecessary, for life has prepared us for death. Even “In Memoriam Dylan Thomas,” dedicated to the Welsh poet Emmanuel so admired and who implored his contemporaries to “rage against the dying of the light,”29 is an opportunity for Emmanuel to grieve without anger and affirm that Dylan Thomas lives through his poetry. According to Kushner, in the short poetry written after the Second World War, Emmanuel “has gradually cast off the garb of myth to bare the conflicts within his own psyche.”30 Nowhere does this effort at honesty come across more clearly than in the second section of Visage Nuage, “Confession.” In “Péché originel” [Original Sin], for example, the poet admits that he still views the body as corrupt and degrading to the soul. He also acknowledges that such guilt has poisoned his existence: J’envenime le vieil homme Que va gangrenant le temps Et je parfais cette somme De mort qui me fait vivant (VN, 30) [I poison the old man Who is being poisoned by time And I perfect that portion of death That makes me a living person]. Emmanuel frequently uses paradox in this section, especially to explore the contradictions in his own personality. In “Confession” he sees himself suffering from the Baudelarian “double postulation simultanée” [simultaneous double postulate], the simultaneous attraction to God and Satan.31 Emmanuel is at once honest and false, loving and destructive: Mon visage s’offre au soleil Mais mon dos lui cache sa lèpre …

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Je suis franc et nul n’est si faux Je suis pur et me prostitue J’aime et l’amour me fait défaut Je me donne à ce que je tue (VN, 31) [My face turns toward the sun But my back hides my leprosy from it … I am honest and no one is as false I am pure and I prostitute myself I love and I lack love I give myself to what I kill]. “Chanson d’un qui n’a pas pleuré” [Song of One Who Has Not Cried] expresses the additional fear that he cannot make sense of his painful past, lost forever in imprecise memories: J’ai vieilli mais je n’ai vécu Ma mémoire est un terrain vague Où je cherche un vague rebut Tout s’en revient si vite à rien Que c’est en vain que je m’obstine Quand le temps plat comme la main Pour osselets prend mes ruines (VN, 36–7) [I have aged but I haven’t lived My memory is a vague field Where I look through a vague scrap heap Everything reverts quickly into nothingness I persist in vain Since time as flat as the palm of a hand Takes my wreckage for its knucklebones]. Emmanuel finds some consolation in these appraisals of the past. In “Pierre” (Stone], one of his many mid-life poems inspired by reflections on his pseudonym, he admits that this name faithfully reflects the stubbornness that has delayed his emotional and intellectual progress.

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Nevertheless, like a rock, he remains solid and faithful to his project of self-understanding. The conclusion of the poem suggests that such tenacity will be rewarded: Ma nature n’est point profonde Mais simplement d’aller au fond C’est ainsi qu’une pierre sonde L’océan de compassion (VN, 45) [My nature is not deep It simply wants to get to the bottom That’s the way a stone sounds the depths Of the ocean of compassion]. Although Emmanuel praises simplicity, his vocabulary is often unfamiliar. We find many references to Greek and Latin mythology, even Latin terms such as “bifrons” [two-faced] (VN, 53). Uncommon medical terms, such as “nécroser” [to ulcerate] (VN, 56) or “myxomatose” [tumour] (VN, 57), as well as numerous regional, archaic, and technical terms, complicate the reading of Visage nuage. The poet requires this variety of imagery to explore fully the intellectual and artistic problems that interest him. “Visage Nuage,” the poem that gives its title to the volume, for example, establishes a three-way comparison among clouds, life, and weaving. The initial four and a half stanzas form a single sentence: Navette d’ombre nuage Nonchalamment promené Par un tisseur de mirages A travers notre journée Fil de trame de nous-mêmes Inconnu et qui nous fais Au hasard de quelle chaîne Montée au métier des faits Tels non qu’un destin d’avance Sur l’ensouple dessiné Mais que notre image absente A jamais inachevée

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Bien qu’à tout instant parfaite Par l’ultime va et vient Pourtant nul car la navette Sitôt refait son chemin Nul car un fil de nuage C’est moins que filandre au vent (VN, 78) [Shuttle of shadow cloud Nonchalantly drawn By a weaver of mirages Through our day You make a weft of our selves Unfamiliar and weave them Haphazardly into what warp On the loom of events? Not like a pre-ordained fate Designed on a bobbin But like our absent image Forever unfinished Even though it is completed at every instant By its previous comings and goings It is worthless since the shuttle Immediately repeats its movement Which is worthless, since the thread of cloud Is not even string in the wind]. Clouds pass through the sky as does a shuttle upon a loom. These clouds resemble the weft (“fil de trame”), the crosswise threads that create fabric as they pass in and out of the warp (“chaîne montée au métier”). Yet, unlike weaving, clouds do not create any order but rather appear randomly. In the second stanza, the poet learns that, as mortals, we experience the same randomness as the clouds. We are caught up in the events of the moment; fabrics woven too loosely, we are forever in danger of unravelling. Trained in mathematics, the sciences and classical languages,

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familiar with several foreign languages and literatures, resident of large cities and of small peasant communities, Emmanuel intends to draw upon all realms of knowledge in his poetry. Marissel signals Visage nuage as the first volume in which Emmanuel freely admits his Christian faith, which also inspires much of the poetry of Versant de l’âge and the complete volumes of Evangéliaire and La Nouvelle naissance.32 The final two sections of Visage nuage are devoted to Christian themes. The four poems of “Antiphonaire” [Antiphonary] are exactly what the title indicates: brief prayers dedicated to saints and the Trinity that can be read in two parts, as are certain parts of the Catholic mass, with the priest uttering one phrase and the server, or congregation, responding. The repetitions and bipartite divisions of the stanzas in “Hymne à la Vierge” (Hymn to the Virgin] could easily be adapted as a litany or a reading by two choruses: Porte de Dieu voile du tabernacle Porte de Dieu Eden muré seul parfait habitacle Eden muré (VN, 100) [Door of God tabernacle veil Door of God Eden enclosed perfect compartment Eden enclosed]. Emmanuel experimented with adaptations of the Catholic liturgy into French almost ten years before Vatican II would mandate such revisions. “Fragments d’une Passion” (Fragments of a Passion Story], the final section, focuses on various elements of the Crucifixion, underscoring its relevance for the twentieth-century believer. In “Faites ceci en mémoire de moi” (Do This in Memory of Me], for example, Emmanuel affirms the value of sacramental rituals: Le mystère du cep et du blé, nous sentons En nous toute l’humanité qui communie En devenant la chair de Dieu (VN, 109) [The mystery of the grape and the wheat is that we feel In ourselves all of humanity that takes communion Becoming God’s flesh].

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This poetry approximates prose by downplaying rhyme. It also seeks out the poetic potential of the most common words. Versant de l’âge (1958) is in part a retrospective volume. Having reached forty years of age and facing the approaching “downward slope of life” [“versant de l’âge”], Emmanuel reviews for himself and his readers his dominant preoccupations of the past two decades. These include his conviction that neither the physical nor the social sciences have brought about any moral progress, that the main explanation for evil lies in mankind’s rejection of Christ, and that the poet has a duty to tell these truths to his generation. No longer tentative about his artistic abilities, Emmanuel asserts in a polemical preface that he has learned to live fully in the present: “Je parle au présent. Je suis tout occupé de ce qui est: ici et maintenant est ma demeure. Que je souffre l’histoire sous mes yeux ou que je la scrute aux palimpsestes de ma race, elle est présente et elle advient en moi. Je dis ce qui arrive et ne cesse d’arriver à tout instant. Et je ne dis jamais qu’une chose: Moi, l’homme, je suis” [I speak in the present tense. I am completely taken up by what is: here and now is my dwelling. Whether I live through the history that takes place before my eyes or scrutinize history on the palimpsests of my people, history is present and I experience it. I only ever say one thing: I—man—am] (VA, 11).33 Emmanuel believes he has grasped the meaning of history – the history of the events he has lived through and those related in the Bible and classical mythology. Since he has no faith in progress, he believes that our intellectual and religious conflicts never change: “Ni dans le passé, ni dans le futur; je n’ai ni d’âge d’or à regretter ou vers quoi tendre. L’homme ne fut jamais, ne sera jamais meilleur. Il est” [Neither has there been in the past, nor will there be in the future, a Golden Age for me to regret or to aspire to. Man never was nor ever will be better. He is] (VA, 12). To live fully in the present means acknowledging our dissatisfaction with existence, with its solitude and unsolvable mysteries, and the conflicts between ourselves and others. For Emmanuel, all such problems can be explained by the quality of our relationship to the divine: “en mon angoisse est mon évidence. Si je m’éprouve infiniment seul, c’est que je suis en face du Tout Autre – de l’Infini et du Seul” [My anguish furnishes the proof. If I feel infinitely alone it is because I am confronted by the Absolute Other, by the Infinite One and the Only One] (VA, 17). The goal of this collection is to communicate the ever-present consciousness of God through a precise poetic language that does not minimize the complexities of our spiritual situation: “Par la rigueur d’un langage attentif, il

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[l’homme] accède à l’ineffable au coeur du dire” [Through the rigour of an attentive language, [man] reaches the ineffable that lies at the heart of speech] (VA, 33). Versant de l’âge treats all the subjects outlined in the preface: the poet’s personal victory over alienation, his development of a stronger, clearer language, and his attempt to make sense of time. A five-page introductory poem, “Eaux de contradiction” [Waters of Contradiction], and a six-page concluding poem, “Eternel retour” [Eternal Return], frame six sections of shorter poems. “Eaux de contradiction” written principally in rhymed lines of varying length, returns to the typological tradition of biblical exegesis and compares the generations living since the Redemption to the ancient Hebrews of the Exodus. Like the Hebrews, modern Christians resent a spiritual liberty that requires suffering. While they would willingly follow a victorious God, the victim of the cross cannot satisfy their desire for worldly power: Nous mourrions volontiers pour un Dieu qui se montrerait dans sa gloire. Mais qui de nous avouerait pour son Roi cette victime dérisoire? (VA, 38) [We would gladly die for a God who showed himself in all his glory. But which of us would acknowledge this pitiful victim as his King?]. Repeating an idea already expressed in the war poetry, especially in Combats avec tes défenseurs, Emmanuel unveils humanity’s propensity to destroy others as firm evidence of our need for Christ. The poet prays that his readers will recognize their love of war as the desire for the sacred blood spilled on Calvary. The volume’s concluding poem, “Eternel retour,” written in rhymed or assonated lines of twelve syllables, teaches that redemption remains an eternal possibility, since creation is an endless process. The first section of poems, “Nous enfants d’Hiroshima” [We Children of Hiroshima] speaks to the generation of Europeans living through the Cold War. New idols have replaced Nazism; science and the media do our thinking for us. Emmanuel accuses science of making warfare too easy and so impersonal that we are spared the sight of the victims of the first atom bomb, only noticing their vaporized forms outlined on the streets of

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Hiroshima. Scientific advances in daily life have infected us with materialism and reduced human contacts with nature, a situation that inevitably leads to anger and destruction: “La catastrophe et le confort / Sont les arts ménagers de cet âge imbécile” [Catastrophe and comfort / Are the domestic arts of this imbecilic era] (VA, 51). He condemns patriotism for the distinctions it creates between nations and the fraudulent sense of moral superiority it instills. As in Babel, he criticizes Communism for its false version of human solidarity, a version that excludes religion. Emmanuel speaks as a prophet in “Nous enfants d’Hiroshima,” using the same insults and accusations as in Jour de Colère. He presents himself as a witness to the atrocities that have already occurred but also warns his readers to cast off their indifference and prepare for divine vengeance. At the same time, he questions the value of prophecy in an atheistic world. The poet is a prophet who is no longer understood: Mais le prophète au coeur de colombe, personne N’a plus de mots pour le comprendre (VA, 62) But the prophet whose heart is like that of the dove, The language needed to understand him no longer exists. The second section, “Dies irae” [Day of Wrath], treats death and human error. Emmanuel so closely imitates many of the themes of Les Fleurs du mal that these five poems can be considered a tribute to Baudelaire, who denounced moral corruption in verse a century earlier. These poems are sadistic, vulgar, and blasphemous. Like the speaker in Baudelaire’s “L’Héautontimorouménos,” who presents himself as “et la victime et le bourreau” [both victim and executioner],34 Emmanuel claims: Je suis le rongeur qui me ronge La vermoulure du mensonge Me nourrit de ma vérité (VA, 88) [I am the rodent that gnaws me The moth-eaten cloth of lies Feeds me my truth]. These are Emmanuel’s most sarcastic short works. The titles of several poems require an ironic reading. In “Veillée funèbre” [Deathwatch], the

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poet explains that the compassion we demonstrate for the dead betrays the pity we feel for ourselves. We live constantly on the watch for the moment of our own demise. In “Le Vif et le mort” [The Living and the Dead], life offers no advantage over death. The living cannot enjoy an existence marred by constant fear of death, whereas the dead, no longer bothered by fear, enjoy a peace of mind denied to the living. Life emerges as the time when we inflict divine vengeance upon ourselves, whereas death will introduce us to God’s mercy (VA, 80–3). Through this emphasis on our obtuseness and hypocrisy, Emmanuel echoes the sentiments in the final verses of Baudelaire’s “Au lecteur” [To the Reader], where the poet addresses his audience as “Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère” [Hypocritical reader, my likeness, my brother].35 Emmanuel also treats his readers as mirror images of his own conflicted psyche, who like him need to be shocked into self-awareness. The tone of the following two sections, “Interrogatoire” [Interrogation] and “Le Pain et le sel” [Bread and Salt], changes completely. Frankly and joyfully, Emmanuel recounts in varied short metres, often rhymed, his conversion to life in the present. In his fifth decade, he realizes that he has remained the author of Tombeau d’Orphée and Le Poète et son Christ, stuck in a psychic grave of his own creation, between death and rebirth: Il y a quarante ans que je ne suis pas né Ou mille, ou la durée du monde Il y a quarante ans que j’occupe mon corps Sans être ici Où est mon corps c’est là ma place (VA, 99) [I’ve been waiting for forty years to be born Or a thousand years, or as long as the world has existed I have inhabited my body for forty years Without being here Wherever my body is, that’s where my place is]. His adoption of mythical personae – Orpheus, Hölderlin, the prophet – prevented him from realizing the identity he gave himself, that of Pierre Emmanuel. He vows to speak henceforth in his own name. This acceptance of the self includes an acceptance of the body. Stanzas such as the following suggest that he has successfully overcome any sense of division between flesh and spirit:

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Chair glorieuse d’être chair Corps que veloute l’âme Terre où me guide mon seul flair Nature faite femme (VA, 106) [Flesh glorious because it is flesh Body that the soul makes smooth Earth where my instinct alone guides me Nature made woman]. The thirteen poems of “Sagesse” [Wisdom] demonstrate the power of poetry to accomplish what science and the social sciences cannot; namely, provide an explanation for the individual’s place in the world vis-à-vis God, nature, and others. The language of these poems is especially interesting because Emmanuel takes seriously the notion that the simplest words are the most expressive. “Langage” [Language] repeats the word “rose” three times to stress that poetry’s main function is to name, that is, to bring the world to the reader’s attention. The reward for naming honestly and wholeheartedly is the ability to become one with what one has named: En échange de la rose Je donne à la rose un nom Pour répondre de ce nom Mon âme devient la rose (VA, 140) [In exchange for the rose I give the rose a name To vouch for this name My soul becomes the rose]. Other poems use similes or metaphors to explain psychic processes. In “Cendre” [Ash], the heat emanating from ashes illustrates how the apprehension of truth both destroys false reasoning and regenerates the mind: Comme le tison à blanc Mange le feu qui le mange L’esprit dévoré se change En lui-même dévorant

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La matière qu’il défait Son ardeur la constitue Tant que flambe la statue De sa poudre il la parfait Plus je sens la vérité M’illuminer d’évidence Plus vive est l’incandescence Où je cherche à la porter (VA, 130) [Just as the white embers Eat the fire that eats them The mind that has been consumed changes Itself into the consumer of The matter that it destroys Its fire composes it As long as the statue is aflame With its powder that perfects it The more I feel truth Enlighten me so obviously The brighter the incandescence Into which I seek to carry the truth]. Jean Rousselot points out that Emmanuel’s attitude toward language in Versant de l’âge is daring. Writing in the early years of the Cold War, when the notion of the Absurd ruled French intellectual life, Emmanuel had the courage to say there was no conflict between his religious faith and his acceptance of fidelity to his own generation: “sa volonté d’assumer sa condition d’homme dans notre siècle déchiré, enfin sa confiance dans la parole, lieu de communion entre les hommes” [his willingness to assume his human condition in our divided century, indeed his confidence in language, the site of communion among men].36 Allusions to Greek mythology and the Bible also appear frequently, as in “Marthe” [Martha], where Emmanuel compares himself to the less favoured sister of the Gospel of John, a worker who accepts the banal tasks that reflect her faith. The Bible and mythology are appropriate sources for the poet who wishes to use a common, eternal language, since

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their stories transcend history and still provide universally familiar moral lessons. The final section, also titled “Versant de l’âge,” specifically addresses the problem of time. “Lou temps vai e ven e vire” [Time Comes and Goes and Turns], an imitation of Occitan verse in stanzas and with a refrain, speaks of the static nature of time. People come and go; war, love, death are events eternally repeated, as time, like the wind “va et vient et vire” [comes and goes and turns] (VA, 147). “Deucalion,” an allegory, takes the contrasting position that every child regenerates the world, as did Deucalion, the Greek hero who recreated humanity after the flood by sowing rocks in the earth. Time is not only cyclical but also renewable. In the title piece, “Versant de l’âge,” the poet fears being swept along by the years with no means of controlling them. The final lines reveal the wisdom he has gained as he crosses the mid-point of life. He understands time as a manifestation of God: Si je nomme Oubli la transparence où baigne l’éternel Et cécité le souvenir de l’invisible, C’est que je n’ai su voir qu’avec des yeux de chair Ce qui passe de la mémoire, non la trame Que j’ignore et dont je suis fait: l’Autre, ses yeux Dont je n’ai rien gardé sinon cette lumière Qui m’apprivoise aux bords étranges du Léthé (VA, 157) [If I name Forgetfulness the transparency in which eternity bathes And blindness the memory of what is invisible It is because I have learned to see with the eyes of the flesh What passes from memory, but not the frame On which I am made and do not know: the Other, his eyes Whose light alone I have kept And which tames me on the strange shores of Lethe]. Evangéliaire (1961) and La Nouvelle naissance (1963) constitute a third category of short poetry. Evangéliaire began as a group of short texts designed to accompany the art book Jours de la Nativité, commissioned by Editions du Zodiaque. Emmanuel decided to expand his work on New Testament themes to three hundred pages of brief verse meditations on the

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liturgical year, from the Annunciation to the Resurrection.37 La Nouvelle naissance originated as the text for an oratorio requested by the director of National French Radio for a Christmas broadcast (NN, 9).38 Emmanuel retained the texts set to music as the introduction and conclusion of this ninety-page volume and added twenty-four shorter poems on the Passion. Many pieces of both volumes fall into the category of traditional devotional poetry. Some re-enact the “composition of place,” the first step in the meditative exercises formulated by Ignatius of Loyola. Emmanuel gives details of daily life and often transcribes the words or dialogues of the gospels. “Le Dernier repas” [The Last Meal] begins with a description of the room where the Last Supper occurs: Le couvert est mis Dans la chambre haute Meublée de tapis L’heure venue il s’assied Les Douze avec lui (NN, 37) [The table is set In the upper room Furnished with rugs When the time comes he sits The Twelve are with him]. Most poems investigate the meaning of the scene and its moral application. In “Annonciation” [Annunciation], we are given the details of Mary’s life after her meeting with the angel. The fact that Mary “reprend son ouvrage” [returns to her household tasks] (EV, 52) impresses upon the reader the humility with which she accepts her mission. Dialogue often sets the scene. In “Les Noces de Cana” [The Wedding Feast at Cana], for example, Mary and Jesus discuss what to do about the lack of wine: Marie qui aidait les femmes Vient à Jésus lui sourit Et sans demander le dit Il entend bien ce sourire Femme qu’attends-tu de moi (EV, 98)

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[Mary who was helping the women Comes up to Jesus smiles at him And without asking tells him what’s going on He well understands this smile Woman what do you want from me]. Mary’s contribution to the miracle is her ability to draw the divine son into the domestic realm. For readers familiar with the gospels, the presentation of Christ’s words effectively evokes the events. Emmanuel is not shy, however, about pointing out to readers less familiar with the gospels why they should consider the topic he raises. He often engages in a gentle demonstration of biblical exegesis. “Le Recensement” [The Census] of Evangéliaire, for example, pointedly directs the reader to the Roman census as a turning point in human history. Because Mary and Joseph were required by Roman law to return to Judea to be counted for taxation, Christ was born in the kingdom of David and fulfilled the prophecy of Zacharias. The census also proves that God works not only in mysterious ways but in the open: Au début de son deuxième chapitre Saint Luc Cesse un instant de rapporter des merveilles … Pour relater ce qu’on appelle aujourd’hui Un événement historique Un fait publiquement arrivé Non secrètement reçu Un noeud dans l’ensemble des choses Et dans la nuit irréversible des temps Une date à partir de quand (EV, 67) [At the beginning of his second chapter Saint Luke Stops telling about wondrous works for a second … To tell about what we call today A factual event That took place in public Not secretly

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A knot in the totality of things And in the irreversible night of time A date after which]. Typological imagery appears throughout this poetry. In “Le Roi des Juifs” [King of the Jews] the poet associates the prophecy of a conquering hero dressed in red (from Isaiah: 63) with the purple cloak forced upon Christ after the scourging, the blood of the Crucifixion, and the Eucharistic wine: Qui est celui qui vient d’Edom Et du Bosra en robe rouge Il ruisselle de vin nouveau Quelle vendange a-t-il foulée Il est la vigne et le pressoir La grappe de chair qui éclate Le vigneron sous l’écarlate Vêtu du vin qu’il a saigné (NN, 59) [Who is this man coming out of Edom And from Bosra in a red robe He drips with new wine What grape harvest has he tread upon He is the vine and the press The bunch of flesh that bursts open The wine-maker covered with purple Dressed in the wine he has bled]. French poetry has not seen such delight in exhausting the symbolic associations of biblical imagery since La Ceppède’s Théorèmes of the early seventeenth century. Typological imagery also structures simpler lessons, as in “Epiphanie” [Epiphany] of Evangéliaire, which equates the gold, frankincense, and myrrh with the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. A frequent procedure of Evangéliaire is to evoke the truth to be examined by using a Latin title. “Cella dei” [Storeroom of God], “Ros misericordiae” [Dew of Compassion], and “Trinitatis Speculum” [Mirror of the Trinity] all raise the question of Mary’s role in the Incarnation. At times, Emmanuel simply lists the attributes of Mary or Christ in imitation of a litany and leaves

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it to the reader to interpret the liturgical symbols. In “Ros misericordiae,” the poet addresses Mary as “Rose orientale” [Rose of the East], “Etroite clôture” [Narrow Gate], and “Giron de Dieu” [Lap of God], all of which suggest the simultaneous fecundity and purity of the Virgin Mother (EV, 57). Still other poems, or sections of poems, re-enact the colloquy or prayer, the final step of Ignatian meditation. These are often prayers of thanksgiving such as those found in the treatment of the Resurrection in both volumes. Evangéliaire concludes with a series of prayers grouped under the title “Salve festa dies” [Hail Solemn Day], and the penultimate poem of La Nouvelle naissance, “Alleluia,” praises the risen Christ. Mourant j’ai part à ta victoire Tu nais en moi tu es ma gloire Je me lève derrière toi De notre tombe Alleluia (NN, 82) [Dying I participate in your victory You are born in me you are my glory I arise behind you In our grave Alleluia]. Alleluia je n’ai pu empêcher Le Vivant d’avoir sa victoire … La foi renée chaque matin D’une inconcevable victoire (EV, 284–6) [Alleluia I couldn’t keep The Living One from his victory … Faith reborn every morning From an unimaginable victory]. In Evangéliaire and La Nouvelle Naissance, Emmanuel portrays the life of Christ sentimentally, emphasizing the kindness and good nature of the New Testament characters, who seem motivated above all by love. In “Annonciation” [Annunciation], the Virgin accepts her election to sainthood with trust but temerity:

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Marie pleure en silence Et livre à Dieu sa pudeur Sa totale confiance Toute abîmée de terreur (EV, 51–2) [Mary cries in silence And abandons her modesty to God All her confidence Has been undermined by terror]. In “Songe de Joseph” [Joseph’s Dream], Joseph’s fatherly instincts account for his joy over Mary’s pregnancy. Jesus resurrects Lazarus out of friendship in “Resurrection de Lazare” [The Resurrection of Lazarus]. This unsophisticated interpretation of the gospels is reminiscent of Victor Hugo’s naïve style in the poems of La Légende des siècles devoted to the Bible. Paul Claudel’s Corona Benignitatis Anni Dei (1915), a long meditation on the liturgical year, also takes a frank and childlike approach to the New Testament. In his reflections on the origins of Evangéliaire, Emmanuel claims to have rediscovered the gospels with the fresh eyes of a child: “Je croyais me raconter des légendes avec la magie d’enfance qui convient” [I believed I was recounting legends to myself, with the childhood sense of magic appropriate to them] (EV, 27). Emmanuel calls this simplicity of language an “esprit de pauvreté” [a spirit of poverty] (NN, 10) that allows him to explain the contradictions he experiences as a modern believer in the Bible. In “La Fin des temps” [The End of Time], he admits that the New Testament was incorrect in its predictions of a Second Coming, in which no reasonable person believes: Depuis deux mille ans le Livre est ouvert A la page du Jugement Pourtant constatez-le rien n’arrive Le ciel n’a pas chu ni le sol n’est fendu … Les Anges nul n’y croit plus (NN, 31) [The Book has been open for two thousand years To the page about the Last Judgment

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However, see for yourself, nothing happens The sky hasn’t fallen nor has the ground split open … Nobody, not even the Angels, still believe in it]. Evil continues to proliferate in the form of political torture, genocide, and capital punishment [“Golgotha,” NN, 62) as if the Redemption had never occurred. Yet the gospels retain their meaning for the contemporary world and Christ is eternally relevant. Evangéliaire and La Nouvelle naissance bear witness to this rebirth of faith; what Evelyne Frank has termed “la naissance du oui dans l’œuvre de Pierre Emmanuel” [the birth of “yes” in the works of Pierre Emmanuel],39 a belief no longer tainted by anger against his Catholic upbringing or the politics of the French Catholic Church. Yet, Emmanuel professes a faith appropriate to the twentieth century. He admits his doubts, yet, to quote Marissel “la foi domine: l’ironie et l’humour n’ont pas droit de cité chez le poète” [faith prevails: irony and a bad mood don’t dominate the poet].40 In Evangéliaire, the poet likens himself to a visual artist. He creates beautiful objects for the senses, but through his words also gives visible form to truths.41 In La Nouvelle naissance the analogy of the poet as a singer is predominant. The introductory and concluding poems are clearly marked in sections divided between ordinary type and italicized type that indicate which parts are to be spoken and which sung. In the twenty-four central poems, Emmanuel uses only short metres because, as he states on the back cover, he believes they make the poem more fluid: “des mètres courts qui coulent de source, chantent, forment la chaîne et se hâlent ainsi vers leur résolution” [short metres that flow from their source, sing, form a chain, and thus carry each other toward their resolution] (NN, back cover). “Stabat mater” could almost be a lullaby. In this revision of the traditional Lenten Hymn honouring the Virgin’s suffering at the Crucifixion, the first and third lines of each stanza repeat themselves, the second line remains constant, and the rhymes of three of the four lines are the same. The result is a singsong effect, at once sad and soothing: La Mère se plante la croix dans le coeur O fils ô mon fils mon amoureux lis La Mère se plante la croix dans le coeur Et mêle son lait au sang du Seigneur (NN, 70)

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[The Mother plants the cross in her heart My son, o my son, my lover my lily The Mother plants the cross in her heart And mingles her milk with the Lord’s blood]. Other poems resemble hymns or antiphons, and the volume as a whole could easily be used in an Easter liturgical service. If, as he claimed, Emmanuel wrote XX Cantos by chance, he had a clear purpose in mind in Versant de l’âge, Evangéliaire, and La Nouvelle naissance. The volumes of short poems, read chronologically, provide a record of Emmanuel’s spiritual development, from a troubled young artist with spiritual longings to a firm believer in the gospels. A progressive simplification of language and imagery is common to all seven collections, as is a greater willingness to use short metres and rhyme in imitation of liturgical music. The short poem continued as an important form in Emmanuel’s works of the 1970s. The second half of the epic Jacob is composed almost entirely of separate short poems, and short poems frequently interrupt the argument of his major works of the next decade, Sophia and Tu.

5 Long Poems of the 1970s: Sophia and Tu

The 1950s marked the beginning of a public career that Emmanuel maintained for over thirty years. His involvement with cultural and educational reform came about initially as a result of his work in the English and American sectors of the state-owned French radio after the Second World War.1 By 1950 he had assumed the unofficial role of spokesperson for French letters and was a frequent participant in international symposia on poetry. He was a visiting educator at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Brandeis universities in the United States as well as at Queen’s University in Ontario. The universities of Oxford, Neuchâtel, Pennsylvania, and Montreal all awarded him honorary doctorates. His international experiences led, in the 1960s, to several government appointments, first as secrétaire général adjoint du Congrès pour la liberté de la culture [Adjunct Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom] and later as the first secretary general of the Fondation pour une entraide intellectuelle européenne [Foundation for Mutual Intellectual Aid in Europe]. Through both of these organizations, he championed the rights of dissident artists in Eastern Europe, Russia, and South America.2 Political activism also coloured Emmanuel’s career in the French Academy. After receiving the Academy’s Grand Prix de Poésie [Grand Prize in Poetry] in 1963, he was elected to the august organization in 1968 – one of the few twentieth-century poets to figure among the “forty immortals.” He resigned from this position in 1975, however, in protest against the election of someone whom he considered a Nazi sympathizer. After the student strikes of May 1968, he was appointed president of a commission to reform French education. Although this commission, finding itself in conflict with the Ministry of Culture, ultimately disbanded,

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Emmanuel’s experience had a profound effect on his understanding of the French school system and even his vision of Western civilization and literature. In the final decade of his life, Emmanuel directed his energies toward international organizations devoted to literature and toward local causes, most particularly the creation of the Vidéothèque de Paris [Video Library of Paris), an audiovisual museum of the history of Paris.3 Emmanuel wore the mantle of public intellectual with great difficulty. In a 1978 essay published in the collection La Vie terrestre [Life on Earth], he speaks of the conflicts he experienced between his role as professional writer and his strongly felt vocation as a poet, conflicts that he attempted to resolve by writing essays: “je souffris à un tel point de la conscience de cette ambiguïté que je cessai d’écrire en poésie, et commençai une série d’écrits en prose comme thérapie pour m’en libérer” [I suffered so much from my awareness of this ambiguity that I stopped writing in verse and began a series of prose writings as a means of therapy to liberate myself from my suffering].4 Yet, Emmanuel never really abandoned poetry. Several of these essays, most notably the collected essays of Le Monde est intérieur (1967) [The World is Inside Us], Baudelaire (1967), and Saint-John Perse: Praise and Presence (1971), this last work written in English, consist of original and insightful readings of the greatest modern French poets – Baudelaire, Claudel, Péguy, Eluard, and Jouve. Even in his essays on education and contemporary culture, such as Pour une politique de la culture (1971) [For a Cultural Policy], he writes about the declining interest in poetry in the contemporary world and the need to integrate both the composition and study of poetry into secondary education. Emmanuel’s essay collections also shed light on his spiritual evolution from the mid-1950s until the 1970s, much as his two-volume autobiography, Qui est cet homme? and L’Ouvrier de la onzième heure, clarified his poetic and political development from his youth until the end of the Second World War. The most important of the essay collections, Le Goût de l’Un (1963) [The Thirst for Unity], proposes a definition of God unlike anything found in Emmanuel’s previous writings. He prefers the term “être” [to be; being], at once a verb and a noun: “Par être j’entends à la fois le tout et l’Un: d’une part l’intégrale de la réalité, la puissance infinie de création et de métamorphose, dans la totalité et l’unité de ses manifestations, immanente à tout mouvement, à tout progrès, à toute forme; d’autre part cette même puissance comme Dieu personnel, comme le tout Autre auquel je m’adresse quand je dis Toi au fond de moi-même” [By “être” I mean at once the whole and the Singular: on the one hand, all of reality,

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the infinite power of creation and metamorphosis in its totality and in the unity of its manifestations, its immanence in every movement, in all progress, in every shape; on the other hand, I understand this same power as a personal God, the great Other that I address when I say “You” in my deepest inner self].5 “God” becomes the universal term for all experience – life, death, the ability to create and to evolve, solitude, solidarity, the human desire for absolute meaning, the quest for self-knowledge. Emmanuel moves toward an abstract concept of divinity that can accommodate not only the Hebrew version of the Creator and the Christian notion of God as love, but also the divinity as seen by Eastern religions. In La Face humaine of 1965 [The Human Face], he defines as a poet any thinker capable of celebrating the inner life, which, in his opinion, has almost completely disappeared from the contemporary world: “Est poète quiconque habite en personne une réalité non réductible aux seules dimensions du monde objectif. Cet autre univers n’annule pas le visible, mais se le subordonne en s’y rapportant comme à un espace de projection” [Anyone who lives a life that cannot be reduced to the dimensions of an objectified world is a poet. This other, poetic world does not do away with what is visible but subordinates the visible world by relating to it as if it were an area of projection].6 He becomes pessimistic, however, about the appeal of dense, seriously religious poetry like his own to a society given over to religious cults, pop art, and dominated by the social sciences as well as by literary and philosophical schools that question the ability of language to express meaning. Emmanuel also sees no models for a spiritual community in the Western world of the 1960s and 1970s and feels himself drawn to the Christian middle ages, where, through shared liturgy, prayer, and song, there was no sense of alienation from churches, and people lived rich inner lives: “Ce qui donnait à l’union des coeurs, à nos solidarités, temporelles, à nos communautés historiques, à notre humanisme ou à notre vision religieuse un caractère sacré dont nous participions par le meilleur et le plus attentif en nous, ces églises, ces formes d’amour qui nous pénétraient et nous intégraient” [What united our hearts, what gave us our solidarity, throughout time, what gave us our historic communities, our humanism or what gave our religious vision its sacred character in which we participated with all that was best and attentive in us, were the churches, those embodiments of love that penetrated us and integrated us].7 The prose essays also indicate that, beginning in the 1960s, Emmanuel accords an increasingly important place to woman in the spiritual devel-

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opment of humanity. This is already evident in his praise for the Great Mother in Jacob. By 1971, in Pour une politique de la culture, Emmanuel considers women the only possible saviours in a male-centred society that imposes the rule of reason over every other human faculty. He calls woman “une immense réalité symbolique presque éliminée de notre fausse culture … Je lui donne aussi d’autres noms … Mémoire, Imagination, Intuition” [an immense symbolic reality that has almost been eliminated from our false culture. I also give woman other names … Memory, Imagination, Intuition].8 He conceives of woman as a deity, a trinity of inner powers meriting not simply respect but worship. In Sophia (1973)9 Emmanuel brings together his new conceptions of poetry, woman, community, and the path to enlightenment. In spite of its length – over four hundred pages of varied poetic forms – Sophia is not an epic because it is not a narrative poem. Rather, it is based on an architectural model. The seven sections of the volume are named after features of Byzantine churches and Gothic cathedrals. The title Sophia, as well as the reference to the dome in the central section of the poem, suggests the Hagia Sophia, the sixth-century Byzantine cathedral in Turkey whose name means Holy Wisdom and whose shape is that of a cross dominated by a large dome. The titles of the concluding sections, “Nef” [Nave] and “Rosace” [Rose Window], refer to the long nave and rose-shaped, stained glass windows of late-medieval Gothic cathedrals. In each section, the poet establishes a triple correspondence between an architectural feature, a time period, and one or more women, some real, some mythical. “Porche” [Portico], the opening section of Sophia, is set in the covered entryway of the church exterior. Its subject is the Creation, including the division of the first human into man and woman. The second section, “Tympan,” the frieze-covered tympanum above the cathedral door, recounts the Fall and Eve’s role in the expulsion from Eden. Two short sections, “Abside” [Apse] and “Choeur” [Chancel], evoke the apse behind the altar and the chancel in front of the altar. These poems move to the New Testament era and the female saints Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary. “Dôme” [Dome], subtitled “Missa solemnis” [High Mass], takes place in liturgical time during the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed at the beginning of the mass and also concentrates on the Virgin.“Nef,” the area of a cathedral where the congregation sits, is composed of poems on contemporary women. “Rosace” ends the volume with a vision of a lightfilled church, the goddess of wisdom Sophia, and eternity.

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While the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Catholic theology, and Greek mythology remain important influences in Sophia, Emmanuel branches out to ancient Near Eastern and Far Eastern religious traditions. The most important of these is Gnostic thought, which flourished in many different forms in the Eastern Mediterranean during the early centuries of Christianity and which claimed to offer its adherents insights into the hidden reality of the cosmos.10 In Gnosticism, “Sophia” is the feminized principle of wisdom. The concept of “Aeons” designates the personified forms of the emanations of the divinity, which, in Sophia, are often women. “Pneuma” refers to the soul’s impulse toward transcendence; “plérome,” the realm of the divine; and the seven heavens represent the cosmic realms separating the material world from the divinity. Emmanuel uses all this vocabulary in Sophia. The stories of the Creation and the Fall presented in “Porche” and “Tympan” are fundamentally Gnostic. They depict the Creation as a disruption of primordial unity and Eve’s role in the Eden story as mankind’s first step toward spiritual enlightenment.11 Emmanuel also takes ideas and characters from Hinduism and Buddhism; Maya, the goddess of illusion, is frequently mentioned in Sophia, and the sacred lotus flower is represented. The repetition of a single word or sound in some poems suggests the influence of Tantric Buddhism, a meditative philosophy that stresses the wisdom of woman, and practises the ritualistic recitation of mantras.12 There are also allusions to the Jewish Kabbalah, another quasi-mystical tradition, in the character of Lilith, the legendary first wife of Adam, evoked in “Tympan.” These signs of interest in a variety of Eastern religions do not indicate that Emmanuel turns away from Christianity in Sophia but rather that he enriches his understanding of Christianity with other teachings that stress the importance of the inner life, the non-rational character of spiritual enlightenment, and the redemptive function of woman. Sophia is the first of Emmanuel’s ecumenical work to proclaim the fundamental similarity of all religions. The two most significant poetic influences in Sophia are Charles Péguy and Paul Claudel, Catholic poets also devoted to the Virgin Mary. Emmanuel stood in awe of Claudel’s ability to convey the movements of the psyche in language that worked more through rhythm than through intelligible words.13 Emmanuel himself aspired to such a language. He also loved Péguy’s long poems on women saints and the cathedrals of France. In Le Monde est intérieur he calls Péguy’s last work, the 240-page Eve (1914),

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a “chef-d’oeuvre de l’art théologique … la figure la plus grandiose de la femme et de l’église à la fois” [a masterpiece of theological art … at once the most grandiose representation of woman and of the church].14 Moreover, it was a courageous defence of religion presented to a Europe that no longer believed in Christianity at the onset of the First World War. Emmanuel may have conceived of Sophia as a similar declaration of faith to the final generations of the twentieth century. He found much to imitate in what he termed Péguy’s “style répétitif” [repetitive style], the use of the same simple words – as simple as “et” and “elle” [and, she] – at the beginning of sequential lines of verse. In Emmanuel’s opinion, repetition of this sort imparted an elevating power to the poetry: “ce geste patient qui fait monter presque inconsciemment le niveau de l’âme, et assure l’imprégnation mystique du quotidien” [this patient gesture that unconsciously raises the soul and ensures that everyday life is imbued with mysticism].15 Such repetition also recalled the litanies recited communally throughout the history of Catholicism, which stimulated the reciter’s spiritual aspirations: “La litanie, c’est le temps devenu louange. C’est aussi, comme une suggestion héréditaire, l’expérience puissante et confuse, de la sainteté inhérente aux paroles une mémoire collective de la sainteté, l’anonymat d’une aspiration innombrable” [The litany is time that has become praise. It is also, like an intuition we have inherited, the powerful and muddled experience of the holiness inherent in the words of our collective memory, the anonymity of the aspiration of countless generations].16 Emmanuel also signals the influence of Henri Michaux, the midtwentieth-century Belgian poet who experimented with drugs to escape reason and wrote poetry of meaningless, alliterative syllables which, as Emmanuel explained in his 1960 address to the American Library of Congress, nevertheless “express a certainty and peace which are recompense for … rendering useless the great effort of the mind within its confines.”17 Camille Jordens also points to the influence of the Vedas, sacred Hindu poetry that uses a fixed refrain.18 The redirection of Emmanuel’s interest from visual imagery – the basis of the symbols in his early poetry as well as the foundation of his short, confessional poetry of the 1950s and 1960s – toward the sound of words and rhythmic groups indicates that he was conscious of entering a new phase of his poetic career, of which Sophia is the first manifestation. The opening section of Sophia, “Porche,” is a sixty-page meditation on the Creation, much longer than the versions of Genesis 1 in Sodome or Jacob. In the first piece, “Le Ventre l’oeil” [The Womb the Eye], the repe-

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tition of “a” and “o” forms an alliterative chant celebrating the mystery of cosmic unity, the abstract all and nothingness, the Alpha and Omega that precedes the cosmic creation: Ni deçà ni delà ni lieu ni temps ni haut ni bas Rien Rien sans repli rien inouï Ahan primordial non émis Abîme aphone Où sans écho Alpha latent dans Omega (Sophia, 11)19 [Neither here nor there neither place nor time neither above nor below Nothing Nothing without folds unheard of nothing primordial Groan not uttered Voiceless abyss Where without echo Alpha is latent in Omega]. The following piece, “Genèse” [Genesis], is a poetic exposition of the seven days of Creation that contains elements of the big bang theory. The universe begins with energy escaping from a primordial absolute, gradually clumping into the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire, which evolve into living plants and animals and, finally, into Adam and Eve. Rather than imagining an explosion initiating this process, Emmanuel presents the starting point as a very slow rhythm that causes matter, at once liquid and gaseous, to seep out by osmosis or distend by suction until the sky, ground, and water are formed. Emmanuel evokes architectural and anatomical analogies, often hermetic yet highly accurate. For example, he calls the firmament “Une voussure / De l’absolu” [An arch / Of the absolute] (Sophia, 16), not a vault but the arching curves that compose a cathedral vault, to give a sense of movement. The uvea, the posterior coloured surface of the eye, becomes a representation of darkness with the potential for light: C’est l’air sans vie, la noire uvée que rien n’allume Sinon, pupille d’ombre insondable, l’éclair (Sophia, 16) [It is air without life, the black uvea that nothing lights up Except, pupil of unfathomable shadow, the flash of lightning]. Emmanuel divides “Genèse” into ten shorter, numbered poems, a structural innovation he uses increasingly in Sophia. “Genèse” emphasizes the

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slow pace of creation and challenges the reader’s ability to understand time, which the poet presents as an endless process of combination and separation. It takes eons for man and woman to appear: Un jour paraîtront nus homme et femme. … Ce couple se pétrit se confond se sépare En pleine pâte universelle: en eux s’unit Et se dédouble le Principe des genèses Que leur étreinte met en branle hors du temps (Sophia, 20) [One day man and woman will appear naked. … This couple kneads itself blends separates In the midst of the universal dough: in them comes together And splits apart the Principle of all geneses That their embrace sets in motion outside time]. Underlying this description is the conviction that poetry can give a much fuller insight into the origins of the universe than science, because the poet masters the sounds and rhythms of intuition, memory, and imagination, while the scientist relies merely on reason. The first woman, who speaks in poems 9 and 10, identifies herself as song and as salvation for man: Comme Dieu S’émerveille à la beauté des mondes Sienne et cependant libre en ses inventions, … Sois heureux que la femme emplisse ton mystère Trouve-toi de te perdre en elle, l’écoutant Chanter à tes confins qu’élargit sans mesure Ce rythme qui la rend pareille à la nature Chant de source dont tu ne sais qu’il est ton Chant (Sophia, 25) [As God marvels at the beauty of the worlds A beauty that is His yet free in its inventiveness, … Be happy that woman fills your mystery Find a way to lose yourself in her by listening to her

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Sing at your borders that are expanded beyond measure By this rhythm that makes her similar to nature Song of origins that you do not know is your Song]. The prose poem “Oeuf spirale” [Egg Spiral] openly signals reason as a force destructive of the spiritual life. The following piece, “La Voie la Mère” [The Path the Mother], is written in lines of varying length. Emmanuel’s use of this poetic line was inspired both by biblical texts such as Proverbs, Psalms, and the Song of Solomon and by the verset [verset], a loose poetic line introduced by Paul Claudel in the early twentieth century to express surges of emotion or inspiration.20 Emmanuel here acknowledges woman as the repository of cosmic mysteries and the agent of rebirth into wisdom: O Mère! O Mère! non-savoir et savoir n’ont qu’un tissu ton intime membrane En toute chose s’éveille à peine le germe qui dans ton ventre vient de se greffer (Sophia, 33) [O Mother! O Mother! not knowing and knowing are a single fabric, your intimate membrane In all things there scarcely stirs the seed that has just planted itself in your womb]. The variety of verse forms and language found in this opening section introduces us to the verbal sensuality that René Plantier feels is the hallmark of Sophia. Plantier attributes this sensuality primarily to Emmanuel’s love of words, but he recognizes also Emmanuel’s desire to set himself apart from most of his contemporary poets – one thinks of Prévert, Char, Bonnefoy, Ponge – whose language is sparse. For Plantier, Emmanuel’s verbal exuberance “est une manière digne de résister à la mort” [is a worthy way of resisting death].21 This language is also fitting for the evocation of the poet’s pilgrimage to the cathedral. In “Porche,” the poems that begin with one-syllable or with one-word lines and gradually expand into longer lines translate what Jordens has called the poet’s “tâtonnement” [groping] for understanding.22 The poems written in versets correspond more closely to meditations on the meaning of this sacred space and to prayer. For Jordens, many individual poems of Sophia are hymns that express Emmanuel’s conviction, found also in Le Goût de l’Un, that “l’oeuvre de

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louange est la tâche majeure du poète” [the work of praise is the poet’s major task].23 Fittingly, Emmanuel dedicates two of the three final poems of “Porche” to his wife, Loo. “Etre la mère” [To Be the Mother] is a sevenpart work on the letters of the word “oui” [yes], “le mantra éblouissant” [the dazzling mantra] (Sophia, 39), extolling woman’s acceptance of her redemptive role.“O” is the closed womb, “U” the womb that opens to permit birth, “I” the apotheosized mother ascending through the seven heavens to the upper divine realm. “Hymne à la déesse” [Hymn to the Goddess] is a litany in twenty-one parts with the refrain: Révérence à Toi, révérence à Toi, révérence à Toi, Révérence, révérence (Sophia, 53–73) [I bow to You, I bow to You, I bow to You, I bow, I bow]. Some of the virtues Emmanuel ascribes to the goddess – forgiveness, grace, modesty, compassion – recall the virtues of the Virgin of Catholic theology, while other concepts – inaction, energy, illusion – are more characteristic of Gnostic teachings or Hinduism. Yet, in all twenty poems, the goddess is trans-historical and universal. Poem 2, for instance, brings together the images of Rachel at the well from Genesis, the statuary of the Parthenon, the Eucharist, and the Milky Way: Puissance qui es Raison en toutes choses Révérence à Toi, révérence à Toi, révérence à Toi, Révérence, révérence. Une femme revient du puits les bras ballants Portant sa jarre en équilibre sur sa tête. Le paysage et sa démarche ne sont qu’un Son pas est la respiration des collines. Ainsi le nombre: féminin et gracieux. Les yeux à l’horizon sans bords, la canéphore Si droite sous le poids des astres, c’est la loi. Tout à l’heure, debout à table, ayant signé Le pain, elle fera de manger et de boire Le geste recueillant la terre dans son sein. Regard plénier, tu es le dôme. Ta pensée

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Pupille où se sertit le ciel pour graviter S’exerce à la lenteur parfaite des étoiles (Sophia, 54) [Power, you who are Reason in all things I bow to You, I bow to You, I bow to You, I bow, I bow. A woman returns from the well, her arms swaying, Carrying her jar balanced on her head. The landscape and her gait are one Her footstep is the breath of the hills. Numbers are thus: feminine and graceful. Her eyes on the endless horizon, this basket-bearing caryatid Straight and tall beneath the burden of the stars. This is the way things happen. In a little while, standing at the table, having made the sign of the cross On the bread, she will transform food and drink Her gesture gathers the earth into her bosom. Absolute gaze, you are the dome. Your thought, Pupil where the sun, to complete its revolutions, sits like a gem in a chalice Practises the perfect slowness of the stars]. Placed between these hymns to woman, “Naître deux fois” [Twice Born] praises men who have the courage to enter “au sein de la Mère” [the Mother’s bosom] (Sophia, 45) and to seek wisdom through her. Woman replaces the male Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as a tripartite deity of the inner life, “primordiale Puissance / Imagination, Rêve, Coeur” [primordial Power / Imagination, Dream, Heart] (Sophia, 49). “Tympan,” the second-longest section of Sophia, turns to the Genesis account of the Creation and the Fall. Emmanuel places Adam and Eve’s story on the tympanum because these poems are intended to remind the reader of the past history of male-female relations, just as events from the Hebrew Bible sculpted into the door of a Gothic cathedral remind the worshipper of the history of human sin. Emmanuel’s new version of the first parents’ appearance and expulsion from paradise raises the same problems of separation and desire as are found in Sodome and Jacob. However, the notion of sin is largely absent.

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The first piece, “Lilith,” evokes the legendary predecessor of Eve from Midrashic tradition who refused Adam’s sexual dominance.24 Here, Lilith is a fetus that suffocates in Adam’s entrails. The poet associates Lilith with the anger that Adam feels at finding himself separate from God and the anguish resulting from his intuition of death. To replace Lilith, God’s hand reaches for Adam’s heart to find material for the creation of Eve. Emmanuel gives all the credit for Eve’s appearance to Adam, not to God. She arises from his first dream: Il concevait sa propre ténèbre Son mystérieux féminin. Tout son corps en travail de son Autre S’en imprégnait, l’esquissait en lui (Sophia, 86) [He conceived his own shadow His own feminine mystery. His whole body in labour to give birth to his Other Soaked up this Other, shaped it within him]. Her flesh is formed from his heart, a spiritual womb. She enters the world crying his name (Sophia, 90). Adam experiences the same blend of joy and astonishment at the first glimpse of his offspring as do all future human parents. In words that only a real father could have written, Emmanuel has Adam express wonder at the new life sprung from his body, a life once a part of him but now distinct: Le corps n’est qu’un lait, une odeur, un sourire, une pudeur des membres aux joues, une nappe entre chair et peau qui s’empourpre, tout entier soi et tout autre que soi (Sophia, 90) [The body is no more than a milky substance, an odour, a smile, a sense of modesty as the limbs touch the cheeks, a blanket between flesh and skin that turns red, altogether itself and completely different from itself]. God, for his part, cannot understand Eve, this fluid, evasive being, the incarnation of Adam’s smile. He withdraws from Adam in frustration:

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Dieu qui Se rêve viril dans la glaise sent sous ses doigts son rêve rêver; l’ébauche toute baignée de sourire, Il ne l’a pas humectée, cela sourd de nulle part sous le pouce qui presse, l’argile cède, élude, il faut petrir l’eau! Ce Dieu créant est un Dieu qui S’éloigne (Sophia, 91) [God who dreams of His virility feels his dream dream under his fingers in the clay; the outline all bathed in smiles, He hasn’t moistened it, it wells up from nowhere beneath the thumb that presses it, the clay gives way, evades him, He must knead water! This God who creates is a God who moves away]. For Emmanuel, Eve is not only the first woman; she is also a deity in her own right, who embodies the mystery of life. She replaces Christ as the one begotten not created, the spirit made flesh. Rather than try to explain this mystery, the poet simply proclaims it in “Blessure” [Wound], a poem in three quatrains of rhymed decasyllables that plays up the paradox of a single being divided into two sexes and the paradox of birth leading to death, then leading to rebirth (Sophia, 93). The following piece, “Bleu” [Blue], renounces any attempt to fathom these enigmas in favour of praise of Eve. Emmanuel combines a game of association between colours and other sensations, reminiscent of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” [Vowels], with a mantra-like repetition of “bleu” that evolves by phonetic association into the word Dieu [God] (Sophia, 96), the most suitable name for the mother of humanity. In “Regard d’Eve” [Eve’s Gaze] and “Regard d’Adam” [Adam’s Gaze], companion poems in three parts of almost identical length, the gaze is a metaphor for coitus. Both Adam and Eve experience love as unity, not only when emotion and body come together but also when male and female blend into each other. Eve’s unspoken thoughts best express this phenomenon: Je fus lavée Dans la tendresse créatrice au crépuscule

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Car j’étais rouge de ton sang dont se teindra Chaque soleil montant à l’aube entre mes cuisses (Sophia, 105) [I was washed In the creative tenderness of twilight For I was red with your blood that tints Every sun that rises at dawn between my thighs]. Adam’s blood stirs her womb; it brings her into harmony with the rhythms of nature. For Eve, love is the equivalent of giving birth, while for Adam love allows him to forget his terror of death. Without any sacrifice of tenderness toward Eve, Adam recognizes love as a means of contact with the absolute. He says to Eve: De ce grand vent tu es le porche, toi béante Sur l’infini. Que ma ruée à travers toi Dieu l’accueille pour ce qu’elle est: une rapace Prière sur la seule Identité qui soit. Lorsque j’aurai forcé mon nom jusqu’à son centre Que le regard de Dieu en ruisselle sur moi Il verra que je suis vêtu de tes entrailles (Sophia, 118) [You are the threshold of this great wind, you who gape wide Into infinity. May God welcome my frantic race through you For what it is: a greedy Prayer made over the only Oneness that exists. When I have forced my name into its center May God’s gaze gush over me He will see that I am clothed in your womb]. Given the positive quality of the relations between the first couple, the Fall comes as a surprise. “Ensemble” [Together] suggests that Adam rejects Eve when he begins to think, to rely on his reason (Sophia, 119). “Adam Serpent” [Adam Snake] and “Nus” [Naked Ones] portray the fear of death that overwhelms Adam, causing him to view woman as the obstacle between him and eternity. Emmanuel also hints that there was no sin, but merely a misunderstanding perpetuated by all future genera-

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tions of Christianity. In “O Vénérable o misérable” [O Venerable, O Miserable], the poet expresses his contrition for having accepted a facile explanation that places the responsibility on woman and exonerates man: Je ne saurais discerner en ton acte la transgression de la sainteté Ni le besoin du serpent de sa ruse Etait-il vraiment le Démon tel que les âges l’ont unanimement désigné Ou le Désir de la matière vers toi ô médiatrice ô instigatrice (Sophia, 129) [I cannot find in your act a transgression against the sacred Or a need for the snake or for his ruse Was the snake really the Demon that all time has unanimously judged him to be Or was he just the Desire of matter for you, o mediator, o instigator]. At the same time, he acknowledges the value of the Fall as the felix culpa that set humanity on the quest for redemption and consecrated woman as humanity’s spiritual intercessor: Le Féminin n’était que ventre il devient Eve où Dieu S’imprime … Pour débusquer Dieu de Lui-même bienheureux ce premier péché (Sophia, 137) [The Feminine was only the womb, it becomes Eve on whom God imprints Himself … Because it forced God out of Himself this first sin is blessed]. Emmanuel concludes “Tympan” with the story of Cain. The title “Fils de l’homme” [Son of Man], an ironic reference to the term Christ uses to designate himself in the gospel accounts, directs our attention to the

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dangers of the male uninfluenced by the female. Angry, fearful, intolerant of ambiguity, repelled by woman, Cain is the son of Adam alone and a cautionary figure for the reader. The third section of Sophia, “Abside,” places the poet inside the church, in the apse. This semicircular space behind the main altar of a Gothic cathedral is often broken into small chapels dedicated to saints. Fittingly, all of these poems except the introductory sequence evoke New Testament incidents in which women play significant roles – Mary Magdalene, the woman who anoints Christ at Passover, the sisters Martha and Mary, and the three women who visit Christ’s tomb on Easter morning. Emmanuel dedicates the entire section to the prostitute, the woman who since the beginning of time has sacrificed herself to man, as the poet indicates through a pun, “par-don” [pardon / as a gift] (Sophia, 153), through the gift of her body.25 “Abside” is one of the two shortest sections of Sophia and easy to read. Most of these poems use short metres, simple vocabulary, and some rhyme, much like the poetry of Evangéliaire. “Abside” opens with the four-poem sequence “Acathiste de Madeleine” [Acathistus of the Magdalene]. Emmanuel uses the unusual term “acathistus,” a liturgical practice begun in the medieval Greek Catholic Church in which the celebrant and congregants sing the praises of the Virgin Mary while standing.26 He may have chosen this term to connect contemporary Catholicism with its ancient origins and thus stress the devotion to female saints that has always been a part of Catholicism. More significantly, however, through the word “acathistus” he bestows the holiness of the mother of Christ on all women, even those scorned by the world. Brian Merrikan Hill has deemed these four poems “magnificent” in their ability to demonstrate the prostitute’s Christ-like behaviour.27 Prostitutes preserve men’s dreams of love and beauty in the dark alleys and on the street corners of modern cities. They revitalize urban life by stimulating the imagination and, above all, they defer the awareness of death and offer a reprieve from despair, if only for an hour. These poems are realistic and erotic, but also tender and respectful. The third poem, for example, compares the prostitute to those who prepare the dead for burial and acknowledges their courage as they undergo the worst indignities of the flesh: Plus familière que les laveuses des morts Avec nos corps moisis à l’odeur sursitaire Tu souffres leur déshabillage vergogneux

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Quand nous les mettons nus dans les chambres d’une heure Pour que ta grâce leur prolonge un vain délai (Sophia, 147) [More familiar with our bodies, moldy with the odour Of our deferred death, than women who wash corpses You tolerate our shameful undressing When we place ourselves, naked, in bedrooms rented by the hour So your charms can prolong our futile reprieve from death]. The poem that follows “Acathiste de la Madeleine,” “Le Vase d’Albâtre” [The Alabaster Vase], is the first of six that alternate between the recreation of a gospel passage and analysis of the passage’s significance in the history of women. As in Le Poète et son Christ, Emmanuel instinctively approaches the New Testament from the Ignatian meditative tradition, analysing scenes for their theological content and drawing moral lessons from the texts. “Le Vase d’Albâtre” evokes the unnamed woman who interrupts Christ’s meal to bless him with precious ointment (Matthew 26:7; Mark 14:3). The scene takes place from the perspective of Christ’s host, Simon, a leper in the gospels but here a Pharisee representing all male-dominated societies that resist social change. Simon’s language is vulgar. He calls the woman “cette femelle en chaleur” [that woman in heat] (Sophia, 151). His only interest in her act of generosity is the loss of money: Ce parfum est d’un grand prix La fille a l’argent facile Trois cents deniers en fumée! (Sophia, 150) [This perfume is very expensive The girl is free with her money There go three hundred coins up in smoke!]. Simon’s remarks relate the woman to Christ, another outsider motivated by love and sacrifice. In the course of the poem, Simon relives Adam’s experience of alienation and senses woman’s regenerative powers but cannot accept them. Emmanuel calls the woman “un trou” [a hole] (Sophia, 152), here symbolic of the total abandonment of personal interest which permits love. At the same time, she is a container, a vase of ointment that becomes the tomb into which Christ and all mortals must

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descend. Because her body has undergone the corruption of her clients, the prostitute, like Mary Magdalene, understands death, as Emmanuel implies by quoting Christ’s words from the gospels: “Elle a gardé ce parfum Pour ma sépulture.” Mots que pas un ne comprit Excepté Marie. C’était bien là son odeur Sa chair saturante Tombeau de tant de clients (Sophia, 153) [“She has saved this perfume For my burial.” Words no one understood except Mary. She recognized her own smell Her saturating flesh Tomb of so many clients]. The obsession with death that pervades “Abside” appears again in “La Meilleure part” [The Best Part], which deals with the sisters Martha and Mary of Luke 10:40–1. The title is ironic because, in Emmanuel’s poem, the good part reserved for the idle sister is to serve as “lieu de la chute” [a landing place] (Sophia, 160) for Christ’s crucified body. Although the two following poems, “Femme au jardin” [Woman in the Garden] and “Le Jardinier” [The Gardener], move to Easter morning and the visit of Mary Magdalene to the resurrected Christ’s tomb, their main interest is Christ’s unique experience of mortality. The repeated phrases “tu es la terre” [you are the earth] and “trois nuits” [three nights] translate the poet’s astonishment at Christ’s return from death. The time between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection allows a reunion with the earth – the “Mère des morts” [Mother of the Dead] – the womb that receives everyone. “Le Jardinier” concentrates on Mary Magdalene’s intuitive grasp of the significance of Christ’s resurrection. Her joy betokens her understanding that the paradise forfeited in Eden has been restored eternally: Dilacérée hors d’elle-même illuminée au fond de soi Tout son corps se jette en avant pour toucher Celui qu’elle voit

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… Tel est pour Marie le Royaume où s’éternise et meurt sa faim (Sophia, 166) [Completely beside herself illuminated in the depths of her being Her whole body flies forward to touch The One she sees … For Mary this is the Kingdom where her hunger is perpetuated and satisfied]. The conclusion of “Abside,” “Sainte de l’Abîme” [Saint from the Abyss], praises the Magdalene figure, both the New Testament sinner and her modern incarnation as a prostitute, for her ability to confront death and accept the weakness of men, as well as for her readiness to offer herself as solace.28 The fourth section, “Choeur,” dedicated to the Virgin Mary, takes place before the altar in the chancel, or choir. In Christian churches, this is the site of the tabernacle as well as the place where officiants remain during the liturgy. Most of the poems of this section can be read as prayers. “Théologales” [The Theological Virtues] are versions of the Catholic acts of faith, hope, and charity written from the point of view of a twentiethcentury believer who is all too aware of the difficulty of continuing his childhood beliefs into adulthood, hoping for God’s kingdom in a world sullied by evil, or loving an absent divinity. “Ecce ancilla” [Behold the Handmaid] recalls the Catholic hymn Magnificat. The concluding poem “Angelus” is a meditation in French on the Latin verses of the Ave Maria. “Ecce ancilla,” “Germe de Dieu” [Seed of God], and “Premier huitième jour” [First Eighth Day] celebrate Mary’s obedience and chastity. Many of these prayers are also songs, most clearly the Ave Maria. In addition, the repetition of the initial line, “Certes il y eut (c’était dans une autre vie)” [Certainly there once was (that was in another life)] (Sophia, 183–5), in the three parts of “Théologales” allows us to read these poems as a hymn in three stanzas. The repetition of “Louée sois-tu” [Be Thou Praised] (Sophia, 192) in the opening of “Prose de la Résurrection” [Prose of the Resurrection] resembles a litany. Taken together, the poems of this short section recreate the Angelus, the liturgical prayer in honour of the Incarnation, in which the Hail Mary is recited three times a day – morning, noon, and evening – as church bells ring the hour.29 In “Choeur” Emmanuel turns his attention to traditional Catholic devotional prac-

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tices that can be performed either silently by the individual or communally during the mass. “Choeur” is also the most theologically dense section of Sophia. “Marie Eve” [Mary-Eve], the ten-poem sequence that begins “Choeur,” is an exegesis of the Incarnation story that not only explains Mary’s role in the redemption of humanity but also argues for her divinity. In “Marie Eve” Emmanuel presents the Incarnation as a cosmic event. Mary’s virginity sunders the heavens like a lightening bolt (Sophia, 174). Her womb is a centrifuge that separates light from darkness; her amniotic fluid – “ses eaux galaxiques” [her galactic waters] (Sophia, 175) – gives rise to the stars. She is the Gnostic divine realm: “le Plérôme / Protégé par l’hymen de l’abîme est en toi” [the Plerome / Protected by the hymen of the abyss is in you]” (Sophia, 176). Yet Emmanuel also arranges his treatment of the Incarnation as if there were a series of paintings or sculptures around the walls of his church telling the Virgin’s story. He begins with Eve in the Garden of Eden, moves to the angel’s appearance to the innocent girl in her family home, and ends with the Pietà at the Crucifixion. Untainted by sin, Mary preserves the goodness of the world before the Fall and becomes a fitting consort for God the Creator. She shares the intuitive wisdom of her ancestress Eve. Just as Eve understood the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as a sign of God’s need for the human creatures he left to themselves in Eden (Sophia, 174), Mary recognizes the first stirrings of her unborn child as a renewal of God’s love for mankind: Sans comprendre aucun mot de l’ange Tu en captes l’immensité l’amour divin (Sophia, 180) [Without understanding a word the angel says You grasp its immensity divine love]. Mary is superior to Eve in her ability to integrate wisdom into her daily existence as well as in her acceptance of suffering. After the angel’s announcement, “la vie simple / Reprend son cours” [everyday life / Returns to normal] (Sophia, 180). Mary knows that by bearing Christ, she also bears his cross, and through this willingness to give her child to death she accepts the experience of all women, from Rachel of the Hebrew Bible, to Sita, the wife of Rama in the Hindu Ramayana, to the Jewish mothers who lost their babes in Nazi death camps:

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Chaque fois c’est cet Arbre-Christ que tu expulses … Mère qui dans la chambre à gaz berces l’enfant Du haut du ciel tu n’en finis pas de tes larmes Tu es Rachel inconsolable dans Rama Eve pleurant Abel l’unique l’innombrable Ton fruit n’est qu’une croix ton ventre un golgotha C’est toi le tertre du supplice et du sépulcre (Sophia, 182) [Each time it’s this Tree-Christ that you expel from your womb … Mother, you rock your child to sleep in the gas chamber From your place in heaven you never stop crying You are Rachel inconsolable in Rama Eve crying over Abel, her only one, the one like so many others Your fruit is nothing but a cross your womb a Golgotha You are the mound of torture and of the sepulchre]. As divinity holding sway over life and death, goddess of wisdom but also of compassion, and the omega of creation (Sophia, 176), Mary is the equal of her Son and merits equal veneration. Just as the dome is the central architectural feature of Byzantine churches, so also “Dôme” is the centrepiece of Sophia. In twenty-one poems written in lines that recall the Claudelian verset, Emmanuel meditates on the words of the Nicene Creed, the act of faith recited by the priest and the faithful during the mass after the gospel and before the consecration of the Eucharist. Emmanuel had already included meditations on the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes in Jacob, but in the 1971 poem both the prayers and his verse commentaries were in French. In Sophia, Emmanuel quotes the Ave Maria of “Choeur” and the Nicene Creed of “Dôme” in Latin and follows the Latin words with his own poetry in French. It is possible to interpret his use of Latin as a critique of the translation of the mass into vernacular languages that followed Vatican II and was in place throughout Europe by 1973, the date of Sophia’s publication. In this poem, which celebrates the history of Catholicism as well as that of the Virgin, the use of Latin acknowledges the importance of this language, considered the universal language of the Church until the 1960s, in the formation of Catholicism. René Plantier notes that the mixture of Latin and French voices creates an active meditation, in which the poet attempts to bring his thoughts and words into harmony with the timeless Latin text.30

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Emmanuel gives the title “Missa solemnis” [High Mass] to this fortypage meditation on the Nicene Creed, a title that suggests the importance of this poem in Emmanuel’s spiritual evolution. This public admission of his return to his childhood religion is equivalent for him to celebrating the Eucharist. These pages analyse and affirm his acceptance of the doctrines of God’s omnipotence, the universality of the Catholic Church, the resurrection of all humanity at Christ’s Second Coming, and the existence of the prophets. “Dôme” is intended, however, less as a meditation on Catholic doctrine than as a hymn of praise to God the Father, Christ, and Mary. It also praises faith itself, the virtue Emmanuel understands as encompassing hope and love, the equivalent of the Virgin’s “yes” at the Annunciation. Emmanuel’s hymn is a choral composition. In the opening piece, the voices of the faithful unite in a vocal offering that echoes the priest’s consecration of the host and chalice as well as the sacrificial holocausts of the Hebrew Bible: Avec sa voix atteindre ce point où c’est par grâce que l’on ne se rompt Où le brasier de chant est si haut qu’il est tunique sacrificielle De la victime mangée du dedans sur le bûcher que sa louange nourrit. Le choeur étage ses murets de fagots la pyramide a pris tout ensemble …. Un seul alto tisonnant l’incendie où se fracassent en tonnerre les basses (Sophia, 213) Reach with our voices that point where it is only by the grace of God that we don’t break apart Where the flames of song are so high they become the tunic worn by the sacrificial victim The victim eaten on the inside on the funeral pyre that his prayers of praise nourish The choir stacks its logs into walls on the pyre the whole pyramid caught fire at the same time …

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A single alto stirs the fire in which the bass voices crash in a thunder]. Emmanuel concludes “Dôme” with song rebounding from the domed ceiling and falling onto the congregation like a benediction. Throughout “Dôme,” he stresses the importance of public prayer as the means of establishing a spiritual community among humans and experiencing the intimate presence of God. The church becomes a womb where God unites with humanity through the mass. “Nef” [Nave], the longest section of Sophia, contains more than a third of the poems in the volume. Emmanuel explains his intention in the opening piece,“Narthex,” the architectural term for the ante-nave of early Christian churches. Here, he admits to having reached middle age without any clear sense of self. To find himself, he returns to the Church, the symbolic womb of the Eucharist, the site of rebirth in Christ: Espèce ô matrice Du Seul en chacun L’église Leur songe unique C’est toi. Innombrable Aspirant à naître Toute en Celui Dont la ressemblance Les rassemble ici (Sophia, 260) [Species o matrix Of the Only One found in each of us The church Their unique dream Is you. Countless Aspiring to be born Fully in Him Whose resemblance Brings them together here].

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The mother remains the dominant female figure, but, as Emmanuel explains, “la Grande Merè / A bien des formes parmi nous. Et des prières / Bien différentes vont à elle” [the Great Mother / Appears in many forms among us. And very different prayers / Go out to her] (Sophia, 288). Poems on real women alternate with poems on goddesses, prostitutes, and women of the 1970s, as well as to France and the Christian Church, allegorized women. Most of these poems analyse the relations between men and women either in Emmanuel’s own life or in the contemporary world. They often involve reflections on the Fall and the Redemption, and also on urbanization, politics, and philosophy expressed in a variety of styles, from erotic love poetry to irony and parody.31 “Nef” brings us intimate poetry reminiscent of Versant de l’âge. “Hommes sans mère” [Men without Mothers] addresses the poet’s own mother, who left him to be raised in France while she lived in America: Mère dont j’ai noirci le sein dans ma mémoire De ne t’avoir connue dois-je me pardonner? Je te rappelle en vain quand je voudrais t’aimer (Sophia, 264) [Mother whose bosom I have sullied in my memory Must I ask for pardon because I didn’t know you? When I try to love you I can’t recall you]. Several poems are inspired by his wife, Loo. “A une proie” [To a Prey] envisages woman as love personified; “Dire je t’aime” [To Say I Love You] celebrates monogamous relationships; and “Jalousie” [Jealousy] recreates the emotional experience of sexual possessiveness. The most intimate and beautiful of these poems is “Confession du mal-aimant” [Confession of One Who Loves Poorly] – an obvious allusion to Apollinaire’s “Chanson du mal-aimé” [Song by One Poorly Loved]. Each of the four parts of this poem on misunderstanding and misuse of love begins with a plea for forgiveness. The poet admits to having seen love as a means of growing up quickly, of avoiding the pain of adolescence. He apologizes for reducing sexual contact to mechanical ecstasy and for idealizing women. The poem ends with praise of marriage, the foundation of understanding between the sexes: Toi le sujet de mon désir essentiel ô mon épouse que j’aurais dû chercher dès l’aurore

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Toi la sagesse qui te tiens à ma porte tandis qu’en vain ma raison bat les chemins (Sophia, 345) [You, the object of my essential desire, o my spouse, whom I should have sought out from the start You, the wisdom standing at my doorstep while my reason wandered aimlessly]. Other poems explore the tension between eroticism and religion. In “Contresens mystique” [Mystical Mistranslation], Emmanuel asks naïvely why sexual desire exists if it does not lead to spiritual salvation. In the conclusion, a kiss becomes a moment of transcendence. “Sainte Mère Eglise” [Holy Mother Church] frankly states Pierre Emmanuel’s justification for remaining a Christian even though his conception of God is hardly orthodox. Christianity is simply the only religion that makes death meaningful, and the Church is a living testament to the Redemption: Cette voûte n’eût-elle pas existé – mais comment ce ventre n’eût-il existé? – je serais mort sitôt conscient d’être homme, affaissé insondablement dans le poids, crevé d’un coup, ô néant bienheureux! par le puits dont l’humanité est la chute (Sophia, 388) [If this vaulted space hadn’t existed – but how could this womb not have existed? – I would have died the minute I was conscious of being mortal, sunk unfathomably under the weight, burst apart once and for all, o blessed emptiness! by the well of which humanity is the fall]. Such frankness about a poet’s personal life is unusual in French poetry after the Second World War, but it does resemble the work of American confessional poets such as Robert Lowell of the 1950s and 1960s.32 Allusions to Baudelaire in “Hommes sans mère” and to Apollinaire in “Confession du mal-aimant” indicate that Emmanuel acknowledges his debt to earlier French poets of the confessional genre but wishes to distance himself from their exaggerated self-pity. Many poems touch upon the situation of contemporary European and

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American women. “Heure de pointe” [Rush Hour], “Métro” [Subway], and “Publicité” [Advertising] all bemoan the promiscuity between the sexes encouraged by city life, where huge posters on the streets and in public transportation make eroticism into a sellable commodity. For Emmanuel, women suffer most from this commercialization of sex, which provides men with easy, uninvolved satisfaction, as he explains in the prose poem “Publicité”: On est bien seule, quand la nudité se vend à vil prix dans les boutiques, sur ces posters où les plus faibles des hommes trouvent au choix confirmation de leurs rêves les plus outrés (Sophia, 303) [We are really alone when nudity is for sale so cheaply in the stores, on posters where the weakest of men have their pick of affirmations of their most outlandish dreams]. “Sex shop” sees the popularization of pornography as the source of further alienation between men and women because it depersonalizes sex. “Women’s Lib” is the angriest of these works. Emmanuel returns to the declamatory, ironic style of his war poetry to condemn advertising. The cosmetics and perfumes hawked by ubiquitous ads offer easy ways for women to attract men, yet these products erase individuality and objectify women. He uses many quotations from actual English-language commercials – “Kiss him in his favourite flavour” (Sophia, 305); “Your biggest perspiration problem isn’t under your pretty little arms” (Sophia, 306) – as well as sentences in English – “Whose me am I?” (Sophia, 306); and “Love is the most fun you can have in the world without laughing” (Sophia, 307). Emmanuel also blames mass culture for influencing women to conform to specific physical types. He mocks the delusions encouraged by the cosmetics industry with a vulgar parody of a familiar Clairol commercial. “Blondes have more fun,” becomes “On dit que les blondes jouissent davantage” (Sophia, 307); that is, blonds have more orgasms. In these poems, as in Babel, Emmanuel points out the ability of language to manipulate. The poem provocatively titled “Avortement” [Abortion] considers abortion the triumph of masculine logic over feminine sensibility. Science, masking itself as the anonymous “On” [One], claims that there is no difference between the fetus and cancer cells, and destroys both without moral reservation, while the pregnant woman, who feels

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every progress of the life inside her, remains silent (Sophia, 368–71). In these poems of “Nef,” Emmanuel takes the role of a cultural critic who analyses the changes wrought by mass media, science, and technology and tries to lead the reader back to the spiritual foundations of Western society. The demonic side of the female force also is given a significant place in several poems of “Nef.” Emmanuel equates war, the plague into which he was born in 1916 and which continued in the form of the Cold War until his death, with an evil mother. The most important piece, “O Mère quand tu mens” [Oh Mother When You Lie], the second poem in “Nef,” ends with the notation “Guerre d’Algérie” [Algerian War]; it resembles the poetry of Tristesse, ô ma patrie (1946), in which Emmanuel appeared as a journalist witnessing Nazi atrocities and mourning the fate of members of the French Resistance. Like many poems of the war era, “O Mère quand tu mens” is written in rhymed quatrains of alexandrines – an anomaly in Sophia. In this piece, however, France is no longer the martyred nation. The French Republic is decried as a liar, and the republican motto “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” found on all French school buildings becomes the falsehood that led to colonization and the excesses of the war in Algeria. Although he loves his country, Emmanuel refuses henceforth to remain silent about any perversion of language that leads to human suffering: J’abandonne au vent sourd d’orchestrer notre gloire Et puisque mon pays se crispe comme un poing Qu’il me prenne à la gorge et ne ternisse point De mon souffle les mots sacrés et dérisoires (Sophia, 263) [I leave it to the deaf wind to orchestrate our glory And since my country clenches itself like a fist Let it grab me by the throat but let it not tarnish The sacred and derisive words of my inspiration]. “American Military Hospital,” with its ending note “Séoul, juillet 1970” [Seoul, July 1970], is a biting political depiction of the ravages of war. Emmanuel emphasizes the physical and psychological suffering of infirm soldiers by concentrating on the material conditions of the hospital – the rolling of the gurney through labyrinthine corridors, the emergency room, life support systems, excrement. The first line of this series of eight

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poems appears to praise the hospital as a maternal, caring site: “L’Hôpital: une de tes formes, Grande Mère” [The hospital: one of your shapes, Great Mother] (Sophia, 351). But the presiding female, named in English “Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart” (Sophia, 357), is unable to mitigate pain either through her ministrations or her prayers. Woman has been reduced to the role of Pietà, able only to receive the dead. Emmanuel goes so far as to imagine the nun losing her faith in the face of such suffering, the supposedly necessary cost of the triumph of Western civilization. War is the nightmare haunting “Autre beauté” [Another Beauty], a portrait of the city reminiscent of Babel, in which sadistic male architects feed the crowds with weapons rather than mother’s milk. The city itself is a swastika-like maze. Emmanuel seems to have lost all sympathy for urban life, which he here associates with totalitarianism, intellectual manipulation, and atheism. “A la Grèce” [To Greece] is an ironic condemnation of Classical Greek philosophy, which, in the poet’s opinion, set the pattern for an over-dependence on reason, war, and conquest in the second millennium of Western history. Faceless caryatids hold up crumbling temples, and the white marble Mount Pentelicon, from which they were sculpted, drips blood. Marriage is a major theme in the concluding poems of “Nef.” Emmanuel praises it as the institution that reconciles imagination and reason, eroticism and spiritual desire. In “Solanée” [Nightshade], the deadly nightshade flower of the title is eroticism, a force powerful enough to suppress the temptation of suicide. “Nudité” [Nudity] harks back to Adam’s misunderstanding of Eve in “Tympan,” and speaks of marriage as a new beginning for the first couple: C’est l’Origine, lieu des mondes. Ciel et terre Homme et femme conjoints en elle réitèrent L’appariement unique, l’Un et Tout (Sophia, 397) [It is the Origin, the starting place of worlds Man and woman, spouses in this origin, reiterate The unique coupling, One and All]. The tenderly erotic “Mourir aimer” [To Die To Love] imagines the embracing couple blending, their saliva nourishing each other as the mother’s blood nourishes the fetus, with orgasm the moment of birth.

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The third part of “Toi moi” [You Me] enacts the vows exchanged in marriage, but here man and woman vow to become each other. The fourth part of “Toi moi” is gently ironic and returns to the story of Martha and Mary already evoked in “Abside.” The poet now makes Martha, the sister rebuked in the gospels for being too concerned with domestic duties (Luke 10:41), into the wise wife who presides over “le bon ordre des choses” [the correct order of things] (Sophia, 404) and saves man from emotional and intellectual chaos. “Rosace,” the conclusion of Sophia, is composed of seventeen short poems in short metres similar to those of Chansons du dé à coudre. Emmanuel evokes not only Sophia but the Virgin Mary, “Panaghia” or the name of Mary in the Eastern Orthodox Church, his own mother, and nature. The Catholic Church appears in the form of the sacraments, the most important of which is marriage because it transforms sexual love into an experience of union with God. The dominant images are light, the egg, and the door, all of which suggest birth or a passage into an enlightened state. However, Emmanuel clearly rejects any such mystical conclusion in poems 16 and 17. In the sixteenth, he writes that he will never cross the threshold of this “Mère qui es la Porte” [Mother Who Are the Door] (Sophia, 426). In the seventeenth, as he imagines the mother goddess disappearing, he returns to the human community: Un pas de plus Et j’aurais été seul Falaise Face à la mer Je ne l’ai pas fait Je m’en suis retourné Au plus bas des hommes Attendre d’y naître De toi (Sophia, 427) [One more step And I would have been alone Like a cliff Facing the sea

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I didn’t do it I turned around To humanity at its lowest ebb To wait there to be born Of you]. Emmanuel admits woman’s unique power to give life, a power that neither the Creator of Genesis nor the poet, the creator of words, can pretend to usurp. This is the meaning of the fourth poem, which includes the name “Sophia”: Sophia Firmament interne De Dieu Moi l’enveloppe Qu’il rompra pour germer Voilà ce qu’il veut par moi dans les femmes Obstinément (Sophia, 410) [Sophia Interior heavenly vault Of God I am the envelope That he will break open so he can germinate That is what he wants to happen through me in women Obstinately]. The Western intellectual tradition, dominated by rationality, has considered the male the creator. Man must now recognize women as the keepers of the “interior heavenly vault,” those inner spiritual gifts that connect the soul to God. Emmanuel vows to become the poet of woman and feminine wisdom. In Sophia, in addition to writing works in rhymed quatrains, long poems in versets, and short poems in short metres, Emmanuel for the first time makes use of the prose poem. One appears in “Porche,” three in “Tympan,” and two in “Nef.” These prose poems resemble the prose prefaces of Babel and Jacob. Long, discursive, and clear in their meaning, they orient the reader to Emmanuel’s thought and aid in the interpretation of

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his symbols. Another significant formal innovation is the numbered series of short poems grouped under a single title. They serve either to develop a single theme, as in “Acathiste de Madeleine,” or to indicate that there is a unifying idea in a group of poems that might otherwise seem unconnected. Emmanuel uses not only numbers but also larger than normal print to indicate the importance of an image or an idea. Throughout the volume, capitalization signifies divinity and, as such, can lead to parody, as in “Avortement,” where “Dit On” [So They Say] is capitalized to point out the pretension of public opinion. Emmanuel has become increasingly aware of the physical appearance of words on the page and of typography as ways to convey meaning. The vocabulary of Sophia is multilayered and technical. To maintain the dual symbolism of church and womb, Emmanuel refers to specific anatomical terms, such as the different membranes enveloping the placenta, and details of church architecture and liturgical rites. Terms from Gnosticism and astronomy force the reader to consider the similarity between the Eden story and nature as well as the connections between Genesis and Greek philosophy. More than in any of his earlier poetry, Emmanuel includes foreign languages – Church Latin, Greek terms, contemporary English – to make his meditation on woman more universal and a-temporal. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in Jacob, Baudelaire, and Le Goût de l’Un, Emmanuel often writes about the relationship between eroticism and poetry. In his essay “Erotique and Poésie” [Eroticism and Poetry] of Le Goût de l’Un, he judges that France has produced no great love poets, as have England and Germany. The male artists of the Renaissance never got past their fascination with the feminine body and reduced woman to an object. Their language, often voluptuous and provocative, was directed toward satisfying male desire.33 The French Baroque poets, as well as Vigny in the nineteenth century and Aragon in the twentieth, approached woman as if she were an enigma, sometimes dangerous, necessarily separate from man. Emmanuel accuses Eluard, the Surrealist champion of heterosexual love, of falling prey to a “sentimentalité populaire” [a popular sentimentality]34 that still considered woman a magical creature, a dream fulfillment for her partner. He sees Baudelaire’s 1857 masterpiece, Les Fleurs du mal [Flowers of Evil], as a “tragédie érotique” [an erotic tragedy].35 Baudelaire’s conflicting view of woman as either devil or saint leads to misogyny and antagonism between the sexes. Only Jouve understood the importance of eroticism in the formation of the

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poetic consciousness; and Claudel, in his plays, the complexity of woman.36 Sophia is Emmanuel’s contribution to French love poetry. He comes to terms with sexual desire as part of love, an issue that troubled him from his earliest works. While the poetry of Sophia is often very erotic, it avoids the sadism and anguish of Tombeau d’Orphée. The poems on prostitutes are tender and those on contemporary women, sympathetic. He also avoids the opposite extreme of transforming woman into an ethereal, distant divinity. The wisdom represented by Sophia is accessible. It is common to all women and also infuses nature. It is embodied in active virtue and in motherhood. As Brian Hill has so well put it, “[Emmanuel] was a boy in all practical ways motherless and discovering sex alone who developed into one of the greatest poets of human love in both its spiritual and carnal dimensions.”37 The author’s note to the volume Tu [You] (1978)38 describes it as a sequel to Sophia.39 As in Sophia, Emmanuel here brings together Asian religions and Catholicism. The God of Tu is consistent with Brahman, the abstract, cosmic divine force of Hinduism, and the Holy Spirit. Woman remains a source of enlightenment but becomes more abstract as that part of the human soul capable of spiritual growth. Men, as well as women, are engenderers of spiritual life, “individualités théophores” [god-bearing individualities] (Tu, back cover). Emmanuel includes in their ranks Moses, Elijah, Christ, and several women from Eastern and Western sacred texts, and he also counts the poet among them. He tries to resolve two problems that have haunted his entire career: how to develop a poetic language that actually conveys the experience of longing for God and how to use this language to overcome the modern sense of alienation. He aspires, through poetry, to discover not only “le Tout Autre” [the Completely Other], God, but also the self, the “moi-je” [me-I] that must be delivered from desire and fear in order to live autonomously. Freedom requires a positive attitude toward death, the passageway to a higher spiritual state: “Porte nommée à tort d’un autre nom” [Door wrongly given another name] [Tu, back cover). Tu continues the quest for supra-rational knowledge begun in Sophia but goes much further in its challenge to fundamental constructs of Western thought, such as the differences between the sexes, God and the human soul, life and death. Emmanuel’s turn to Eastern religions reflects his continued displeasure with contemporary Western intellectual life and post–Vatican II

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Catholicism. He carries the critique of French national education begun in Pour une politique de la culture [For a Cultural Policy] (1971) even further in La Révolution parallèle [The Parallel Revolution] (1975), four essays that actually lay out a plan for an alternative public education that would stress literature, imagination, manual labour, and contacts with older people and nature.40 He deplores the predominance of intellectual models drawn from the social sciences which envision the human spirit as a measurable quantity because, by forming consumers, these models play into the hands of capitalism.41 Several chapters of La Vie Terrestre [Life on Earth] (1976), a collection of personal essays and public addresses, often taken from presentations to Christian symposia, indicate how contemporary churches, in their efforts to combat atheism, use advertising techniques to bring about conversions or pop psychology to make religion “easy.” Never hesitant to speak his mind, Emmanuel signals the stupidity of calling television “mass communication” when in truth it has squelched conversation. He condemns the politicization of all human interactions, especially religious practices, and mocks the Liberation Theology movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which remade priests into social activists and the Catholic Church into a “socially relevant” institution. Emmanuel proposes, instead, a definition of theological liberation as “l’hospitalité oecuménique” [ecumenical hospitality],42 which can be brought about through the study of other religions to find their common ground with Christianity. This idea is implicit throughout Tu. His interest in Hindu thought results from a much earlier personal contact. In 1967 Emmanuel wrote a preface titled La Loi d’Exode [The Law of Exodus], later reprinted in La Vie Terrestre, for the posthumous work of Abbé Jules Monchanin, his friend and teacher in Lyon. A pioneer in Hindu-Christian relations, Monchanin spent his last twenty years as a contemplative in India after an active life as parish priest. Monchanin’s life served as an example of the movement from social commitment to mysticism, and his book De L’Esthétique à la mystique [From Estheticism to Mysticism] taught Emmanuel the fundamental similarities between the Hindu belief in an inner divinity and the Catholic concept of the Holy Spirit. Emmanuel also credits Monchanin with pointing out the resemblance between the Trinity and the three personae of Brahman [creator, preserver, and destroyer], as well as showing him the possibility of understanding the human soul as a locus of threefold desire for activity, knowledge, and love.43 In De L’Esthétique à la mystique, Emmanuel finds justification for reinterpreting the transfiguration of Christ recounted in

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the gospels as “l’instant de plénitude traversé d’éternité” [the instant of fullness crossed by eternity],44 that is, the moment when the soul recognizes its own divinity. Monchanin provided Emmanuel with the inspiration for the longest, most abstract and mystical poem of his career, for which he would earn the title of “le poète du Saint-Esprit” [the poet of the Holy Spirit], as Monchanin had christened him in the 1940s.45 Emmanuel is aware that Tu is difficult reading, because of its length (over four hundred pages) and its introduction of Eastern religious concepts. “Au lecteur” [To the Reader], the fifteen alexandrines opening Tu, admits his own challenge in writing it: “Ce livre qu’il te reste à faire c’est l’ahan” [This book you must finish is a struggle] (Tu, 7). In an effort to guide the reader, the author gives a brief interpretation of the entire poem in a note on the back cover. Epigraphs from Chrétien de Troyes and the fourth-century saint Gregory of Nyssa position Tu in the greater historical framework of Western literature on love and transcendence. The dedication of numerous poems to friends, often lesser-known writers, allows Emmanuel to acknowledge his debt to others and to act as the spokesperson for a generation of artists ignored by the public. “Au lecteur” also states Emmanuel’s refusal to write the word “God” except when citing poems in a language other than French. Capitalized nouns or pronouns such as “Lui” [Him] and “Centre” [Centre] (Tu, 7) evoke the unnamable cosmic divinity. The first section of Tu, “Vent” [Wind], is a fifty-four-page poem divided into twelve sections, each of which begins with a part of the Latin hymn “Veni, creator spiritus” [Come, Holy Spirit] – sometimes a single word, sometimes a full stanza of the hymn. “Vent” is intended as a recreation of Emmanuel’s “prise de conscience” [awareness] of the spirit within him and of his mission to contemporary society as a poet of the spirit. He takes as his model Claudel’s Les Cinq grandes odes [Five Great Odes]. Emmanuel repeatedly expressed his admiration for Claudel’s work in his prose essays; particularly in “Claudel à pleine pâte” [Claudel at his fullest] of Choses dites [Things Said], he expresses enthusiasm for Claudel’s rhythms, which translate perfectly the emotional apprehension of religious truth.46 Tu alternates between stanzas of short lines, often rhymed or assonated, and stanzas of longer lines. This alternation of forms gives an impression of immediacy, as if the poet were actually experiencing inspiration by the Holy Spirit. The most striking linguistic feature is the regular repetition of single words at the beginning of a stanza – “vent” [wind], “veni” [come], “oui” [yes], “Don altissime” [gift most high]. Like

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mantras, these repetitions direct the poet’s meditation. We also find the repetition of phrases with slight but significant variations, as in these lines from Part 8: Le silence est le Vent Qui recueille le Vent Le silence est le Vent Que féconde le Vent (Tu, 47) [Silence is Wind That gathers up the Wind Silence is Wind That the Wind inseminates]. Emmanuel even includes disconnected, onomatopoeic sounds (for example, “vrtt” [Tu, 11]). He also violates French syntax for emphasis and uses different types of lettering – italics, boldface and large print – for visual reinforcement, as in the final line of “Vent,” “Qui devient NOUS” [That becomes US] (Tu, 64). Like Claudel’s imagery, the imagery of “Vent” associates many types of human experience and many religious rituals. Emmanuel, like Claudel, reworks figural symbolism to include the traditional associations between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and also to demonstrate how the simplest rituals of daily life, as well as the tragedies of human history, are connected to the Redemption. In Part 2, wind is at once the Holy Spirit, the whirlwind that lifted Elijah to heaven in II Kings 2, the ejaculation of sperm, and transcendence. In Part 3, the Latin words “Imple superna gratia” [fill us with your greatest grace] extend to the fire of everyday cooking, the mystical fire that consumes the self, and the fire of love which fuses all of humanity into a single, desiring force. Emmanuel includes “ceux-là que l’on jette en fagots / Dans les crématoires” [those who are thrown in bundles / Into the crematoria] (Tu, 26). The unwilling sacrifices of these political victims bestow grace as surely as Christ’s crucifixion. Part 6 contains some of the simplest yet most beautiful threads of images. The “digitus paternae dextrae” [the finger of God], the Father’s right hand evoked in the Latin hymn, becomes the desert of the Hebrew wanderings and also the furrows sown by a caring farmer, the bread shared at mealtime, and the offertory of the mass – all activities motivated by the human need to commune with God and nature.

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The second section of Tu, called “Sagesse” [Wisdom] in the table of contents but “Eaux” [Waters] in the text, is an abbreviated version of Sophia. Emmanuel again writes of his own Mother, his wife, and prostitutes. The longest poem, “L’Hymne à l’ouvrière des mondes” [Hymn to the Woman Builder of Worlds], in twenty-one parts, is a recitation of woman’s attributes very reminiscent of “Hymne à la déesse” of Sophia. Here, however, Emmanuel has in mind a more abstract feminine principle, one found in all religions. He alludes to Eve, to the Virgin Mary, and to a sun goddess resembling the Hindu Kali. In the three final poems, the feminine principle becomes the religious traditions that have formed the poet. The mother in “Drogman” is the Catholic Church. She has assigned her son the role of “drogman,” or the interpreter of Christianity, to Asia. “Thora” [Torah] praises Judaism as the mother of the New Testament. “Paraclétique” [Of the Paraclete] conjures up Eastern Orthodox Christianity and its contributions to Western spirituality. Emmanuel also describes woman in scientific terms. The title of the ten-part sequence “Ylem” refers to the Big Bang Theory, which posits a condensed state of matter preceding the original cosmic explosion. Woman is this “ylem,” the totality of space, movement, colour, elements, and thought (Tu, 74–83). In other poems, woman resembles the Big Bang itself and sets the cosmos into motion, as in the first piece of “Eaux,” “Non encore” [Not Yet]: L’éclat La scintillation non encore L’innombrable clivage latent Impossible impensable de dire L’Avant (Tu, 67) [The radiance The scintillation not yet The countless latent cleaving Impossible unthinkable to say The Before]. Woman is also a Black Hole, “le Vide” [the Vacuum], the gaping wound in Adam’s chest from which Eve was drawn, the force whose attraction is synonymous with love (Tu, 72). Woman serves not only as a universal divine principle but also as the poet’s personal assurance that he is on the right track to enlightenment.

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In “Ciel adolescent” [Adolescent Sky], a teenage girl experiences the divine force immanent in the physical world without being able to express this experience. Emmanuel, now “le poète vieux” [the old poet] (Tu, 112), recognizes himself and all youthful poets in the girl’s wonder: Ainsi parlait la presque jeune fille Encore petite fille Qui sans comprendre (Comme jeunes font toujours les poètes) Savait Savait (Tu, 112) [Thus spoke she who was almost a young lady Still a little girl Who without understanding (As poets always do when they are young) Knew Knew]. In “Gnostique” [The Gnostique One], a girl cloistered in a house, innocent yet already exuding love and guidance, changes from bodily form into light. The poet understands this transfiguration as evidence that woman stimulates his quest for the absolute (Tu, 114). In this section devoted to woman, Emmanuel writes frequently of death. “Causa sui” (Uncaused Cause), in five parts, suggests his growing awareness of death and of the need to die well. He seeks also to understand death simply as a release from the body that does not affect universal order. Que tout meure, le Tout intact à tout instant. Un jour de vent ou de brise calme, la feuille Qui fut toi-même se détachera de toi (Tu, 131) [Let everything die, the Whole intact at all times. A day when it is windy or there is a calm breeze, the leaf That was you will detach itself from you]. Woman counterbalances man’s intractable desire to live forever. The title “Causa sui” usually refers to God, but Emmanuel uses the Latin term

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ironically to describe men, who fancy themselves masters of society and philosophy and too often fail to recognize woman as the human face of the divine. As in “Tympan” and “Nef” of Sophia, the poems of the section “Eaux” are quite varied in form and include a prose poem, several series of numbered poems, stanzas of unrhymed twelve-syllable lines, rhymed quatrains, and lines of varying lengths recalling the Claudelian verset. Another striking feature is the use of paradox, as found in the mystical verse of John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and T.S. Eliot, where it meets the need to express spiritual truths in non-rational language. Emmanuel calls the effacement of the self “trop-plein d’être et besoin d’être à la fois” [at once over-fullness of being and need to be] (Tu, 81). The feminine principle, indescribable yet omnipresent, is: Chose Que les hommes ne cessent de peindre Qu’aucun n’a peinte telle qu’elle est Puisqu’elle n’est pas (Tu, 111) [Thing That men never cease to paint That no man has painted as she is Since she is not]. Sometimes, perhaps to impress the reader with the poet’s inability to understand the spiritual adventures he lives, Emmanuel contradicts himself, as he does in Part 6 of “Ylem”: Chacune étant un nouveau labyrinthe Dont je sais d’avance (ne le sachant pas) Que tu es l’issue Dont je sais d’avance (ne le sachant pas) Qu’il va croître de m’enchevêtrer dans mes ombres (Tu, 79) [Each one being a new labyrinth About which I know beforehand (not knowing) That you are the way out About which I know beforehand (not knowing) That it will grow to entangle me in my shadows].

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Part 2 of “Causa sui” includes several lines that suggest the poet does not even know how to formulate questions, much less answers, about death: Qui s’interrompt Là pour reprendre? Qui à la rencontre De Quoi De (peut-être) Qui? On chacun On Va son chemin (son?) chemin Le temps dit-on passe On (cela) passe sans être Sans se passer (Tu, 130) [Who interrupts himself To return to the question? Who trying to find What (maybe) whom? We each one We each Continue on our (our?) way. They say that time passes We (that thing) pass without existing Without happening]. This enigmatic language befits a writer who has spent forty years searching for the way to live fully but has not yet reached the goal of his existence. The three central sections, “Moïse” [Moses], “Elie” [Elias], and “Toi” [You], take up the Transfiguration on Mount Hermon in the presence of the disciples Peter, James, and John (Matthew 17:2; Mark 9:2). In the gospel accounts, Christ appears with Moses and the prophet Elijah, his face and clothing shine with light, and the voice of God the Father announces: “Celui-ci est mon fils bien-aimé en qui je mets toute ma joie” [This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased]. Emmanuel had long been interested in the idea of transfiguration, which he interpreted in Le Goût de l’Un (1967) not as transcendence of the self but as a heightened understanding of the self: “Mes qualités et mon manque restent les mêmes, s’ils se manifestent autrement: Je ne suis pas autre, je suis davantage” [My qualities and my defects remain the same, even if they show themselves differently: I am not other, I am to a greater degree].”47 In Tu, Emmanuel celebrates Moses and Elijah as “théophores,” or God-bearers. They further the soul’s liberation by transmitting God’s will to his people and preparing for the advent of Christ. This vision of history as an endless alternation between birth and death is closer to the Hindu concepts of Brahman, reincarnation, and karma than to Christian doctrine. The Christian promise of an afterlife no longer appears. In “Israël,” the

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first poem of “Moïse,” there is no promised land, but the eternal quest for this ideal gives meaning to every period of history: Dans la terre de Promission jamais aucune génération n’entrera. Mais l’Origine cheminera avec elles tant que le vent sera leur tente et leur voie (Tu, 146) [Into the Promised Land never will any generation enter But the Beginning will walk with them as long as the wind is their shelter and their path]. “Moise,” “Elie,” and “Toi” follow three scriptural accounts: the life of Moses from his birth through the Exodus, the story of Elijah from his conflict with Ahab and Jezebel until his assumption into heaven in the chariot of fire (I Kings: 17–II Kings: 2), and the life of Christ from his childhood to his early ministry and transfiguration. The allegory Emmanuel develops in all three sections is the struggle against tyranny, which manifests in different forms throughout history. In “Moïse” the body is the tyrant that fears deprivation and easily falls prey to idolatry: Ils ont soif ils auront toujours soif S’accroupissent autour des sources Disant: “Que boirons-nous?” Ils ont faim ils auront toujours faim Sous le déluge de manne Ils craignent de manquer (Tu, 169) [They are thirsty they will always be thirsty They crouch around the springs of water They say: “What will we drink?” They are hungry they will always be hungry Beneath the flood of manna They are afraid of not having enough]. In “Elie” tyranny is represented by Jezebel, the queen enamoured of death, and by King Ahab, a meek civil servant who leads his people to slaughter. Elijah’s Israel resembles the Babel of Emmanuel’s 1952 epic, a

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country where deterministic philosophy and reason justify “l’ordre des choses” [the order of things] (Tu, 240). In “Toi,” Jesus battles human egotism (Tu, 298) as well as twentieth-century bureaucracy and materialism. In an amusing remake of Christ’s summons to the disciples, the apostle Philip obeys the call, leaving behind “l’Industrie et L’Education nationale” [Industry and Public Education], television, department stores, and shopping malls (Tu, 289–90). Less amusing are the frequent references to the Second World War, the Spanish Civil War, poverty, and injustice – evils of totalitarianism that continued to haunt the final decades of the twentieth century. Emmanuel picks up the struggles waged by Moses and Elijah against false gods in contemporary Europe by proclaiming the real presence of Christ, not only in the Eucharist, but even in modern city dwellers, victims of genocide, and all who suffer: Dans la foule du métro de six heures C’est que Tu es physiquement là Indistinct de n’importe qui (Tu, 322) [You are physically there In the six o’clock crowd in the subway Indistinguishable from everybody]. Communicating with others and the Other (God) also requires an understanding of the self. As Emmanuel explains: “seul celui qui dit Je avec une autorité absolue et familière fonde et définit L’Homme total que notre moi-je, dans son ambiguïté, redoute et désire” [only he who says I with an authority at once absolute and familiar can lay the foundation for and define Man, the whole being that our self, in its ambivalence, fears and desires] (Tu, back cover). The quest for self-knowledge inspires the two longest, most personal poems of “Toi” – “La Rencontre” [The Encounter] and “Sanctification du Nom” [Sanctification of the Name]. Like Blaise Cendrars in “Pâques à New York” [Easter in New York] and Apollinaire in “Zone” [Zone], Emmanuel reviews his life, juxtaposing times and places. His frequent questions to Christ, his self-analysis as well as his recounting of moments of spiritual despair or joy also recall St Augustine’s Confessions. Unrhymed lines of varying length are a fitting form for these autobiographical reflections, which often erupt into acts of faith or praise. In “La Rencontre” Emmanuel traces the origins of his Christian faith. He gives no credit to his Catholic education, when he was infected with

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the pride of schoolboy accomplishments and his envy of superior classmates. Rather, it was his experience of the Second World War and the Holocaust that forced him to recognize Christ in the faces of all political victims and to realize that, twenty centuries after Christ’s birth, humanity still awaits salvation. In “Sanctification du Nom,” Emmanuel confronts the difficulty of naming the divinity that imbues all religious experience, the Word that belongs to every language yet to none: Traduire le Nom par lui-même ne se peut Toutes les langues le portant dans leur sein aucune langue ne le contient Partout pensé il perdure impensable (Tu, 333) [It is impossible to translate the Name by itself All languages carry the name in their bosoms no language contains it Thought about everywhere it endures as unthinkable]. After considering the possibility that silence is the best means of reaching communion with the deity, the poet comes to understand proper names as the only way of identifying the uniqueness of each individual and of loving that individual. Because Christ has a human name, we can give a face and address to an otherwise abstract theological concept. All names are instruments of incarnation, Emmanuel states in a frank allusion to his use of a pseudonym that once seemed to capture his personality more aptly but now appears no truer than his birth name: Telle est l’unicité du nom propre Car le nom qui nomme que ce soit Pierre ou Jean ou Noël Mathieu qui est le vrai mien Il n’est que l’amour qui le sache unique Il n’est que l’amour qui lui donne visage Et ce visage est l’hostie du seul Nom (Tu, 340) [Such is the uniqueness of proper names Because the name that names whether the name be Peter or John or Noël Mathieu which is my real name

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It is only love that recognizes it as unique It is only love that gives it a face And that face is the communion wafer of the only Name]. “Moïse,” “Elie,” and “Toi” all conclude with poems of praise to those who, accepting the vocation of “théophore,” are reborn into a higher spiritual state. “La Messe de l’aurore” [The Mass of the Sunrise] of “Toi” recalls “La Messe des Ténébres” [The Mass of Darkness] of Babel, except that this abbreviated liturgy now concentrates on the victorious Christ, whose glory is reflected in all human names and prayers, and whose sacrifice gives meaning to all human suffering. The first poems of “Moi-je” [Me-I], the penultimate section of Tu, mark a return to pessimism. Writing principally in quatrains of rhymed alexandrines, Emmanuel affirms the empire of the senses over the spirit, sometimes in language as sordid and sadistic as that of Baudelaire’s “Pièces Condamnées” [Condemned Works] in Les Fleurs du mal. Woman is now a “vulve carnassière” [flesh-eating vulva] (Tu, 357). “Eglise” [Church] and “Carpocratiens” [Carpocratians] condemn organized religion as perversions. The Catholic Church becomes the scene of a black mass while Carpocration Gnostics, heretics who denied Christ’s divinity, justify licentiousness as a path to mystical knowledge. Other poems offer a hopeless view of modern city life, as in “Rats” [Rats], where people are represented by rodents lost in a maze, without identity or direction. “Naître” [To Be Born] and “Coupable” [Guilty] obsess about death and express remorse for a life poorly lived. These initial poems serve as an introduction to “Cryptoportiques” [Cryptoporticos], possibly Emmanuel’s best philosophical poem, a meditation in thirty-two parts on death and the desire for the absolute. The title refers to the concealed walkways of ancient Greek and Roman buildings, and symbolizes the recesses of the psyche, where the poet’s fears and ambitions endure, hidden from view. The title also alludes to the poet’s inner resources, which allow him to find meaning in the face of death. Each part is a single stanza of twenty-one lines in predominantly short metres, sometimes as short as two syllables, but more commonly of seven syllables, with infrequent rhymes. These short metres eliminate the possibility of rhetorical excess, forcing the reader to concentrate on the poet’s train of thought. The imagery is drawn mainly from nature and mathematics.

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Emmanuel begins “Cryptoportiques” with an avowal of his discouragement at the thought of living each new day – a sentiment of ennui very unusual for this poet of vigorous emotions: Chaque matin l’homme en moi S’éveille en état de mort. Sa chair: une immense fatigue Où la taupe feint qu’elle dort (Tu, 367) [Every morning the man in me Awakens in a state of death. His flesh: an immense fatigue In which a mole pretends to sleep]. He lives with the constant expectation of death, yet also with the realization that death brings no finality, only a further reincarnation: Tu as déjà passé mille fois De ce monde à ce monde Sans t’identifier Sans te ternir (Tu, 369) [You have already passed a thousand times From this world to that world Without identifying yourself Without tarnishing yourself]. Emmanuel recognizes reason as the faculty that sets man apart from other animals, but he believes that reason has stifled the spirit in the twentieth century. Reflecting the thought of Léon Bloy, the radical novelist of the late-nineteenth-century phase of the French Catholic Revival, Emmanuel interprets human suffering as the means to redemption.48 All suffering, including the senseless slaughter of Jews by the Nazis, brings even unwilling victims into the Christian community. Imagination, not reason, is the faculty that allows us to understand the concept of redemptive suffering: L’important est ce qui s’imagine Ce réel que notre oeil ne veut voir

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Ce wagon à bestiaux qu’est la vie Où le suint asphyxie le troupeau Cette interminable nuit qui se traîne Vers la porte du ciel ou du four (Tu, 386) [The important thing is what is imagined This reality that our eye refuses to see, That life is a cattle truck Where sweat asphyxiates the flock This endless night that drags on Toward the gate to heaven or to the ovens]. In the nineteenth piece, the possibility of rebirth is renewed with an acceptance of daily life. By combining images relating to newborns with astronomical terms such as “parsec,” the length of an imaginary line in space, Emmanuel gives a sense of the infinite scale of this endeavour. Un fruit Aussi rond que le monde Un sein galatique Où spire l’énergie L’embryon c’est la nébuleuse c’est l’homme Il prend forme à des milliers de parsecs Tandis que chetif il s’efforce D’être au jour le jour (Tu, 385) [A fruit As round as the world A galactic breast Where energy shoots up in a spire The embryo is the Milky Way, is man He takes form over thousands of parsecs While, puny, he tries To live each day as it comes]. Poem 22 echoes Mary’s “Ecce Ancilla dei” [Behold the Handmaiden of the Lord] at the Annunciation. “Cryptoportiques” concludes with an affirmation of love and of the individual, whose satisfaction can only come through the world and through others:

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Ce Je suffit Pour que la terre tourne Pour que la fleur s’oriente … J’aime Je suis (Tu, 391) [This I is enough To make the earth turn To let flowers get their bearings … I love I am]. Parts 30 through 32 celebrate man as the creature who has learned to accept his limits and, through this acceptance, can rescue the world from atheism and indifference. Although Emmanuel’s spiritual convictions have little in common with Paul Valéry’s atheism, “Cryptoportiques” is a philosophical poem in the manner of Valéry’s “Cimetière marin” [Marine Cemetery] of 1922. Both poets invoke Greek culture and contrast human mortality with the eternal workings of nature. For Valéry, the sea embodies nature; Emmanuel concentrates on the stars. The final image in Part 32 of “Cryptoportiques” imagines the sea washing ashore under “le Vent solaire” [The solar Wind] (Tu, 398). This image recalls the concluding stanza of Valéry’s poem: “Le vent se lève il faut tenter de vivre” [The wind rises we must try to live].49 Faced with death, both poets renounce the possibility of understanding mortality but affirm the value of life and choose to live. Several of the final poems of “Moi-Je” are riddles. “Sans Nom” [Nameless], for example, invites the reader to guess the name that has not been written a single time in this volume, the name of God: Quelqu’un n’a pas de nom dans ce livre Il et elle est l’auteur de l’auteur Celui-ci n’en connaît qu’un sourire Dont il parle sans pouvoir en parler (Tu, 401) [Someone has no name in this book He and she is the author of the author All the latter knows of this someone is a smile That he talks about without being able to talk about it].

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The last quatrain then teases the reader: “Quand tu ne voudras rien faire autre / Toi aussi tu l’auras rencontré” [When you are willing to do nothing other / You too will have found it] (Tu, 401), that is, the name of God means nothing if the reader has not sought God and, if the reader has sought God, the word “God” is unnecessary. Paradoxes abound in these often playful works, in which Emmanuel restates the permanent, insoluble enigmas of life. In “La Tâche spirituelle” [The Spiritual Task], God creates man as man creates God, and guilt proves human immortality. “Dialogue de l’Un” [Dialogue of the One] posits that God exists everywhere and nowhere. Paternity and maternity are the same process, and the poet vows to be his own father, in imitation of God’s paternity. In “Le Vent et le roseau” [The Wind and the Reed], a new conception of the poet is born. The wind symbolizes the cosmic divine spirit, while the reed is poetry. Emmanuel returns to the legend of Orpheus but now sings to bring life not to others but to himself: J’en joue pour m’entendre Contre le vent J’ai l’ouïe très bonne J’amplifie le silence A ma façon Chaque son que je tire Fait sur l’eau des ronds Jusqu’à l’horizon (Tu, 411) [I play to hear myself Facing the wind I have very good hearing I amplify silence In my own way Every note I bring forth Makes circles on the water That reach the horizon]. Tu concludes with “La Porte” [The Door], twenty-six brief poems in short metres with simple vocabulary, which recall the Chansons du dé à coudre and “Rosace” of Sophia. The “porte” symbolizes death, an opening for the soul. Death is no more significant than love, friendship, or appreciation of nature – all experiences that force the individual out of

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isolation. Echoing Hindu thought, several poems treat animal life, including insects such as the scorpion and the fly, with the respect due to other creatures that share in the universal cosmic spirit. In “Puits” [Well], Emmanuel admits his fatigue after a lifetime of the search for self-knowledge, an impossible task because the self constantly changes: Dans la vaine affirmation de moi-même Je me suis épuisé Chaque moi ne servait qu’une fois Tous tombaient de même Quelle redondance Quel poids (Tu, 425) [I have worn myself out In useless self-affirmation Each self was only good for one time They all fell away similarly What redundancy What a burden]. He also writes now of the value of silence. In “Pour voir” [To See], he questions the power of words to express more than superficialities. “Rossignol” [Nightingale] belittles human speech in favour of the bird’s song. A poem with the same title as the section – “Porte” – calls silence the pre-condition for meditation: Si je m’interroge Où est ici Je ferme les yeux Et deviens leur silence (Tu, 439) [If I ask myself Where here is I close my eyes And become the eyes’ silence]. This emphasis on silence suggests a second interpretation for Tu, the past participle of taire, to be silent. Emmanuel, with his fine sensitivity to the ambiguities of words and love of puns, surely intended the reader who

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has reached the end of the volume to understand that the poet has no more to say and will be silent. In Tu, Emmanuel reacts against the facile use of Eastern religions in America and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s – the fascination with yoga, transcendental meditation, even drug-induced trances – which he decries in La Vie terrestre as a quest for “une psychosynthèse magique, à travers les mirages d’un Orient abusivement déformé” [a magic psycho-synthesis, accomplished through mirages of an Orient that has been excessively deformed]. The poet goes on to say that an Asian thinker would find such practices by Westerners laughable and, moreover, a failure of imagination, since every religion has its “magies indigènes” [indigenous magic practices].50 Tu points out the similarity of certain beliefs of Hinduism and Christianity, such as the manifestation of a holy spirit in the outer physical world and in the human soul, the existence of female and male deities, and, especially, the immortality of the soul, which the Hindu concept of reincarnation explains more fully than the Christian notion of the afterlife. Emmanuel mixes vocabulary from Hinduism and Christianity to demonstrate the compatibility of Eastern and Western religious rites. The most notable example of this linguistic fusion occurs at the conclusion of the fourth section, “Toi,” in “Messe de l’Aurore,” where the word om, the mantra that opens Hindu sacred texts, appears, in company with the Latin term Agnus dei and the Greek kyrie, to emphasize the resources found in prayers of every language.51 Tu can also be read as Emmanuel’s defence and illustration of religious verse. He was certainly the most notable poet of the 1970s to practise religious poetry seriously. In the essay “Poésie, art moribond?” [Poetry, a Dying Art?] in Le Monde est intérieur, he signals two extreme tendencies that have dominated French poetry since the mid-twentieth century. The first, initiated by Mallarmé’s Livre [Book], denies the importance of outer reality and attempts to transcribe an idiosyncratic personality, often in a hermetic style. Readers find such poetry alienating because it does not speak to common concerns, is difficult to understand, and is not in the least uplifting. At the opposite extreme, there exists a poetry of things – one thinks especially of Francis Ponge’s Le Parti pris des choses [The Prejudice in Favour of Things], and also of René Char.52 This poetry of things tries to recreate the object and give us a sensory experience of it: “la concrétiser par une description intéressant tous les sens, comme si la seule réalité n’était que le contact physique avec la chose décrite” [make the object concrete through a description involving all of the senses, as if the

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only true reality was no more than our direct physical contact with the thing described].53 Although readers find such poetry much easier to read and sometimes amusing in its playfulness, this poetry belittles the mind: “cette tentative de restaurer l’homme dans l’intimité du concret est finalement une façon de réduire l’homme lui-même à l’état de l’objet” [this attempt to re-establish mankind’s intimate contact with the concrete world is, in the final analysis, a way of reducing man himself to the condition of an object].54 Tu succumbs to neither of these extreme tendencies. While Emmanuel speaks often of himself, he does so with an eye to how his personal experience reflects universal concerns. He celebrates the complexity of the inner life, which can never be reduced to a single object or event. Emmanuel’s longest work, Tu, testifies to the resilience of the imagination and to the poet’s refusal to consider poetry a moribund art. Jacob is Emmanuel’s transitional work of the 1970s. In Jacob, the poet remains firmly rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. By the time he composes Sophia and Tu, he sees, to borrow Hill’s title, “with planetary eyes”55 that encompass the entire history of Christianity, Christianity’s connections to other world religions, and scientific interpretations of the Creation. He continues the alternation of long and short stanzas and metres first used in Jacob to introduce a variety of voices and opinions on the spiritual life. In Jacob, the anger and sarcasm of Emmanuel’s war poetry was already mitigated. In Sophia and Tu, they disappear. These are no longer what Andreu has termed “poèmes du cri” [shout-poems] but “poèmes du chant” [song poems], “ceux du sens, de la parole mythique et initiatique qui dit le monde et l’incarne en le disant” [poems of the senses, of the word that is myth and initiation, which expresses the world and incarnates it by saying it].56 These are poems concerned with praise and uplifting the spirit. Emmanuel remains a social critic, but his vision of woman’s condition in the twentieth century is expressed with compassion, rather than condemnation, just as the poetry touching upon his own life is accepting rather than bitter. His prose essays on spirituality and poetry, our most important sources for understanding Tu and Sophia, outline his evolution from a mythical writer, concerned above all with myth, symbolism, and prophecy, to a craftsman of vocabulary and metres capable of translating sensual awareness and the rise and fall of emotions. Rejecting the model of contemporary French poets obsessed with the concrete world, Emmanuel turns

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to earlier twentieth-century French poets, mainly to Claudel and Péguy, but also to the non-Christian Valéry, all of whom he admires as masters of versification and for their ability to speak of philosophy or theology without sacrificing the sensuality of words or rhythms. Sophia and Tu are landmarks in Emmanuel’s poetic career, which, over the course of almost fifty years, never ceased to broaden its subject matter and its linguistic experimentation.

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6 The Return to Myth

Throughout his more than four decades of writing poetry, Emmanuel’s fundamental preoccupations remained consistent. The most important of these were his belief in the Redemption as the organizing event of human history; his quest to understand himself and, through himself, all of humanity; his hatred of tyranny – whether of a political regime, an authoritarian religion, or an intellectual system; the importance of love and his belief that God is love. He employs a seemingly endless variety of poetic forms – sonnets, epics, hymns, short metres, rhymed alexandrines, versets – and his vocabulary ranges from the most common words of everyday speech to scientific terms and quotations from foreign languages. Verbal torrents alternate with simple sentences, according to the needs of his goal of expressing “le tout du langage et de l’expérience” [the entirety of language and experience].1 Emmanuel’s poetry displays an unusual and vast erudition. With several foreign languages at his command, and a knowledge of philosophy, psychology, theology, mathematics, modern German, French and English poetry, the writings of Golden Age Spanish mystics, medieval Occitan verse, Classical Latin and Greek literature, and the Latin liturgy – and even Hindu, Buddhist and Gnostic texts – he had an extremely broad and deep source of subjects and metrical models to draw upon. Although he was solidly part of the French traditions of medieval troubadours, Late-Renaissance devotional literature, nineteenth-century Symbolists, and twentieth-century Surrealists, Emmanuel transcended his national literature to become a truly international poet conscious of the poetic heritage of all of humanity. In his final works, Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme [The Book of Man and Woman] (1978–80) and Le Grand œuvre: Cosmogonie [The Great

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Work: Cosmogony] (1984),2 we find Emmanuel continuing to explore the themes that marked his whole career and at the same time continuing to innovate. These two works also mark a return to the myths Emmanuel first explored in the 1940s, namely, the Fall and the Redemption, Orpheus’s descent into hell, and poetic madness. He accounts for his return to myth in several short articles of his last two collections of essays, L’Arbre et le vent: Feuilles volantes, 1980–1981 [The Tree and the Wind: Loose Leaves, 1980–1981] and Une Année de grâce: Feuilles volantes, 1981–1982 [A Year of Reprieve: Loose Leaves, 1981–1982],3 in which he bemoans the death of the imagination in the contemporary world and expresses his determination to regenerate the soul of his contemporaries through poetry. This, he says, has been his true vocation from the beginning of his career as a poet: “L’Ame souffre. Il n’y a pas place pour elle en ce monde encombré. Le mot lui-même est banni du vocabulaire. N’étant plus nommée, elle n’est plus définie. Depuis ma vingtième année, je suis en quête d’elle: l’art est cette quête pour moi … Toute ma vie est l’histoire de cet effort: ramener l’Ame parmi les vivants, pour qu’ils cessent d’être des morts-vivants, des zombies” [The Soul suffers. There is no place for it in this encumbered world. The very word “Soul” is banished from our vocabulary. Since the Soul is no longer named, it is no longer defined. I have been on a quest for the Soul since I was twenty: for me, art is this quest … My whole life is the story of this effort to bring the Soul back to the living, so that they will stop existing as living dead, as zombies].4 In this quest, he takes his cue from Carl Jung,5 who was also interested in Gnosticism6 and whose most mature thought drew heavily on medieval alchemy.7 Emmanuel praises Jung in L’Arbre et le vent as the modern psychologist who best understood the soul, the repository of complex, deep psychic forces that evade rational explanation and give rise to our spiritual life.8 Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, or universal archetypes, is the inspiration for Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme, a trilogy published over three years in three separate volumes: Una ou la mort la vie [Una or Death Life] (1978), Duel [Duel] (1979), and L’Autre [The Other] (1980). As the collective title of the trilogy indicates, the main subject of Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme is the male and female forces governing the human psyche, or to use Jungian terminology, the animus and anima, which inform all our conflicts and desires. Emmanuel, who experienced this psychic division throughout his entire life and wrote Sophia and Tu to praise woman, now undertakes what, in his opinion, no other poet has ever accomplished: to overcome the duality of the

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sexes and be man and woman together.9 He admits that this trilogy, like all his poetry, flows from his belief in Christianity and the Bible. Emmanuel hopes to distinguish his work from that of other Christian poets, such as Dante, Milton, or T.S. Eliot, by laying bare the erotic underpinnings of Christian theology, which give rise to our sense of guilt and our feeling of separation from God (Autre, vi–vii). Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme is closely related in theme and character to Emmanuel’s only novel, Car enfin je vous aime, first published in 1950. Both the novel and the trilogy see love between man and woman as a duel to the death, and, in both, woman is the vehicle for man’s rebirth. In the preface to the revised edition of the novel, published in 1983, Emmanuel admits that the composition of Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme allowed him to recognize that he had already expressed the same themes in the novel over three decades earlier and inspired him to revise the novel with a new ending.10 Whereas Sophia and Tu have varied metric forms, all three volumes of Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme are written with a twelve-line stanza that Merrikan Hill has called a “douzain.”11 Each volume contains 160 douzains, although they are divided differently in each book. Una has no divisions. Duel has three parts, sixty poems in “Lui” [He], sixty in “Elle” [She], and forty in “Eux” [They]. L’Autre is divided into equal parts of eighty poems titled “Eden” and “Perdu” [Lost]. Each book also begins with two or three epigraphs from literary or philosophical writers, a polemical preface, and a riddle in four- and five-syllable lines. Each volume closes with an explanatory note on the cover. The first seven lines of every poem are decasyllables, while the concluding five lines have twelve syllables, usually with no break in the line. Although there are rhymes in every poem, they do not form a consistent pattern, and assonance occurs as often as rhyme. René Plantier has called the trilogy “des formes régentées par le nombre” [forms controlled by number].12 This strict mathematical organization of both the individual poem and the volume as a whole suggests that Emmanuel is interested in numerology, the secret language of numbers. He says as much in the preface of Duel: “Duel offre un exemple de cette recherche du nombre, familière à d’autres époques de la poésie” [Duel offers an example of such a search for number that is familiar to other poetic ages].13 He has in mind medieval fixed forms like the rondeau or virelai, Renaissance sonnets, and the terza rima of Dante’s Commedia – in other words, the entire history of European poetry that recognizes the

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evocative potential of complex stanzas and metres. Anne-Sophie Andreu, who classifies the poems of the trilogy among “les poèmes du chant” [song poems], believes that these mathematical forms have a sacred or magical function: “Cette poésie du chant est aussi ‘Charmes,’ force protectrice qui permet d’affronter les puissances des ténèbres, le monde inconscient et archaïque qui nous habite et dans lequel le poète, comme Orphée, doit s’engloutir pour pouvoir en espérer renaître” [This poetry of song is also “Charm,” a protective force that makes possible the confrontation with the powers of darkness, the unconscious and ancient world that lives within us and in which the poet, like Orpheus, must immerse himself if he hopes to be reborn from it].14 Emmanuel writes in the cover notes to Una that the douzain obliges the reader to engage in multiple and complex interpretations of each book. Una tells the story of a tragic love15 but can just as well be read as a record of nostalgia for childhood, a quest for spiritual rebirth, or a turning point in the creative process. In Duel, Emmanuel instructs the reader to invent the characters and events, to read the book “comme s’il le faisait” [as if he (the reader) were writing it] (Duel, back cover). The note to L’Autre explains that the two halves of the book take place both simultaneously and consecutively. Emmanuel insists that the three books form a single poem (Autre, back cover). Each volume recreates an episode in the quest to reconnect contemporary humanity, numbed as it is by abstraction, bureaucracy, and conformity, with the primitive erotic impulses that art has always expressed. Una ou la mort la vie is inspired, in part, by Rimbaud’s prose poem Une Saison en enfer [A Season in Hell] (1873) and Gérard de Nerval’s dream narrative Aurélia (1855). Quotations from both of these nineteenth-century works appear as epigraphs. Speaking of the difficulty of writing this book, Emmanuel acknowledges Rimbaud’s influence: “Écrit[e] entre Noël et Pâques [ce livre] fut dans la profondeur de son être, le journal de sa plus grande épreuve orphique, et, en un sens, une saison en enfer” [Written between Christmas and Easter, coming from the depths of his being, (this book) was the diary of his greatest Orphic trial, and, in a sense, his season in hell].16 Emmanuel includes the dates of composition of Una – Christmas 1977 to Easter 1978 – to ensure an interpretation of his personal adventure in terms of the Christian account of sin and redemption. Without these dates, the reader could consider Una a non-religious poem, or even an indication of Emmanuel’s loss of faith. It is also tempting to read Una as the confession of a personal tragedy, but the crisis, like the

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one Rimbaud describes in Une Saison en enfer, could also be seen as a loss of confidence in poetry. In the opening poem, he calls poetry an “ankylose,” a medical term for the stiffening of a joint, which suggests that poetry fossilizes life: Parfois il songe à quoi bon le poème Mais de sa part c’est bien sûr un blasphème Une ankylose absurde de la vie En vérité à quoi bon un poème... (Una, #1) [Sometimes he thinks what good is a poem? But coming from him that is, of course, blasphemy An absurd ankylosis of life Really, what good is a poem...]. From Nerval, Emmanuel takes the notions of poetry as the art of dream transcription17 and metempsychosis, or the passage of a soul from one body to another. Una represents the beloved person or art. The remainder of the title, ou la mort la vie, suggests a moment of decision to live or die, if not literally, then at least through art. The narrator undertakes a voyage through earlier Western poetry and encounters many female objects of desire, such as “la belle dame sans merci” [the Beautiful Lady without Mercy] of the French Middle Ages and English Romanticism, Petrarch’s Laura, Dante’s Beatrice, and Orpheus’s Eurydice, as well as the Virgin Mary, the Hindu goddess of destruction Maya, and Hecate, the witch of Greek folklore. Women from Emmanuel’s personal mythology – the mother, the wife, the prostitute, Sophia – also appear. The narratorpoet becomes the meeting place of the souls of earlier poets, among them the Occitan troubadour Rambaut de Vaqueiras, the sixteenth-century Lyonnais poet Maurice Scève, Dante, T.S. Eliot, Nerval, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. Rather than simply alluding to these earlier artists, he relives their adventures. For example, poem #15, which addresses the woman in Occitan and mentions the estampie, a medieval dance, re-enacts the beginnings of fin’amor: Mais qui es-tu Bèl Cavalièr, Sophie? Lorsque Rambaut te fait son estampie Un premier mai tout dansant dans sa hâte De te mirer dame de vérité (Una, #15)

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[But who are you, beautiful lady Sophie, When Rambaut writes his music in your honour? On a first of May, he dances in his haste To gaze at you, Lady of truth]. The use of Occitan and the evocation of medieval art terms are just two of the linguistic devices that bring together poetry from all ages into the narrator’s psyche. Among others are neologisms, such as “mirer” of poem #15, a word used by Mallarmé to replace the more conventional “regarder” [to look at] or “refléter” [to mirror], and the unexpected capitalization of words like “Rien” [Nothing] or “Quel” [Which]. As in Nerval’s sonnets,18 this unusual use of the upper case suggests anguish and uncertainty. If the beginning poems of Una seem more concerned with an actual love, the middle and end of the volume concentrate on art and the conflict between ordinary life and the poetic vocation. These poems bring together the experiences of Mallarmé and Rimbaud. Poem #85 has in common with Mallarmé’s early poems a disgust with bourgeois institutions – including marriage – which impede the poet’s quest for absolute beauty. The suffocating domestic situation evoked in #85 recalls Mallarmé’s “Brise marine” [Sea Breeze] of 1864:19 Parfois le soir travaillant sous la lampe Banalement ensemble et séparés L’un de vous deux prend conscience que l’autre Respire ou fait une ombre à son côté Et c’est alors en lui une montée D’angoisse de déni ou de colère Une rupture à son identité (Una, #85) [At times in the evening, working by lamplight, In a banal way together and separated One of you notices that the other Is breathing or casts a shadow next to you And that’s when one feels an increase In anguish in denial or in anger A rupture to one’s identity]. Like Rimbaud, who vowed in the final prose poem of Une Saison en enfer to “posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps” [to possess the truth

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in both soul and body],20 the narrator claims that he has freed himself from his obsession with an ideal love and is prepared to accept the body and erotic love: Finie l’anorexie de l’idéal S’aimer c’est se manger l’un l’autre ensemble Il faut l’oser par le ventre d’abord Et que très humblement l’amour commence Par le baiser sur la honte des corps Comment nommeriez-vous parties honteuses Ce que vos lèvres ont sanctifié (Una #143) [I’m finished with the anorexia of idealism Love means consuming each other together You have to dare to begin with the lower body And let love humbly begin With the kiss on the body’s shame How can you call shameful those parts That your lips have sanctified?]. Like Nerval, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, having suffered the incomprehension of his contemporaries, the constant struggle to write meaningful verse, and the physical evils that befall humans in general, the poet affirms his survival of this season in hell through the mediation of poetry. He also overcomes his own sense of isolation. The poet no longer is a single person, or the representative of one age or philosophy. He now incarnates the human soul in its infinite variety and contradictions. Finally, he undergoes the integration of the masculine and feminine parts of his psyche. In the final poem, the feminine “Una” of the title changes into “Un” [One, or the masculine form of the indefinite article], a being reborn from the reconciliation of the physical and the spiritual: Vous serez enfin l’Un dans son accouplement Ni regard entre vous ni geste qui d’avance Ne vous soient le symbole et l’accomplissement De cet Un indivis dont vous naîtrez ensemble Lui de ton ventre toi de son esprit béant (Una, #160)

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[You will finally become the One through this mating May every look you exchange every gesture you make Be, from the very start, both the symbol and the fulfillment Of this undivided Oneness from which you will be reborn together He from your womb, you from his wide-open mind]. In Duel, Emmanuel verbalizes the unexpressed conflicts that make communication between the sexes so difficult. He calls the main sections, “Lui” and “Elle,” two long soliloquies, and “Eux,” a spirited dialogue between man and woman (Duel, iii). Rather than evoke any dramatic literature, Duel recalls the medieval debate poem, especially Alain Chartier’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” [The Beautiful Lady without Mercy] from the early fifteenth century. As in Chartier’s poem, the speeches of Duel are filled with mutual accusations, and the work ends without resolution. Man, who speaks first, expresses fear and confusion. He fears destruction by woman, whom he sees in negative terms, first as “la foudre qui noircit” [the lightening that blackens] (Duel, #6), then, in Poem #7, as a “gouffre [qui] se distend / Pour dévorer ensemble tous ses mâles” [an abyss that enlarges itself / To devour all of its males], and finally, in Poem #13, as matter without soul: “Elle est vide et dense à la fois comme l’abîme” [She is, at once, empty and dense like the abyss]. He denies the possibility of spiritual love with a creature that cannot transcend the body. Woman’s beauty is man’s enemy: Femme belle tu l’es pour d’autres mais pour moi Tu es l’éclair de haut en bas dont je n’accepte Pas qu’il me tue! Et corps à corps avec ta Nuit Chargée de foudre qui m’habite insaisissable Je chante, oui: pour encercler mon ennemi (Duel, #34) [Beautiful woman, you are beautiful for others, but for me Your essence is the flash of lightening that I refuse To let kill me! In hand-to-hand combat with your Night Charged with lightening that lives within me elusively I sing out “yes”: in order to surround my enemy]. “Lui” commits himself to aggressive resistance and renounces the effort to understand the non-rational, emotional woman that his heart nevertheless yearns for.

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“Elle” presents justified complaints. She accuses man of turning her into Eve and thus imposing upon her the responsibility for all human evil. Despite being filled with memories of the first days of their love, she voices her disappointment with intimacy and sex: Pourtant un homme y pénétrait comme il voulait Il y menait tout seul un grand remue-ménage Au bout d’une heure il le quittait je refermais Avant de m’éloigner cette espèce de gîte Où le rite sur moi sans moi se perpétrait (Duel, #67) [However a man penetrated (my body) as he saw fit There he conducted a big commotion all alone After an hour, he left it. Before distancing myself from him, I closed up what he regarded as temporary lodging Where the ritual took place on me without me]. She further resents living in man’s shadow (Duel #73). “Elle” admits a desire for an intensely passionate experience, one that would relieve the tedium of conjugal love, but believes that man is too cowardly to initiate such passion. She recognizes motherhood, not marriage, as her true calling as well as her only means of claiming superiority: C’est seulement lorsque je me sens pleine Que je suis enfin sûre d’exister Etre est pour moi chose trop peu certaine Pour que mon vide en puisse être oublié Mais s’il se moule à l’être qui le comble Par lui je suis cet être à tout jamais L’enfant qui naît c’est moi qui viens au monde (Duel, #98) [Only when I am pregnant Am I sure that I exist Existence, for me, is far too uncertain To allow me to forget the emptiness of life But if my existence shapes itself to the being that fulfills it Through this being I exist forever The child that is born is I myself who enter the world].

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In “Eux” the man and woman take turns denouncing each other’s misperceptions and inadequacies. Their anger ultimately gives way to a longing, in both, for a deeper, less self-conscious affection. Man is the first to lay down his arms and ask for friendship and comfort: Et moi jamais je ne perdrai l’espoir De retrouver l’amitié de ta hanche Par un beau jour d’été, je m’étendrai Sur elle comme au flanc de la colline Je sentirai ma nuque reposer Sur les hauteurs puissantes de ta cuisse (Duel, #157) [As for me, I will never lose the hope Of finding again the friendship of your hips On a beautiful summer’s day, I will stretch out On her as on a hillside I will feel my neck relax On the powerful heights of your thigh]. Woman now responds that love, born of their mutual need, is the source of her desire to bear children: Rencontrer ton regard est ma seule assurance D’être! et je suis par lui ce qui lui donne sens (Duel, #158) [Your gaze that meets mine is my only assurance Of existing! And I am through him that which gives him meaning]. In Duel, as in parts of Jacob and Sophia, Emmanuel cannot accept the idea, contradicted by ten centuries of European love poetry, that gender is socially constructed. In his view, there are real differences between man and woman that will never change. Duel ends with no definitive resolution precisely because Emmanuel wants to demonstrate the undiminished complexity of eroticism in the twentieth century. The final poem, however, turns from erotic love to love of God. The last line, “Il est grand temps d’y revenir Emmanuel” [It’s high time you got back to that, Emmanuel] (Duel, #160), can be read in several ways: the poet’s admonition to himself to return to his beloved, or as a prayer for God to take an

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interest in human love, and certainly as a transition to the third book of the trilogy. The trilogy ends in L’Autre with yet another version of the Fall. The titles of the book’s two halves, “Eden” and “Perdu,” allude to Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, but rather than justify the ways of God to man, Emmanuel examines the origins of guilt. In the prefatory notes, he admits: “A quarante ans de distance, la quête de l’auteur est restée celle d’Orphée” [after forty years, the author’s quest has remained that of Orpheus] (Autre, i); now, however, he wants to interpret the descent into hell in a positive light. L’Autre, the most Jungian volume of Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme, posits the two fundamental principles of Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. First, the psyche is composed of multiple beings. The three earthly characters, Adam, Eve, and the serpent, are interchangeable and all take their identity from their relationship with the Other, God. Second, time is not linear but cyclical. In L’Autre, there is no precise moment when the Fall occurs. Adam, Eve and the serpent are “protagonistes de l’origine et des êtres aujourd’hui” [protagonists of the beginning of time and beings of today]. The preface also contains the author’s acknowledgment that he had gone too far in his poems of the 1970s – Jacob, Sophia, Tu – in his presentation of women as divine figures and erotic love as a means of transcendence. Ultimately, the union of man and woman in sex is not “une étreinte mystique, chacun fondu en l’autre, deux en un” [a mystical embrace, one dissolved into the other, two in one] (Autre, ii); nor, he says, is human love a pathway to union with God (Autre, iii). As a corrective to this exaggerated emphasis on the Great Mother, Emmanuel now evokes a Great Father, the recognition of whom offers the only possibility for mutual understanding between the sexes: “Dans l’exacte mesure où l’homme parvient à constituer en soi cette figure du Père, et à entrer avec elle dans un rapport de révérence filiale équilibrant à la Mère abyssale, au sacré féminin, il se délivre du sortilège de la femme et la libère du sien. Il est vain de parler de libération de la femme sans parler de libération correspondante de l’homme, cette double libération étant l’œuvre commune, fort éloignée de l’idée qui en court et que bien des femmes professent au péril de leur essence” [To the degree that man manages to elaborate in himself this figure of the Father, and to enter by means of this figure into a relationship of filial reverence that counterbalances the primitive Mother or the sacred feminine, he delivers himself from woman’s spell and liberates her from his. It is useless to

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speak of woman’s liberation without speaking of man’s liberation This double liberation is a common effort, very different from today’s popular ideas that so many women profess at the risk of destroying their essence.] (Autre, iii). In L’Autre, Emmanuel indicates a pathway out of the endless cycle of anger and frustration between the sexes that is expressed in Una and Duel. The depictions of the Creation and of Adam and Eve’s initial encounters in the first half of L’Autre vary little from the description of the same events in “Tympan” of Sophia. The real innovation is the ongoing juxtaposition of Adam and Eve with the narrator and his beloved. Not nearly as naïve as Genesis makes them out to be, Adam and Eve both realize from the outset that a third presence overshadows them, making their unity impossible (Autre, #10–11). Their consumption of fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil confirms their understanding of their differences: Ce fruit du bien-et-mal est donc pour l’homme Le visible où s’épuise à s’atteindre l’esprit, Pour la femme (masquée de sa propre nature) L’ubiquité d’être une énigme qui se fuit (Autre, #35) [This fruit of good-and-evil is thus for the man The visible world where the spirit wears itself out in efforts at selfattainment, For the woman (wearing the mask of her own nature) It is the inescapable fact of being an enigma that runs away from itself]. This knowledge destroys the Romantic notion that every love is unique, as well as the myth of the androgyne, according to which love could restore a lost perfection: Fût-elle la première nuit d’amour Aucune nuit d’amour n’est la première L’unique Nuit où se conçoit l’amour Avant les jours après l’aube dernière C’est à jamais l’intenable lumière Qui brise ainsi qu’une jarre de terre Quiconque veut en contenir l’amour (Autre, #38)

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[Even if it were the first night of love No night of love is ever the first night The unique Night in which love is conceived Before the beginning of days after the last dawn Is forever the unbearable light That breaks, as an earthen vessel might break, Anyone who tries to contain love within himself]. Like God, Adam and Eve are omniscient. They see reproduction, as well as the conflicts between children, as further divisions between them. Art only perpetuates the war of the sexes, Emmanuel asserts in poem #71, which, in depicting Adam and Eve on the west door of Notre Dame Cathedral, does nothing to clarify the responsibility for the first sin. “Eden” ends with the narrator’s exasperation with the story of Genesis. The volume’s second half, “Perdu,” recreates the experience of loss that can be triggered by the simplest of everyday events: Une dernière phrase au téléphone Un “Vous savez la nouvelle?” banal Et du dedans c’est l’être qui s’effondre Sans qu’au-dehors se voie rien d’anormal. Entre l’instant d’avant et l’instant même Qui s’éternise en écho sépucral Il y a chute à pic lendemain blême Du monde point par point identique infernal (Autre, #81). [A final sentence on the phone A banal “Have you heard the news?” And from the inside it’s your whole being that collapses Without showing anything abnormal on the outside. Between the instant before and the instant itself That drags on like an echo from the tomb There is the sheer drop pallid tomorrow Of a world in every detail the same and infernal]. By not identifying the cause of pain – perhaps a death, the break-up of a romance, the end of a friendship – Emmanuel emphasizes the universality and timelessness of our emotional reactions to separation from what we love. This initial shock leads, in the first sixty poems, to a descent into the

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hell of the unconscious. Several poems express fear of being buried alive or of violent death by butchering. Negative memories of love obsess the narrator. He sees that daily routine kills passion, that conflicts and sadism infect love, and that the excesses of love resemble religious fanaticism and war. Poetry is no better than voodoo, and the poet no longer counts himself as someone “qui guérit de soi-même / Par la magie nocturne du poème” [who cures himself / By the nocturnal magic of poetry] (Autre, #109). At this impasse of impotence and loneliness, the Great Father appears to explain the nature and goal of erotic love: Aimer n’est pas un verbe réfléchi Il ne gouverne rien que le fait d’être, Fait absolu. Or que peut l’absolu Dès que le moindre rien par amour-propre le fuit? … Imperceptible Germe de l’Un où l’homme et la femme ont conjoint Leur substance ignorée d’eux-mêmes, identique A l’origine et divisée pour que l’amour De chaque jour naissant fasse son premier jour (Autre, #141). [Love is not a reflexive verb It controls nothing but the fact that we exist, An absolute fact. So, what power does the absolute have When the least little thing flees from it out of self-love? … Imperceptible Germ of the One in which man and woman have joined together Their substance, which they themselves do not know, Identical at the beginning and divided so that the love Of each new day makes it their first day]. The poet undergoes a rebirth, speaking as the “je” that eluded him in Tu: Je sens – je suis – l’emprise immense d’un regard Tout ensemble du fond de moi du fond des mondes. Je: la syllabe-centre et ses rayons sans fin. Je: le cercle infini qui se rue vers le centre (Autre, 155) I feel – I am – the immense influence of a gaze At once from deep within me and from the depths of the universe.

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I: the syllable-centre and its radii without end. I: the infinite circle that rushes toward the centre]. Just as Sophia ends with a vision of the goddess wisdom, “Perdu” concludes with a vision of the Father as the morning star relieving this dark night of the soul. Aude Préta-De Beaufort has interpreted Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme as Emmanuel’s admission that neither love nor poetry can satisfy his hunger for union with God, a hunger that betrays itself throughout his poetry, but especially in his final volumes. She attributes this insatiable hunger to Emmanuel’s adherence to traditional Neo-Platonism and Christian theology, both of which stress the dualism of matter and spirit,21 a dualism that cannot be reconciled. Emmanuel would be the first to agree that he cannot abandon his Christian perspective (Autre, vi), but his intention in the trilogy is not to examine his personal spiritual adventure but to show that the story of Adam and Eve mirrors the trajectory of the artist: “Bien des existences d’artistes, apparemment jalonnées d’erreurs douloureuses, quoique vouées – peut-être par là meme – à la quête de la vérité, se verraient ainsi reconnaître leur sens” [The lives of many artists that are apparently punctuated by painful errors in spite of being dedicated – or perhaps because they have been dedicated – to the quest for truth, would thus be able to find meaning] (Autre, vii). The biblical account of the Fall addresses the human drive for knowledge, the risks involved in artistic creation, and the guilt both from artistic successes and from failures. Emmanuel’s goal in the trilogy is to illuminate “le statut spirituel de l’artiste” [the spiritual status of the artist] (Autre, vii). Far from being a devaluation of poetry, Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme is Emmanuel’s strongest statement of the religious nature of poetry. Pierre Emmanuel’s final volume of poetry was published in September 1984, the month of his death. The author’s note calls Le Grand œuvre: Cosmogonie [The Great Work: Cosmogony] his most complete elaboration of the spiritual history of the universe.22 Emmanuel uses the term “Le grand œuvre” in several different but compatible ways. This is an architectural term referring to a completed edifice. Used in this sense, the title informs the reader that this 394-page poem has a structure and is not simply a collection of separate pieces. “Le grand œuvre” is also an alchemical term for the process of transmuting base metals into gold; Emmanuel considers the composition of poetry an alchemical operation. Ever more convinced

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at the end of his life of the power of poetry, he writes in the preface to his prose journal of 1981–82, Une Année de grâce, a sentence that could appropriately serve as the epigraph to Le Grand œuvre: “je vérifierai ce que la poésie m’avait appris: que du chaos, mystérieusement, le sens s’élève” [I will confirm what poetry had taught me, that from chaos, mysteriously, meaning emerges].23 Clément Olivier reminds us that this idea of poetry as alchemy is an allusion to Rimbaud’s “alchimie du verbe” [alchemy of the word] and indicates that Emmanuel believed he had achieved, in this volume, the goal of French poets from Rimbaud through the Surrealists to transfigure the world through poetry.24 Olivier also points out that Le Grand œuvre is a compendium of Emmanuel’s ideas on the feminine that began in Sophia.25 This brings us to the third meaning of Le Grand œuvre: Emmanuel intends it as a recapitulation of the major themes and metrical experiments of the past fifteen years as well as his definitive statement on love and redemption, the great poem he leaves as his final gift to his contemporaries. “Cosmogony,” the second part of the title, is both an astronomical and a philosophical term denoting a theory of the origins and evolution of the universe. Olivier adds that Emmanuel includes religious concepts, from ancient Indian conceptions of the structure of reality found in Hinduism and Buddhism to Jung’s notions of animus and anima.26 Not surprisingly, however, Emmanuel finds the most pertinent explanation of history in the Bible. The main characters are, once again, Adam and Eve, but rather than use the story of the first parents to explain guilt, as in Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme, the Eden story becomes an allegory of man’s search for autonomy, a quest that inevitably arouses the desire to vanquish, or even eradicate, the Creator.27 This desire, he suggests, is the mainspring of human history. Man has triumphed over God in the twentieth century, the first truly atheistic period in human history, but the price for this victory has been continuous war, the suppression of individual freedom, and mental anguish. Fortunately, Christ’s sacrifice still offers us the possibility of resolving our relationship with the Creator and achieving peace in this life. It is possible to consider Le Grand œuvre an epic poem because it proceeds chronologically from the Creation to the story of Cain and Abel. Poems are grouped by theme and structure. The twenty-six poems of the initial series constitute a meditation on words associated with creativity and meditation, divine syllables like “Om” that begin Hindu and Buddhist prayers. The following thirteen poems are grouped under the title

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“L’Hymne à l’Un sans second” [Hymn to the unique One], “One” denoting the undivided All at the moment of creation. The first piece, “Introit,” and the final piece, “Amen,” frame eleven poems all titled “Naissance” [Birth], which are similar in length and metre. Like the Introit of the mass, “Naissance” is a preparatory prayer in which each separate poem examines one element of the Creation, from the exhalation of God’s breath to the emergence of human consciousness, including the creation of man and woman, time, and death. Emmanuel also evokes the gifts bestowed upon humanity at the creation – imagination, desire, fertility, and harmony with nature. Eight series of poems, all called hymns, take up almost half of the volume. Each hymn differs in the number of poems it contains and in metre and stanzas. The poet intends these poems as songs of praise to all the characters in the first chapters of Genesis. He includes the male and female principles that give rise to Adam and Eve, God, the serpent, the avenging angel, and an embryo in Eve’s womb. The four series following the hymns – “Adam,” “Eve ou le sommeil” [Eve or Sleep], “A l’Est d’Eden” [East of Eden], “Le Livre de Caïn” [The Book of Cain] – treat the period after the expulsion from Eden until Cain’s murder of Abel. The eight parts of “Le Nouvel Abel” [The New Abel] then turn to the twentieth century, where destructive tendencies dominate but where Christ’s sacrifice still holds the promise of redemption. The following eleven-part “Porte de l’homme” [Portal of Man] prophesies a new era of reconciliation between man and God, when man will recognize divine omnipotence and God will grant man autonomy. Emmanuel claims to have written the concluding section of twelve brief poems, “Etre ou fenêtre” [Being or Window], to leave the reader with the impression that “le réel où nous croyons vivre n’est peut-être qu’un reflet de celui où nous vivons” [the reality in which we think we live may be no more than the reflection of the reality in which we live] (GO, back cover). Although Emmanuel admits that full understanding of the self is unattainable, the concluding image of the universe expanding as the individual soul engages in selfexamination (GO, 394) suggests that the quest for understanding directs our spiritual life and is, in fact, the driving force of evolution. In Le Grand œuvre Emmanuel uses all the verse forms that have appeared in earlier volumes – the prose poem, rhymed stanzas, unrhymed twelve-syllable lines – as well as two new forms. The first, found only in the conclusion, “Etre ou fenêtre,” can be considered the visual poem,

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something like Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, where words are arranged in shapes to reflect the meaning. Phrases separated by spaces alternate with whole phrases to give the impression of ideas that diverge then reconverge in the poet’s mind, or the impression of reflected images, as in a mirror: Des deux côtés de la fenêtre Suis-je je suis Dehors Dedans Mon visage colle à lui-même Inversé (GO, 383) [From both sides of the window Am-I I am Outside Inside My face is glued to itself Reversed]. The second new form is a nine-line stanza of unrhymed sixteen-syllable lines, used especially in “Naissance” for description and narration. This unusually long line creates the impression of meditating on the event described, as in the first stanza of “Naissance du sourire” [Birth of the Smile]: Au tréfonds du sommeil sans rêve il n’y a rien que Ce qui Est Avant que rien ne soit encore après que tout a cessé d’être (GO, 46) [From the depths of dreamless sleep, there is nothing but That which Is Before anything yet is after everything has stopped existing]. The volume as a whole is an excellent example of the movement from shout, to song, to silence that Andreu describes as the structure of Emmanuel’s long poems of the 1970s.28 The opening poem of the volume, “Om,” is spectacular in its torrential repetition of the capitalized letters A, U, and M, and its capitalization of the words “mother,” “hymen,” and “om” for emphasis:

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AAAAAAA UUUUUUU MMMMMMM

… La Syllabe ineffable est caresse de MÈRE et matrice de tout sans nul enfantement Est l’accomplissement et l’HYMEN du Silence ourlement de la bouche enfin se rassasiant OM (GO, 10). [AAAAAAA UUUUUUU MMMMMMM … The ineffable Syllable is the MOTHER’S caress and matrix of everything without any trace of birth Is the fulfillment and the HYMEN of Silence puckering of the mouth that is satisfied at last OM]. In calling many poems of the volume’s middle sections hymns, Emmanuel suggests the relationship between poetry and sacred song. The final pieces, often of less than five words, drift into silence. This movement, as Andreu notes, mirrors the evolution of Emmanuel’s poetry from the beginning of his career, when he wrote stirring, dramatic verse, to the short poetry of his mid-career, to his final volumes: “La poésie est d’abord lutte contre le silence pour parvenir au Silence après avoir accompli la parole” [Poetry is, above all, a struggle with silence with the goal of returning to Silence after creating language].29 Emmanuel now explains history as a dialectical movement between states of unity and acts of separation that progress toward the final reunification of God and mankind at the end of time. Like Dante’s vision of God in the final line of the Paradiso, the God of Le Grand œuvre is “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” [the love that moves the sun and all the stars].30 Both father and mother, God makes a conscious choice to create life: “Le Soi de même peut choisir entre avorter ou enfanter” [The Being also can choose between aborting and giving birth] (GO, 27). God extends this same freedom of choice to Adam and Eve, and thereby forfeits omniscience. Human autonomy, for Emmanuel, was inherent in the Creation. The fall of Adam and Eve from Genesis 3 undergoes a radical reinterpretation. In “Hymne à la déesse” [Hymn to the Goddess] and “Hymne au Père” [Hymn to the Father], the maternal principle, which is both imagination and mystery, becomes Eve, while the paternal principle insemi-

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nates and sets limits. The serpent of “Hymne au serpent” [Hymn to the Snake] plays a cautionary role by demonstrating the ease with which the mind deceives itself. Even the angel of “Hymne au fil de l’épée” [Hymn to the Sword’s Edge], which chases the first parents from Eden, provides a suffering that enriches human experience. Both “L’Hymne à l’homme et femme” [Hymn to the Man and Woman] and “L’Hymne à l’homme et à la femme” [Hymn to the Man and the Woman] praise the division of Adam into two sexes, the necessary condition for love and the generation of new life. In these hymns Emmanuel removes the burden of sin from the first parents, and Adam and Eve accept their separation from God as a necessary consequence of knowledge and freedom. In recompense they become godlike through their power to create: Avec chaque enfantement Le monde commence. L’Un ne cesse d’être l’Un De naissance en naissance (GO, 255) [With each new child The world begins. The One does not cease to be One From birth to birth]. Human history begins in Le Grand œuvre with Cain’s murder of Abel. This first sin, recounted in “A l’Est d’Eden” and “Le Livre de Caïn,” resembles the conflict between the Shepherd and the King of Babel. Like the Shepherd, Abel lives in the fields, in touch with the endless return of the seasons. He has a rich spiritual life. Rather than think, he contemplates attentively and so attunes himself to creation: Souffle d’Abel! Haleine du silence! Lente, large, méditative, profonde Face à tout l’espace, Inspiration! (GO, 297) [Abel’s breath! The Breath of silence! Slow, extended, meditative, deep Facing all space Inspiration!].

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Because Abel feels at one with his flock, he willingly submits to death, seeing his sacrifice as simply another offering to the deity. Cain is a restless mover, bored with the stability of nature. He also distinguishes himself from his fellows as a leader, that is, a conqueror. Like the tyrant of Babel, Cain turns pastures into cities, perverts language, degrades erotic love, and enslaves the populace with false reasoning. Conformity organizes the existence he imposes on his subjects because he has managed to suppress their spiritual life. Cain erects his Babel on the very altar of Abel’s murder, so that it becomes a monument to death and proof of the weakness of love and benevolence: Montagne d’où l’homme se voit en abîme Amas de morts matériau de Babel sur le corps d’Abel Où Caïn tour centrale s’érige (GO, 313) [Mountain from the top of which man sees himself in the abyss Mounds of dead, the building material for Babel piled on Abel’s body Where Cain the central tower stands erect]. In the 1952 epic, the walls of Babel fall effortlessly as humanity reasserts its love of liberty. Emmanuel is more pessimistic in Le Grand œuvre and sees twentieth-century humankind at an impasse, having lost belief in autonomy and community. Guilt is the only remnant of the Eden experience. With a sense of urgency, Emmanuel speaks again with the familiar prophetic voice of his war poetry, calling his readers to ask for forgiveness, not from God, but from themselves, for succumbing to Cain. We are the progeny of both Cain and Abel: “Caïn et Abel en toi furent semés [You were inseminated with Cain and Abel] (GO, 335). We must learn to forgive the hateful side of our own souls: “Ce Caïn que tu fus” [This Cain that you were] (GO, 335) and, with Cain, to forgive all murderers and tyrants. Emmanuel remains a strong critic of the Catholic Church, which has done nothing, he says, to stop the spread of war. He nevertheless exonerates Christianity from being the source of repression and violence in the twentieth century. Christianity has provided assurance of God’s love through Christ: Certes, il n’y a qu’un seul Dieu Et ce Dieu est le vôtre.

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Certes, votre histoire est mauvaise Comme par essence toute histoire est mauvaise. Certes aussi, Dieu est le Tout Puissant. C’est lui qui souffle les quatre vents de l’histoire (GO, 365) [Of course, there is only one God And that God is your God. Of course, your history is bad Because all history is, by nature, bad And of course, God is the Almighty He is the one who stirs the four winds of history]. These lines appear all the more extraordinary given Emmanuel’s emphasis on Gnosticism, Buddhism, and Hinduism in Sophia and Tu, where Christianity is no more than one form of the divine spirit found in all religions. Here, the poet speaks as a Christian exhorting his contemporaries to return to the religious faith of the West. This does not mean that Emmanuel reverses the ecumenical stance of Sophia and Tu. Le Grand œuvre begins with epigraphs from the Upanishads and Sufi mystical literature; and there are references to tantric meditations and Taoism. Rather, the concept of free will, of man as “un libre agent” [free agent] (GO, 367), which Emmanuel finds central to the biblical account of man’s creation, remains our only defence against the determinism touted by the social sciences. This freedom, in turn, spurs us to active involvement in our world. Thanks to our freedom, we view history as “le lieu de la quête du sens” [the locus of our quest for meaning] (GO, 367). Given the emphasis on freedom, it is impossible not to see Le Grand œuvre as Emmanuel’s final prise de parti [stand] against atheistic philosophy in favour of Christianity. Evelyne Frank reminds us that Emmanuel always viewed the Bible from the perspective of a twentieth-century thinker who had given thoughtful consideration to Marx’s conception of religion as the opiate of the masses, Nietzsche’s contention that God is dead, and Freud’s view of God as a projection of the super-ego. While Emmanuel retained his faith in Christianity, he did not do so naïvely and was acutely aware of the problem that evil posed to any belief in God’s goodness and omnipotence.31 His studies of Eastern and mystical religions gave him a new perspective on the Eden story, one that interpreted Adam and Eve’s sin as the beginning of a journey to God through negation. By their revolt against the Father, they separated themselves from

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God but also created the possibility of reunion with God, or, as Frank so well put it: “L’homme ne pourra dire oui au Vivant que s’il a pu et osé Lui dire non” [Man cannot say yes to the Living God unless he has consciously dared to say no to Him].32 Le Grand œuvre is Emmanuel’s final poetic assertion of the relevance of the Bible and the perfect compatibility of these scriptures with all other religions and philosophies whose goal is truth. But it is more than that. Le Grand œuvre is Emmanuel’s call to solidarity, a plea to his readers to take their place in the historical struggle between good and evil, to exercise their freedom by joining God in the never-ending work of creating the world. Olivier sees Emmanuel’s message as an appeal against nihilism: “il faut que maintenant l’homme se révèle à Dieu dans la libre réponse d’un amour créateur” [man must now reveal himself to God through a freely accorded response of creative love].33 There is a confessional element in all of Emmanuel’s poetry, beginning with Tombeau d’Orphée and Le Poète et son Christ. His later long volumes – Jacob, Sophia, Tu, Le Grand œuvre – contain very personal poems, in which Emmanuel speaks as “je” and even refers to himself by name. These poems concentrate on the conflicts between his faith and organized religion, or his poetic vocation and his public career. Such poems resemble diary entries that Emmanuel shares without shame or a desire to elicit pity. They provide a record of his efforts to reconcile his spiritual life and his daily routine, and bear witness to his refusal to give up his religious convictions in a secular world. Emmanuel’s later poetry is as erotic as the poetry of Tombeau d’Orphée and the war volumes, but all traces of sadism have disappeared. He commonly evokes the heterosexual couple in the act of love, especially in Sophia and Le Grand œuvre, out of respect for human sexuality. He also describes the sexual experience from the perspectives of both men and women, again illustrating the poet’s ability to transcend the limitations of gender. The language of Le Grand œuvre is much simpler than that of the other long poems of the 1970s and 1980s. Most allusions are biblical. Emmanuel clarifies the sole allusion to an Asian religion in “Aux Dix mille vivants” [To the Ten Thousand Living] by explaining the title with a quotation from Lao-Tse: “Le Nom est la mère des dix mille vivants” [The Name is the mother of the ten thousand living]; that is, to have a name is to be human, since the Tao is nameless. Emmanuel avoids the obscure scientific terms found in Sophia and Tu but keeps the repetition

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of lines, words, and syllables reminiscent of chants and litanies to preserve the analogy between poetry and prayer. Prayer and song constitute the traditional poetry of Christian communities, whose spokesperson he remains. After a decade spent exploring the feminine principle of wisdom and the cosmic divine spirit, Emmanuel returns to Christ. In the early pieces of Le Grand œuvre he evokes Christ without naming him, by using images of blood and the cross. “Le nouvel Abel” of the section following “Le Livre de Caïn” is unmistakably Christ. Emmanuel waits to speak of Christ by name until the penultimate section, “La Porte de l’homme,” but then does so on almost every page to remind the reader that, of the major world religions, Christianity alone offers a flesh-and-blood deity and a story that makes sense of the seemingly endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that is human history: Christ est le levain d’une histoire tout autre que celle que jalonne la chronologie. De l’Annonciation au matin de Pâques il l’a toute vécue et résolue en lui. La vie de tout homme en est un raccourci depuis l’origine jusqu’à la Pâque éternelle (GO, 370) [Christ is the leaven of a history completely different from the history marked by chronology. From the Annunciation to Easter morning, he lived all of history and brought all history to a resolution. The life of every man is a shortcut to this resolution from the beginning of time until the eternal Passover]. With an urgency not found in his work since the war poetry of the 1940s, Emmanuel pleads with his generation, all too overwhelmed by wars, religious and political divisions, and materialism, to have faith in the Redemption. The battle against evil has already been won; the Second Coming, with its community in Christ, is now: Le monde est un seul champ, une vigne Dans notre regard. Ce soir, il y aura place pour tous A la table du Père (GO, 380)

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[The world is a single field, a vineyard For our eyes. This evening, there will be room for all of us At the Father’s table]. The dramatic way in which Emmanuel withholds the name of Christ until the poem’s conclusion highlights the importance accorded to names in Le Grand œuvre. In the opening piece, God is referred to as “Soi,” an abstraction of existence suggesting self-containment or universality, but not intimacy. By the end of the introduction to “Naissance de Toi” [Your Birth], Emmanuel rejects this abstract term as unsatisfying and calls the Creator father: Que m’importe, à moi que Tu crées, que je sois émané du Soi Que me fait d’être issu de Toi si je ne puis Te nommer Père? (GO, 64) [What does it matter to me that You create, that I am an emanation of Being Why should I care if I have come from You if I can’t name You Father?]. Abstractions cannot fulfill the profound human need to give a name to those we love. In the course of the poem, naming becomes an act of love. Adam takes pleasure in pronouncing the word “Eve.” Abel names each lamb as it is born, thus showing his concern for every member of his flock. Cain, on the contrary, is “Ignorant de son propre nom” [doesn’t know his own name] (GO, 313) and uses this anonymity to spread hatred and tyranny. Emmanuel also insists upon names as a solace in adversity. In a very personal part of “Le Nouvel Abel,” the aging, sick poet speaks of the comfort he derives from the knowledge that Abel’s death was meaningful: “Le vieil homme veut retrouver en lui Abel” [The old man wants to find Abel within himself] (GO, 342). Christ’s name satisfies the human desire to understand life far better than the “isms” of modern social science. Names are part of a larger discussion found throughout Emmanuel’s poetry about the efficacy of language. The war poems and Babel demonstrate the corruptibility of language. In Jacob, Emmanuel laments the ease with which contemporary speech has been reduced to jargon and abstractions. As early as La Liberté guide nos pas, he admits that certain qualities like heroism and charity cannot be expressed in words. In the

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opening of Tu, the poet is tempted by the notion that silence nourishes the soul more than speech. The initial section of Le Grand œuvre resembles Tu in its vision of a silent harmony before the Creation. Adam is the first to speak, and his words signal a break with the harmony of nature as well as an awareness of his separation from God and perhaps the beginning of egotism. However, speech also permits love. “Je t’aime” [I love you] are the first words pronounced by Adam and Eve. In the course of the poem, Emmanuel develops a very positive assessment of language. Abel speaks to his flock, while Cain imposes silence on the city. In his final poetic statement on language, Emmanuel conveys his understanding that to speak is to imitate Christ. Speech is an act of courage, a sacrifice of the self that combats evil. We all have a duty to speak, and no one more than the poet: Car ce Verbe est une épée Et qui ne le met en pratique S’est déjà donné la mort L’épée au travers du corps (GO, 345) [For this Word is a sword And whoever doesn’t put it to use Has already killed himself With this sword through his body].

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1 Conclusion

Le Grand œuvre is a fitting end to a long poetic career governed by two principles. The first, “le goût de l’Un,” or taste for unity, reveals itself in Emmanuel’s need to understand the entirety of human experience in terms of God. The second, an openness to life, which Emmanuel calls “l’Ouvert” [the Open] in Une Année de grâce,1 accounts for his lifelong interest in all realms of knowledge, from science to religion, as well as his frequent allusions to literature ranging from Classical Greek tragedy and Vedic texts to contemporary French poetry. Emmanuel’s erudition suggests a comparison with the twentiethcentury English-American poet T.S. Eliot. Both men were acquainted with several foreign languages and both were interested in myth. Both were well versed in the canonical literature of Europe from antiquity to their own time and saw themselves as heirs of Dante, Donne, and the German Romantics. Both understood the European Middle Ages as the high point of Western civilization and the twentieth century as an age of decadence. Emmanuel’s depressing descriptions of modern urban society in Sodome and Babel rival Eliot’s portraits of the alienated individual in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland. Both poets saw Christianity as the foundation of Western civilization and expressed their personal faith in Christianity ever more forcefully in their later works, Eliot most notably in Four Quartets and Emmanuel in everything he wrote after 1970. Neither found a contradiction between the Bible’s explanation of sin and redemption and the spiritual quest evoked in Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts. Eliot and Emmanuel both wrote dense verse using complex imagery. Finally, their careers followed a similar trajectory, with

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both becoming public intellectuals who wrote, in addition to their own verse, critical essays on modern poetry. Even more than with T.S. Eliot, Emmanuel demonstrates affinities with Victor Hugo. Both Emmanuel and Hugo mastered every poetic genre, from the ode to the epic. Both composed poetry on all subjects – nature, love, or the current political situation in France – and did so in a language appropriate to the subject. Their verse rings with anger when addressing tyrants, becomes sentimental when evoking marital and familial love, and is sometimes humorous, as when Hugo speaks about his grandchildren or Emmanuel makes puns on his name. Both poets are equally comfortable in the sermo gravis [high style] of epic poetry and the sermo humilis [low style] of the Bible. Both Hugo and Emmanuel write naturally in metre. Mallarmé believed that Hugo had succeeded in rewriting philosophy, oratory, and history in metre. In Crise de vers, he even called Hugo “le vers personnellement” [the personification of verse].2 Emmanuel is one of the few French poets of the second half of the twentieth century to prefer metrical poetry to free verse or the prose poem. He, like Hugo, succeeds in translating discussions of philosophy, theology, science, even political theory, into verse. Above all, Emmanuel shares with Hugo a vision of time as a cyclical process through which the physical universe and humanity move from enslavement to freedom. Hugo expresses this view most clearly in La Légende des siècles, where he imagines the progressive liberation of humanity from ignorance and matter into light and spirit. Emmanuel’s concept of human time finds its roots in the biblical accounts of the Fall, Redemption, and Christ’s Second Coming. He communicates his view through typological symbolism, which invites us to understand literature and myth, as well as past and contemporary history, in relation to the Bible. Hugo interprets events from the Bible, mythology, earlier history, and his own epoch as episodes in the same story, each representing a regression or advance in the struggle between good and evil. The similarity of their conceptions of history results in a comparable notion of the poet as a prophet whose role is to interpret current events and warn the community of dangers. A century before French intellectuals of the political Left coined the term “littérature engagée” [committed literature], Victor Hugo used poetry to condemn the tyranny of Napoleon III. Emmanuel incorporates contemporary politics – Nazi atrocities, the repression of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, nuclear war – as well

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as social issues such as prostitution, abortion, and sexual liberation, out of a sense of duty to his readers. Both Hugo and Emmanuel look to poetry as a weapon against evil, a defence of the spirit in an increasingly atheistic and materialistic society. Emmanuel’s early works manifest no such confidence in the power of poetry. Tombeau d’Orphée and Le Poète fou take up the dilemma posed by Hölderlin in the early nineteenth century and later by Rimbaud in the 1870s that the poet must develop a sacred language – “le Verbe” [the Word] – that will save a fallen world. The term “chant” [song] appears frequently in Tombeau d’Orphée, Le Poète fou, and many of the war poems to denote this redemptive language, the linguistic equivalent of Christ. This belief in the high purpose of poetry co-exists, however, with the fear that the poet will be destroyed by his mission. Like Hölderlin, he will lose his sanity, or, like Orpheus, he will die in the enterprise. Different doubts about the poetic vocation appear in the war poetry, where Emmanuel often evokes the inadequacy of language to describe the horror of war and tyranny. Both Jour de colère and Babel admit the frailty of words, which so easily fall prey to distortion and can be enlisted in the service of evil. Such questioning of language, not at all unusual in French literature written immediately after the Second World War, offers one explanation for postwar movements such as the new novel, the pseudo-popular poetry of Prévert and Brassens, Ponge’s concentration on things, or concrete poetry. In Emmanuel’s case, these doubts eventually caused him to abandon the composition of verse for almost two decades. When he returned to poetry in the 1970s, Emmanuel had resolved any doubts about the value of language, especially poetic language. Jacob, Sophia, Tu, and Le Grand œuvre not only affirm by their length that the poet has much to say to his reader but also exude a new fascination with words. Emmanuel now finds his vocabulary in all domains – medicine, astronomy, advertisements, myth, foreign languages, household furnishings, ancient philosophy. He even recognizes the ability of single sounds or isolated letters to express meaning. The abstract “chant” of the 1940s becomes actual song found in sacred music or meditative chants, forms of music and prayer that have existed since antiquity and are the universal poetic inheritance of humanity. This exuberance of language attests to Emmanuel’s recovery of faith in words in the latter half of his career and makes him unique among French poets of the second half of the twentieth century.

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Although Emmanuel was influenced by numerous poets and philosophies of his own time and of the past, he remained an independent voice, a poet impossible to categorize as belonging to a single artistic or intellectual school. A writer of epic verse in the age of the short poem, a poet at a time when the novel clearly attracted more interest than all other literary genres, Pierre Emmanuel attests to poetry’s unmatched power to express all human experience and affirms the survival of high art in twentieth-century France.

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1 Notes

introduction 1 Eva Kushner, “L’Evolution du symbole dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” Ecrits du Canada français 13 (10 June 1962): 58–9. 2 William Calin, A Muse for Heroes. Nine Centuries of the Epic in France, 404. 3 Pierre Emmanuel, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. François Livi, xxxix. 4 Two of the most recent monographs are Anne-Sophie Andreu’s Pierre Emmanuel, which concentrates on readings of Emmanuel’s poems, and Irène Grünberg-Bourlas’s Pierre Emmanuel ou la Matière Spirituelle, a study of the influence of the Kabbalah on Emmanuel’s work. 5 Volume 1, Lire Pierre Emmanuel (1994), contains the proceedings of the international colloquium “Lire Pierre Emmanuel,” held in Paris on 17–18 October 1989. Volume 2 contains Emmanuel’s correspondence with the Swiss critic Albert Béguin: Lettres à Albert Béguin. Correspondance. 1941–1952 (2003). 6 Eugene A. Nida, Language Structure and Translation: Essays, selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil, 33. 7 For readers interested in details of Emmanuel’s biography, the best source is the Chronologie [Chronology] found at the beginning of his Œuvres poétiques complètes. André Marissel’s Pierre Emmanuel. Essai (1974) also begins with a useful “Jalons biographiques” [Biographical Milestones], which lists the important events in Emmanuel’s life from his birth until 1973. Camille Jordens’s Pierre Emmanuel. Introduction générale à l’œuvre also contains a section, “Eléments d’une biographie” [Elements of a Biography], with biographical information through 1980. 8 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 49.

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Notes to pages 9–25

9 Ibid., 54. 10 Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves and La Psychanalyse du feu. 11 Erich Auerbach, “Typological Symbolism in Medieval Literature,” Yale French Studies 9 (1952): 5. 12 For the most complete explanation of the development of typological symbolism, see Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 2: The Four Senses of Scripture, translated by E.M. Macierowski. 13 Auerbach, “Typological Symbolism in Medieval Literature,” 3–5. 14 Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, xxi. 15 Calin, A Muse for Heroes, 363. 16 See Stephen Schloesser’s Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris 1919–1933. 17 Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 168. 18 Ibid., 64 and 154–5. 19 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 360–8. 20 Henri Meschonnic, Les Etats de la poétique.

chapter one 1 Pierre Emmanuel, Autobiographies, 186. All references to this text will be cited parenthetically: (Aut., page number). 2 In the Œuvres poétiques complètes, Le Poète et son Christ is found in volume 1, 189–243. 3 The best studies of devotional poetry are Louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation and Terence Cave’s Devotional Poetry in France c. 1570–1613. 4 Emmanuel lists his readings in his introduction to Alain Bosquet’s Pierre Emmanuel, 12, 13. 5 Pierre Emmanuel, Le Poète et son Christ, 1938. All references to this text will be cited parenthetically: (PC, page number). 6 Alliance biblique universelle, La Bible en français courant. All references to the Bible in French are to this edition. 7 The Reader’s Bible. All references to the Bible in English are to this edition. 8 Cuthbert Lattey, S.J., The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, 34–5. 9 Joseph Chiari interprets this poem to mean that “Christ is as old as the world and we are the Cross on which he is crucified” (Contemporary French Poetry, 102). For Eva Kushner, “Pierre Emmanuel voit l’homme totalement identifié au Christ crucifié. Chacun de nous est éternellement présent sur la Croix sur laquelle le Christ est cloué quotidiennement tout au long de l’histoire” [Pierre Emmanuel sees man totally identified with the crucified Christ. Each of us is

Notes to pages 25–55

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

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eternally present on the Cross on which Christ is nailed daily throughout history] (“L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” 23). Albert Béguin explains that “L’audace de Pierre Emmanuel est de méditer sans cesse ce scandale du Christ coupable qui existe et souffre en chacun de nous, et qui nous demande de travailler à Le racheter, à L’introduire dans la Gloire” (The audacity of Pierre Emmanuel is to meditate unceasingly on this scandal of the guilty Christ who exists and suffers in each of us, and who asks us to work to redeem Him, to lead Him into Glory) (PC, 140). Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 210. Chiari, Contemporary French Poetry, 101. Tombeau d’Orphée is found in the Œuvres poétiques complètes, volume 1, 29–104. Chiari, Contemporary French Poetry, 101. Eva Kushner’s Le Mythe d’Orphée dans la littérature française contemporaine offers the most comprehensive study of the Orphean myth in modern French literature written before the mid-twentieth century. Bosquet, Pierre Emmanuel, 14. Chiari, Contemporary French Poetry, 97. William Calin, A Muse for Heroes: Nine Centuries of the Epic in France, 404. Kushner, Le Mythe d’Orphée dans la littérature française contemporaine, 308–9. Ovid, Metamorphosis, with an English translation by Frank Justus Miller, 66–177. Pierre Emmanuel, Tombeau d’Orphée. All references to this text will be cited parenthetically: (TO, page number). Pierre Jean Jouve, Noces, suivi de Sueur de sang, 129. See Calin, A Muse for Heroes, 408; Chiari, Contemporary French Poetry, 98; Kushner, Le Mythe d’Orphée dans la littérature française contemporaine, 423. See Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, La Psychanalyse du feu, and La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté. Calin notes that blood, saltwater, “the feminine, menstrual, fetal element” is the medium of Orpheus’s rebirth in the poem (A Muse for Heroes, 411). Elégies is found in the Œuvres poétiques complètes, volume 1, 1–28. Orphiques is found in the Œuvres poétiques complètes, volume 1, 1103–23. Le Poète fou is found in the Œuvres poétiques complètes, volume 1, 379–98. “Hölderlin et l’histoire” [Hölderlin and History] originally appeared in the literary review Fontaine in 1945; “Le Christ de Hölderlin” [Hölderlin’s Christ], originally entitled “Sur une traduction de Hölderlin” [On a Translation of Hölderlin], appeared in the revue Suisse contemporaine in July 1943. Both essays are included in the 1944 edition of Le Poète fou. Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, 243–53. All references to Hölderlin’s poetry will be cited parenthetically by the name of the poem.

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Notes to pages 55–73

30 Pierre Emmanuel, Le Poète fou, suivi d’Elégies. All references to this text will be cited parenthetically: (PF, page number). 31 Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres poétiques, 110.

chapter two 1 Pierre Seghers, La Résistance et ses poètes. 2 Other studies of individual poets, especially Char and Aragon, or of the role of French prose writers, do exist. See Margaret Atack, Literature of the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms, 1940–1950 or Jean Cassou’s 33 Sonnets of the Resistance and Other Poems, transl. by Timothy Adès. Seghers’s book, however, is the only comprehensive study of the poetic resistance in France. For a recent anthology of French Resistance poetry, see Bruno Doucey and Josiane Grinfas, La Résistance et ses poètes (Southeastern Pennsylvania: Beach Lloyd Publishers, 2008). 3 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, 18. 4 The details of Emmanuel’s experience during the Second World War can easily be reconstructed from three sources: his Autobiographies, 216–89; his introduction to Alain Bosquet’s Pierre Emmanuel, 15–16; and Seghers’s La Résistance et ses poètes, 132, 150, 166, 168, 177, 228, 264, 335, and 340. 5 Emmanuel published a few individual poems under the pseudonym Jean Amyot in clandestine works such as L’Honneur des poètes, published by Editions de Minuit in 1943. 6 Mémento des vivants (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1944) brings together selected poems from Jour de colère and Combats avec tes défenseurs in a single volume. 7 The volumes of war poetry are found in the Œuvres poétiques complètes, volume 1: Jour de colère, 133–243; Combats avec tes défenseurs, 107–29; La Liberté guide nos pas, 403–43; and Tristesse, ô ma patrie, 447–92. 8 Albert Béguin, Poésie de la Présence, 338–9. 9 Seghers, La Résistance et ses poètes, 80. 10 Seghers studies the many volumes of poetry, often published clandestinely throughout the Occupation, that celebrated the French people and French nation. Among them are volumes 40-44 of Poésie in Poèmes de la France malheureuse (1942) and L’Honneur des poètes (1943) in La Résistance et ses poètes. 11 Ibid., 191, 232, 267, 274, 400. 12 Pierre Emmanuel, Jour de colère. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (JC, page number). 13 Victor Hugo, Œuvres poétiques, 2, 178. 14 Agrippa d’Aubigné, Œuvres, 57.

Notes to pages 73–93

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15 Pierre Jean Jouve, Poésie 1925–1938, 287–369. 16 See, for example, the concluding poem of Kyrie: Adieu. Les troupes de cristal La matière céleste Se sont réunis en haut du dernier jour Les innombrables ombres d’Hélène voyagent Sur ce pays poussées par le souffle de Dieu Tout est profond tout est sans faute et cristallin Tout est vert bleu tout est joyeux et azurin (369) [Goodbye. The troupes of crystal The celestial matter Have come together at the top of the last day The innumerable shadows of Helen travel Over this country pushed by the breath of God All is profound all is faultless and crystalline All is greenish blue all is joyous and tinged with blue]. 17 In his “Avant-propos” to Emmanuel’s La Colombe, Jouve says : “La lecture à plusieurs hauteurs permet enfin de saisir ce qu’il y a de vrai dans l’évocation apocalyptique de notre époque” [Reading at several levels finally allows us to understand what is true in the apocalyptique evocation of our time] (Pierre Emmanuel, La Colombe, 19). Albert Béguin considers Emmanuel one of the “grands visionnaires de notre apocalypse” [the great visionaries of our apocalypse] (Poésie de la Présence, 251–2). Joseph Chiari judges that, like Claudel or Hugo, Emmanuel “is a poet of cosmic and apocalyptic visions” (Contemporary French Poetry, 97). 18 Seghers, La Résistance et ses poètes, 80. 19 Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 362. 20 Pierre Emmanuel, Poésie raison ardente. References to this volume will be cited parenthetically: (PRA, page number). 21 Béguin, Poésie de la Présence, 344. 22 Seghers, La Résistance et ses poètes, 483. 23 Pierre Emmanuel, Combats avec tes défenseurs. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (CT, page number). 24 Chiari, Contemporary French Poetry, 105. 25 Léon-Gabriel Gros, Poètes contemporains, 164. 26 Pierre Emmanuel, La Colombe. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (Col., page number). 27 Alan Boase, The Poetry of France, li. 28 D’Aubigné, Œuvres, 197.

276 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

36 37

Notes to pages 94–109

Pierre Jean Jouve, “La Résurrection des Morts,” Poésies, 29–37. New Catholic Encyclopedia 8 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 96. Chiari, Contemporary French Poetry, 105. Boase, The Poetry of France, lii. Sister M. Rita Rose Vistica, SNJM, “The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel: Incarnation in Progress,” 127. “La Colombe pèse … par sa faiblesse et légèreté même, du côté de la résurrection. Emmanuel reprend avec sollicitude ce symbole, déjà chargé de tout l’espoir de la réconciliation dans l’histoire de l’arche de Noé, parvenu à son apogée spirituelle comme signe visible du Saint-Esprit”: Eva Kushner, “L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” 27. In “L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” Kushner notes that, in order to reach a larger audience through his war poetry, “le poète doit dégager le symbolisme de toute enveloppe par trop intellectuelle, et le restituer, tel un viatique, à l’humanité souffrante” [the poet must separate his symbolism from its overly intellectual wrappings and restore it, as a source of comfort, to suffering humanity] (31). Pierre Emmanuel, La Liberté guide nos pas, 10–11. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (LG, page number). Pierre Emmanuel, Tristesse, ô ma patrie. References to text will be cited parenthetically: (TP, page number).

chapter three 1 William Calin, A Muse for Heroes: Nine Centuries of the Epic in France, 5. 2 Sodome is found in the Œuvres poétiques complètes, volume 1, 245–349; Babel, in volume 1, 609–746. Jacob is in volume 2, 1–191. 3 Emmanuel, Le Poète fou, suivi d’Elégies, 103–12. 4 Pierre Emmanuel, Prière d’Abraham. 5 Pierre Emmanuel, Sodome, 5. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (S., page number). 6 M. Rita Rose Vistica, “The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel: Incarnation in Progress,” 74. 7 Albert Béguin, Poésie de la Présence, 350. 8 In “Poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” Cahiers du Sud 340, April 1947, André Marissel credits Emmanuel’s refusal to give into despair, despite the desperate political situation of France during the war, to his ability to integrate his vision of the universe with his vision of history, a vision that caused him to meditate on the

Notes to pages 109–21

9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19

20

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Eden story. Emmanuel’s poetry is thus as much concerned with the first days of humanity as with the contemporary world (446–7). John Milton, Paradise Lost, Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes, 212. See, especially, Schloesser’s discussion of Jean Cocteau and Jacques Maritain, 178–81. Eva Kushner considers the guilt of the city the main subject of Sodome (“L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” 40), as does Alain Bosquet (Pierre Emmanuel, 88). Jean Onimus interprets the crime of Sodom as self-sufficiency (Expérience de la Poésie, 218), while Camille Jordens sees homosexuality as a deeper obsession with an unattainable unity (Pierre Emmanuel: Introduction générale à l’œuvre, 38). Milton, Paradise Lost, 284–6. For a different interpretation, see Joseph Chiari, Contemporary French Poetry, 110. Sven Siegrist connects Adam’s transgression to that of the Sodomites: “La perfection serait synonyme d’inertie, la division en général (et celle des sexes en particulier) est un stimulant par la souffrance, une ouverture à l’altérité: la blessure de la division rendra l’homme perméable à l’action divine, éveillera en lui le désir de s’unir à Dieu” [Perfection would be a synonym for inertia, division in general (and division of the sexes in particular) stimulates through suffering, is an opening to alterity: the wound of division renders man permeable to divine action, awakens in him the desire to unite himself to God]. Sven Siegrist, Pour et contre Dieu. Pierre Emmanuel ou la poésie de l’approche: L’Expérience du manque et de l’antériorité potentielle, 35. Kushner, “L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” 47. Onimus, Expérience de la poésie, 218–19. Kushner, “L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” 40–1. For Kushner, both Sodom and Babel are places of redemption as well as of sin. See “Catholic Writers in France: The Generation of 1915,” Renascence 36, no. 1 (autumn-winter 1983–1984): 22. See Contemporary French Poetry, where Chiari judges the mixture of imagery as a defect and concludes that Sodome “is too heterogenous and lacks the unifying force of a central character or theme” (113) and Expérience de la poésie, for Onimus’s claim that this lack of logic in the imagery is necessary to the poem’s purpose of reliving the totality of the Sodom myth (210). There exist several critical studies of Babel. Kushner’s “L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel” provides a concise plot summary of the poem as well as an analysis of the imagery (50–8); Onimus analyses Emmanuel’s

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21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Notes to pages 121–36

preoccupation with chaos (Expérience de la poésie, 222–9); Siegrist, the problem of the human-divine relationship (Pour et contre Dieu, 274–315); Marissel, the theme of condemned cities (Pierre Emmanuel: Essai, 31–41); Bosquet’s brief remarks situate Babel in relation to Emmanuel’s earlier works and to other modern political poetry (Pierre Emmanuel, 89–94); Calin studies the epic dimensions, symbolism, and meaning of the poem (A Muse for Heroes, 413–23). Pierre Emmanuel, Babel, 11. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (BA, page number). Kushner, “L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” 50. Ibid., 53. Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles, La Fin de Satan, Dieu, 783–809. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 7. Onimus explains: “L’invention de la femme causera l’ébranlement de Babel: cette structure froide et orgueilleuse de l’énergie virile ne résistera pas à la renaissance de la tendresse” [The invention of woman will cause the destabilization of Babel: this structure, cold and proud of its viril energy, won’t resist the rebirth of tenderness]. Expérience de la poésie, 217. Calin, A Muse for Heroes, 421. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage. See Calin, A Muse for Heroes, 413. Gaston Bachelard analyses the imagery of petrification recurrent in Emmanuel’s work as evidence of the Medusa complex, that is, the ability of those who would transgress the boundaries between the human and the divine to turn those they gaze upon into stone (La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté, 227). According to Bachelard, dew also signifies for Emmanuel a cosmic intuition that penetrates all things (ibid., 331). Kushner, “L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” 51. Jean Rousselot, Poètes français d’aujourd’hui. Panorama critique, 171–2. Kushner, “L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” 50. Thomas Merton, The Tower of Babel. Béguin, Poésie de la Présence, 353–4. Rousselot, Poètes français d’aujourd’hui, 169. Ibid., 166. Marissel, Pierre Emmanuel. Essai, 55. Marissel’s excellent essay concentrates on Jacob in relation to Emmanuel’s prose essays of the 1960s – Le Goût de l’Un, La Face humaine, and Le Monde est intérieur – all of which, like Jacob, give evidence of his renewed spiritual life.

Notes to pages 136–46

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40 Pierre Emmanuel, Jacob, 26. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: ( J, page number). 41 Marissel, Pierre Emmanuel: Essai, 66. 42 Marissel notes that Emmanuel met Eliot, as well as Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas during a two-month stay in England in 1945 (Pierre Emmanuel: Essai, 11). 43 In the second part of Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages,” Eliot writes: I have said before That the past experience revived in the meaning Is not the experience of one life only But of many generations (24). 44 Marissel notes that, even in his poetry of the 1940s, Emmanuel integrated his vision of history with his vision of the universe (“Poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” 447). Jean Rousselot also notes that, beginning with Babel, Emmanuel consistently presents himself as “l’homme d’aujourd’hui” [the man of today], who lives out his own generation’s search for meaning (Poètes français d’aujourd’hui, 170–1). 45 Yves-Alain Favre, “Théologie négative et parole poétique dans Jacob,” Lire Pierre Emmanuel, 75. 46 Favre and Evelyne Frank have written insightfully on Emmanuel’s theology as it is expressed in Jacob. Favre sees Jacob as the poem in which the opposition between art and religion plays itself out. He suggests that Emmanuel arrives at an understanding of God by adopting Gregory of Nyssa’s negative theology, which holds that it is impossible to speak about God but fruitful to examine one’s experience of searching for God (“Théologie négative et parole poétique dans Jacob”). In “La Naissance du oui dans l’œuvre de Pierre Emmanuel” (Lire Pierre Emmanuel, 81–94), Frank compares Emmanuel’s negative conception of the relationship between man and God expressed in his poetry of the 1940s, Babel, and Jacob to the work of modern philosophers, including Nietzsche, Camus, Michel de Certaud, and Martin Buber, as well as the imagery of Jacob, which indicates a move toward acceptance of the human-divine relationship, what she terms “la naissance du oui” [the birth of “yes”]. 47 Favre mentions the German mystic Meister Eckhart as a possible source in Jacob (“Théologie négative,” 75). 48 Emmanuel claims, in La Vie terrestre, 36, that Delacroix’s painting of Jacob wrestling with the angel found in Paris’s St Sulpice inspired Jacob. 49 Jordens, Pierre Emmanuel. Introduction générale, 33. 50 Favre points out that Emmanuel had already written poetry for an oratorio that would later be published as a volume of short poems on a biblical subject in Evangéliaire of 1961 (“Théologie négative,” 71).

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Notes to pages 146–60

51 In the 1971 edition to Sodome, Emmanuel states his intentions for this work on the book’s back cover: “un long développement musical: lire ceci est d’abord l’entendre” [a long musical development: reading this involves, first of all, hearing it]. 52 C.G. Jung, Four Archetypes, 15–18; Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Trans. by Ralph Manheim. See especially, 147–9; 211–12; 240–60.

chapter four 1 In the Œuvres poétiques complètes, XX Cantos and Cantos are included in Chansons du dé à coudre, volume 1, 493–555. 2 In the Œuvres poétiques complètes, all four of these books are included in volume 1: Visage nuage, 747–811; Versant de l’âge, 813–94; Evangéliaire, 895–1057, La Nouvelle naissance, 1059–1100. 3 The Œuvres poétiques complètes only contains the introductory essay to Ligne de faîte in volume II, 1237–59. 4 Eva Kushner, “Pierre Emmanuel and the Quest for Unity,” Renascence 36:1 (autumn-winter 1983–84): 24. 5 William Calin, A Muse for Heroes: Nine Centuries of the Epic in France, 404. 6 Eva Kushner, “L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” 39. 7 Pierre Brunel, “Les Cantos de Pierre Emmanuel, ou le sablier et la croix,” Lire Pierre Emmanuel, 50. 8 Joseph Chiari, Contemporary French Poetry, 107–8. 9 Léon-Gabriel Gros, Poètes contemporains, 165–6. 10 Alain Bosquet, Pierre Emmanuel, 15. 11 Pierre Emmanuel, XX Cantos. All poems of this volume will be cited by Roman numeral. 12 Pierre Emmanuel, Sodome, 9. 13 Chiari, Contemporary French Poetry, 108. 14 Bosquet, Pierre Emmanuel, 13. 15 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Brise marine,” Œuvres complètes, 38. 16 David O’Connell, “Catholic Writers in France: The Generation of 1915,” 12. 17 Michael Edwards notes that, although Emmanuel may not have read Wordsworth, he resembles Wordsworth in his sense of the distance between an object and the poetic rendering of the object. He concludes that the “language problem” was bequeathed to the twentieth century by Romanticism and never fully resolved (Of Making Many Books, 83).

Notes to pages 160–88

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18 Pierre Brunel, “Les Cantos de Pierre Emmanuel,” 38. 19 Pierre Emmanuel, Cantos, 68. References to this volume will be cited parenthetically: (Cantos, page number). 20 See, for example, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” 21 Brunel, “Les Cantos de Pierre Emmanuel,” 39. 22 Kushner, “L’Evolution des symboles dans la poésie de Pierre Emmanuel,” 17. 23 Brunel, “Les Cantos de Pierre Emmanuel,” 49. 24 Chiari, Contemporary French Poetry, 105–6. 25 In the preface to Ligne de Faîte, the collection of selected poems of the 1940s to the 1960s, Emmanuel explains this conception of the poet’s relationship to words: “Il y a une manière silencieuse de se servir des mots en servant leur sens … mais seulement si le poète accepte la loi de la parole qui l’institue serviteur et non créateur du sens” [There is a silent way of using words by using their meaning … but only if the poet accepts the command of language to become the servant rather than the creator of meaning]. (Pierre Emmanuel, Ligne de faîte, 33) 26 Pierre Emmanuel, Chansons du dé à coudre. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (CD, page number). 27 Kushner, “Pierre Emmanuel and the Quest for Unity,” 18. 28 Pierre Emmanuel, Visage nuage. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (VN, page number). 29 Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 128. 30 Kushner, “Pierre Emmanuel and the Quest for Unity,” 19. 31 Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 1277. 32 André Marissel, Pierre Emmanuel: Essai, 43–4. 33 Pierre Emmanuel, Versant de l’âge. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (VA, page number). 34 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 74. 35 Ibid., 6. 36 Jean Rousselot, Poètes français d’aujourd’hui. Panorama critique, 172. 37 Pierre Emmanuel, Evangéliaire, back cover. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (EV, page number). 38 Pierre Emmanuel, La Nouvelle naissance. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (NN, page number). 39 Evelyne Frank, La Naissance du oui dans l’œuvre de Pierre Emmanuel, 328. 40 Marissel, Pierre Emmanuel. Essai, 49. 41 Rousselot compares Evangéliaire to a series of “xylographies colorées” (coloured woodcuts) and stained glass windows (Poètes français d’aujourd’hui, 173). Marissel speaks of “les enluminures d’Evangéliaire” (Pierre Emmanuel. Essai, 55).

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Notes to pages 189–204

chapter five 1 Both André Marissel and Camille Jordens provide information on Emmanuel’s career as a public intellectual (Marissel, Pierre Emmanuel: Essai, 9–12; Jordens, Pierre Emmanuel. Introduction générale à l’œuvre, 2–6). 2 Pierre Emmanuel, Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. 1, xxxiv. 3 Ibid., vol. 1, xxxvii–iv. 4 Pierre Emmanuel, La Vie Terrestre, 31. 5 Pierre Emmanuel, Le Goût de l’Un, 14. 6 Pierre Emmanuel, La Face humaine, 64. 7 Ibid., 78. 8 Pierre Emmanuel, Pour une politique de la culture, 109. 9 In the Œuvres poétiques complètes, Sophia is found in volume 2, 193–445. 10 Hans Jonas, “Gnosticism,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 3 and 4 (New York: Macmillan; The Free Press, 1972), 336. 11 Ibid., 37–9. 12 Paul Williams, with Anthony Tribe, Buddhist Thought, 200. 13 Pierre Emmanuel, Le Monde est intérieur, 94. 14 Ibid., 203. 15 Ibid., 202. 16 Ibid., 203. 17 Pierre Emmanuel, French and German Letters Today: Four Lectures by Pierre Emmanuel, Alain Bosquet, Erich Heller, and Hans Egon Holthusen, 4. 18 Jordens, Pierre Emmanuel. Introduction générale à l’œuvre, 31. 19 Pierre Emmanuel, Sophia. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (Sophia, page number). 20 See, especially, Paul Claudel, Cinq grandes odes. 21 René Plantier, “La Sensualité verbale dans Sophia,” Lire Pierre Emmanuel, 63. 22 Jordens, Pierre Emmanuel. Introduction générale, 33. 23 Ibid., 30. 24 Irène Grünberg-Bourlas studies the presence of the Kabbalah in Sophia and other works in Pierre Emmanuel, ou La Matière Spirituelle. 25 Emmanuel’s interest in the prostitute as a redemptive figure, already evident in Tombeau d’Orphée, comes to him from his reading of Léon Bloy and is further proof of his debt to the Catholic Revival of 1919–33 (Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 65–6). 26 Hugh Henry, “Acathistus,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907), 1 May 2011 http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/ 01092c.htm.

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27 Brian Merrikan Hill, With Planetary Eyes, xii. 28 See Emmanuel’s Baudelaire, 25–72, for an analysis of the prostitute in the nineteenth-century poet’s work. 29 Herbert Thurston, “Angelus,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1, 1 May 2010 http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01486b.htm. 30 Plantier, “La Sensualité verbale dans Sophia,” 66. 31 Plantier notes that “Nef” “est le lieu des tensions et des contraires, elle est le monde” [is the site of tensions and contradictions. It is the world] (“La Sensualité verbale dans Sophia,” 65). 32 See, for example, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959). 33 Emmanuel, Le Goût de l’Un, 135. 34 Ibid., 136 35 Ibid., 138. 36 Ibid., 140–6. 37 Hill, With Planetary Eyes, xi. 38 Tu is found in the Œuvres poétiques complètes, volume 2, 447–724. 39 Pierre Emmanuel, Tu, back cover. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (Tu, page number). 40 Pierre Emmanuel, La Révolution parallèle, 12–13. 41 Ibid., 227. 42 Emmanuel, La Vie terrestre, 157. 43 Ibid., 176. 44 Ibid., 177. 45 Ibid., 166. 46 Pierre Emmanuel, Choses dites, 214–30. 47 Emmanuel, Le Goût de l’Un, 239. 48 Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 65–6. 49 Paul Valéry, Poésies, 105. 50 Emmanuel, La Vie terrestre, 160–1. 51 In La Naissance du Oui dans l’œuvre de Pierre Emmanuel, 329. Evelyne Frank agrees that, beginning with Jacob, Emmanuel evolves from a theology that concentrates on a personal God more typical of Christianity to an interest in “l’énergie cosmique du Tout-Autre” [the cosmic energy of the Absolute Other] characteristic of Asian religions. 52 See Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses précédé de Douze petits écrits et suivi de Proêmes (Paris: Gallimard, n.d.) and René Char, Poèmes et prose choisis (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). 53 Emmanuel, Le Monde est intérieur, 37.

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Notes to pages 238–44

54 Ibid., 38. 55 Hill, With Planetary Eyes. 56 Anne-Sophie Andreu, “Les Poèmes du cri, les poèmes du chant, les poèmes du silence,” 58.

chapter six 1 Anne-Sophie Andreu, “Les Poèmes du cri, les poèmes du chant, les poèmes du silence,” 62. 2 Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme is found in the Œuvres poétiques complètes, volume 2, 725–990; Le Grand oeuvre, in volume 2, 991–1236. 3 L’Arbre et le vent: Feuilles volantes, 1980–1981; Une Année de grâce: Feuilles volantes, 1981–1982. 4 Emmanuel, L’Arbre et le vent, 13. 5 Anne-Sophie Andreu notes, in her chronology of Emmanuel’s life found in the Oeuvres poétiques complètes, that Emmanuel was being treated by a Jungian psychoanalyst at the time of the trilogy’s composition (Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. 1, xxxvii). 6 See The Gnostic Jung, compiled by Robert Segal. 7 See Jung on Alchemy, selected and introduced by Nathan Schwartz-Salant. 8 Emmanuel, L’Arbre et le vent, 13. 9 Pierre Emmanuel, L’Autre, back cover. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (Autre, page or poem number). 10 Pierre Emmanuel, Car enfin je vous aime, 9. See also Ginette Adamson, “Un roman et son double: Car enfin je vous aime de Pierre Emmanuel,” Lire Pierre Emmanuel, 103–15. 11 Brian Hill, With Planetary Eyes, 89. 12 René Plantier, “La Sensualité verbale dans Sophia,” 63. 13 Pierre Emmanuel, Duel, iii. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (Duel, page or poem number). 14 Andreu, “Les Poèmes du cri, les poèmes du chant, les poèmes du silence,” Lire Pierre Emmanuel, 59. 15 In her notes to Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme, Andreu notes that Emmanuel admitted that his love for a younger woman inspired the trilogy. Some poems, such as #62 and #63 of Duel recount real-life encounters between Emmanuel and the woman (Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. 2, 1281–3). 16 Pierre Emmanuel, Una ou la mort la vie, back cover. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (Una, page or poem number). 17 Gérard de Nerval, Œuvres complètes, 363.

Notes to pages 245–69

285

18 The best-known example is the first sonnet of Les Chimères, “El Desdichado,” in the first stanza of which the words “Etoile” [Star], “Soleil” [Sun], and “Mélancolie” [Melancholy] are capitalized without explanation. 19 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 38. 20 Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres poétiques, 141. 21 Aude Préta-De Beaufort, “Pierre Emmanuel: La Faim ou ‘la mort la vie,’” 1032. 22 Pierre Emmanuel, Le Grand œuvre: Cosmogonie, back cover. References to this text will be cited parenthetically: (GO, page number). 23 Emmanuel, Une Année de grâce, 7. 24 Clément Olivier, Les Visionnaires. Essai sur le dépassement du nihilisme, 129. 25 Ibid., 130–3. 26 Ibid., 131–2. 27 In her notes to Le Grand oeuvre, Préta-De Beaufort suggests that in his conception of the antagonisms between brothers and family members, as well as in his belief in a sacrificial victim, Emmanuel was influenced by his friend René Girard’s La Violence et le sacré (Emmanuel, Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. 2, 1295). 28 Andreu, “Les poèmes du cri, les poèmes du chant, les poèmes du silence,” 60–2. 29 Ibid., 56. 30 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, transl. by Charles Singleton, vol. 3, 380. 31 Evelyne Frank, “La Naissance du oui dans l’œuvre de Pierre Emmanuel,” 84. 32 Ibid., 89. 33 Olivier, Les Visionnaires, 145.

conclusion 1 Pierre Emmanuel, Une Année de grâce, 9. 2 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 360.

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1 Bibliography

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Cave, Terence. Devotional Poetry in France, c. 1570–1613. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Chiari, Joseph. Contemporary French Poetry. New York: Philosophical Library, 1952. Claudel, Paul. Oeuvre poétique. Paris: Gallimard, 1967. – Les Cinq grandes odes. Paris: Gallimard, 1957. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Charles Singleton. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. Edwards, Michael. Of Making Many Books. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990. Edwards, Paul, ed. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 4 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1943. – “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960. Emmanuel, Pierre. L’Arbre et le vent: Feuilles volantes, 1980–1981. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983. – Une Année de grâce: Feuilles volantes, 1981–1982. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983. – Autobiographies. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1947 and 1953. – L’Autre. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980 (vol. 3 of Livre de l’homme et de la femme; each volume published separately). – Babel. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1951. – Baudelaire. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1967. – Cantos. Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1944. – Car enfin je vous aime. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983. – Chansons du dé à coudre. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971. – Choses dites. Paris & Bruxelles: Desclée de Brouwer, 1970. – La Colombe. Fribourg: Editions de l’Université de Fribourg, 1943. – Combats avec tes défenseurs. Paris: Editions Seghers, 1942. – Duel. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979 (vol. 2 of Livre de l’homme et de la femme; each volume published separately). – Elégies. Paris: A. Magné; Brussels: Edition Universelle, 1940. – Evangéliaire. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961. – La Face humaine. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963. – French and German Letters Today: Four Lectures by Pierre Emmanuel, Alain Bosquet, Erich Heller, and Hans Egon Holthusen. Washington: The Library of Congress, 1960. – Le Goût de l’Un. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963. – Le Grand œuvre. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984.

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Meschonnic, Henri. Les Etats de la poétique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. Milton, John. The Complete Poems and Major Prose. Edited by Merritt Hughes. Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980. Monchanin, Jules. De l’esthétique à la mystique. Précédé de La Loi d’exode. Introduction by Pierre Emmanuel. Tournai, Belgium: Casterman, 1967. Nerval, Gérard de. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Pantheon Books, 1955. New Catholic Encyclopedia, 17 vols. New York: McGraw Hill, 1967–69. Nida, Eugene. Language Structure and Translation: Essays. Selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1975. O’Connell, David. “Catholic Writers in France: The Generation of 1915.” Renascence 6:1 (Autumn-Winter, 1983–84): 12. Olivier, Clément. Les Visionnaires: essai sur le dépassement du nihilisme. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1986. Onimus, Jean. Expérience de la poésie. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1973. Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translation by Frank Justus Miller. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1921. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Paris: Editions Garnier, 1964. Péguy, Charles. Œuvres complètes de Charles Péguy, vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard, 1925. Plantier, René. “La Sensualité verbale dans Sophia.” Lire Pierre Emmanuel. Cahiers Pierre Emmanuel 1 (1994): 63–70. Pope John Paul II. Poèmes: Karol Wojtyla. Translated by Emmanuel, Constantin Jelenski, and Anna Turowicz. Paris: Cana-Cerf, 1979. Préta-De Beaufort, Aude. “Pierre Emmanuel: La Faim ou ‘la mort la vie.’” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 94 (1994: no. 6): 1021–32. The Reader’s Bible. London: Oxford University Press, 1951. Rimbaud, Arthur. Œuvres. Paris: Editions Garnier, 1960. Rousselot, Jean. Poètes français d’aujourd’hui. Panorama critique. Paris: Seghers, 1952. Rousso, Henry. Le Syndrome de Vichy, de 1944 à nos jours. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990. – The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Schloesser, Stephen. Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris 1919–1933. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

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1 Index

Adamson, Ginette, viii, 284n10 Aeneas, 120 alchemy, 241, 254–5 Amyot, Jean (pseudonym of Pierre Emmanuel), 274n5 Andreu, Anne-Sophie, 6, 237–8, 240, 243, 257–8, 284n4, 284n15 Anthonioz, Geneviève, 140 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 212, 213, 229, 257 Aragon, Louis, 11, 68–9, 76, 104, 108, 120, 154, 220 architecture, of cathedrals, 192–220, 252 Atack, Margaret, 274n2 Aubigné, Agrippa d’, 3, 6, 72–3, 76, 78, 89, 93, 129 Auerbach, Erich, 10 Augustine, Saint, 4, 86, 229 Avila, Teresa of, 25, 143, 226 Bachelard, Gaston, 10, 51, 147, 272n10, 273n23, 278n30, 278n31 Barth, Karl, 31 Baudelaire, Charles, 65, 170, 177–8, 213, 219, 231

Béguin, Albert, 54, 69, 77, 109, 135, 271n5, 272–3n9, 275n17 Bloy, Léon, 13, 232, 282n25 Boase, Alan, 88, 97 Bonnefoy, Yves, 6, 11, 52, 197, 266 Bosquet, Alain, 8, 32, 151, 274n4, 277n11, 277–8n20, 282n17 Brassens, Georges, 12, 268 Brunel, Pierre, 151, 160, 163, 164 Buddhism, 193, 240, 255 Calin, William, 5, 33, 108, 127, 150, 273n22, 273n24, 277–8n20, 278n29 Cassou, Jean, 274n2 Cayrol, Jean, 16, 87 Cendrars, Blaise, 229 Char, René, 11, 52, 69, 162, 237 Chartier, Alain, 247 Chiari, Joseph, 31–3, 97, 151, 156, 164, 273n22, 275n17, 277n13, 277n19 Claudel, Paul, 10, 13, 16, 97–8, 108, 186, 190, 193, 197, 209, 220, 222–3, 226, 239, 275n17, 282n20 Cohen, Leonard, 12 Communion of Saints, 91, 95, 97

294

Index

Dante Alighieri, 51, 108, 119–20, 136, 139, 145, 242, 244, 258, 266 Desnos, Robert, 154 devotional Poetry, Counter Reformation or Late Renaissance, 16, 24–5, 32, 62, 64, 143, 182, 226, 240, 272n3 Donne, John, 3, 7, 10, 16, 20, 22, 98, Doucey, Bruno, 274n2 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 68–9 Dylan, Bob, 12 Edwards, Michael, 280n17 Eliot, T.S., 8, 9, 20, 126, 144, 226, 242, 244, 266–7 Eluard, Paul, 11, 17, 68, 69,76, 155, 190, 219 Emmanuel, Pierre, Une Année de grâce: Feuilles volantes, 1981–1982, 241, 255, 266; L’Arbre et le vent: Feuilles volantes, 1980–1981, 241; Autobiographies, passim; L’Autre, 242–3, 250–4; Babel, 120–35, 260; Baudelaire, 190, 283n28; Cantos, 160–4; Car enfin je vous aime, 242; Chansons du dé à coudre, 164–7; Choses dites, 222, 283n46; Le Christ de Hölderlin, 54, 273n28; La Colombe, 86–98; Combats avec tes défenseurs, 76–86; De l’Esthétique à la mystique. Précédé de La Loi d’exode, 221–2; Duel, 242, 243, 247–50; Elégies, 53, 109; Evangéliaire, 181–8; La Face humaine, 191; French and German Letters Today: Four Lectures by Pierre Emmanuel, Alain Bosquet, Erich Heller, and Hans Egon Holthusen, 194, 282n17; Le Goût de l’Un,

190–1, 197–8, 219, 227; Le Grand œuvre, 254–65; Jacob, 135–49; Jour de colère, 70–6; Jours de la Nativité, 181; La Liberté guide nos pas, 86, 98–105; Ligne de faîte, 280n3, 281n25; Le Livre de l’homme et de la femme, 240–54; Le Monde est intérieur, 190, 193, 237–8, 282n13, 282n14, 282n15, 282n16; La Nouvelle naissance, 181–8; Œuvres poétiques complètes, 6; Orphiques 53; Poésie raison ardente, 77; Le Poète et son Christ, 15–32, 36, 50, 109; Le Poète fou, 53–66; Pour une politique de la culture, 190, 192, 221; Prière d’Abraham, 109; La Révolution parallèle, 221–2; Saint-John Perse: Praise and Presence, 190; Sodome, 109–20; Sophia, 192–220; Sur une traduction de Hölderlin, 273n28; Tombeau d’Orphée, 32–54; Tristesse ô ma patrie, 105–7; Tu, 220–39; Una ou la mort la vie, 242, 243–7; Versant de l’âge, 175–81; La Vie terrestre, 190, 221–2, 237; Visage nuage, 167–75; XX Cantos, 151–60 English Romantics, 160, 244, 251 Favre, Yves-Alain, 144, 279n46, 279n47, 279n50 Frank, Evelyne, 187, 261–2, 279n46, 283n51 French Baroque poetry, 19, 32, 219 French Resistance, 4, 68–70 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 9, 11, 17, 23, 31, 34, 51, 78–9, 82, 85 261 Frye, Northrop, 10 German Romantics, 65, 266

Index Gide, André, 11, 110 Girard, René, 285n27 Gnosticism, 193, 198, 208, 219, 231, 240, 241 Góngora, Luis de, 16 Gros, Léon-Gabriel, 86, 151 Grosjean, Jean, 16 Grünberg-Bourlas, Irène, 271n4, 282n24 Herbert, George, 16 Hill, Brian Merrikan, 204, 220, 238, 242 Hinduism, 193–4, 198, 208, 220, 221–2, 224, 227, 236–7, 240, 244, 255 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 53–62, 178, 268 Homer, 9 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 7, 16, 32, 189 Hugo, Victor, 71–2, 76, 85–6, 89–90, 98, 124, 129, 141, 186, 267–8 Jacob, Max, 13, 16 John of the Cross, Saint, 16, 25, 143, 153 Jordens, Camille, 146, 194, 197–8, 271n7, 277n11, 282n1 Jouve, Pierre Jean, 15–16, 32, 38, 69, 73–4, 82, 86–7, 95, 98, 219–20, 275n17 Jung, Carl, 10, 147, 241, 250, 255, 284n6, 284n7 Kabbalah, 193, 200, 271n4, 282n24 Kierkegaard, Søren, 31, 145 Kushner, Eva, 5, 33, 97, 117, 119, 121–2, 133, 135, 150, 151, 164, 167,

295 170, 272–3n9, 273n14, 273n22, 276n35, 277n11, 277n20

La Ceppède, 16, 51, 98, 184 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 52 Lao-Tse, 262 La Tour du Pin, Patrice de, 11, 16 Livi, François, 7 Lowell, Amy, 162 Lowell, Robert, 213, 283n32 Loyola, Ignatius of, 16, 23, 182, 185, 205 Lubac, Henri de, 272n12 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 13, 65, 158–9, 244–6, 237, 267 Marissel, André, 136, 174, 187, 271n7, 276n7, 276n8, 277–8n20, 279n41, 279n42, 277n44, 282n41, 282n1 Maritain, Jacques and Raïssa, 12, 85 Marx, Karl, 6, 98, 121, 130, 177, 261 Mauriac, François, 4 medieval poetry, 152, 162, 184, 240, 242–5, 247, 258 Meister Eckhart, 279n47 Merton, Thomas, 135 Meschonnic, Henri, 13 Metaphysical poets, 3, 32, 98, 134, 143 Michaux, Henri, 194 Milton, John, 9, 108, 109, 113, 124, 136, 242, 250 Monchanin, Abbé Jules, 221–2 Nerval, Gérard de, 243–6 Neumann, Erich, 147 Nida, Eugene, 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 129, 261, 279n46 numerology, 242–3

296

Index

O’Connell, David, 160 Odysseus, 120, 124 Olivier, Clément, 255, 262 Onimus, Jean, 119, 277n11, 277n19, 277n20, 278n26 Orwell, George, 123, 129 Ovid, 33–4, 45–6, 50 Pascal, Blaise, 17, 23, 29, 31 Péguy, Charles, 13, 16, 108, 190, 193–4, 239 Petrarch, 54, 162, 244 Plantier, René, 197, 209, 242, 283n31 Ponge, Francis, 6, 11, 237, 268 Pound, Ezra, 162, 281n20 Préta de Beaufort, Aude, 254, 285n21, 285n27 Prévert, Jacques, 6, 12, 197, 268 pseudo-popular poetry, 12, 268 psychoanalytic interpretations, 9–10, 11, 23, 31, 34, 38, 51, 82–3, 147, 149, 250 Rambaut de Vaqueiras, 244 Renouveau catholique, or Catholic Revival, 12–13, 110, 232 Rimbaud, Arthur, 41, 62, 65, 201, 243–6, 255, 268 Rousselot, Jean, 135, 180, 279n44, 281n41

Rousso, Henry, 68 Saint-John Perse, 108, 190 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 130 Scève, Maurice, 244 Schloesser, Stephen, 110, 272n16, 272n17, 272n18, 277n10, 282n25, 283n48 Second Vatican Council, 16, 142 Seghers, Pierre, 32–3, 68, 69, 70–1, 77, 274n4, 274n10, 274n11, 275n18 Siegrist, Sven, 277n14, 277–8n20 Sponde, Jean de, 16, 64 Surrealism, 11, 23, 50, 240, 255 Symbolism, 11, 160, 240 Taoism, 261–2 Thomas, Dylan, 7, 170 Transfiguration, 221, 225, 227–8 typological, or figural, symbolism, 10–11, 31, 51, 70, 77–8, 92, 97–8, 120, 136, 149, 176, 184, 223, 267 Valéry, Paul, 32, 153, 155, 234, 239 Verlaine, Paul, 155–7 Vian, Boris, 12 Virgil, 9 Vistica, Rita, 97, 109 visual poetry, 12, 256–7