Poetic fantasy and fiction: The short stories of Jules Supervielle 9783111343754, 9783110991956

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edenda curat C. H. VAN S C H O O N E V E L D Indiana University Seríes Practica, 83

POETIC FANTASY AND FICTION The Short Stories of Jules Supervielle

by L O U I S A E. J O N E S University of Washington

1973 MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

©Copyright 1973 in The Netherlands. Mouton &Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 73-86215

Printed in The Netherlands

With warmest thanks to Renée Hubert, for inspiration, encouragement and direction

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

. .

7

Problems of contemporary fiction. Characteristics of narrative. Nineteenth century narrative tradition. Nineteenth century poctic tradition with respect to anecdote and metaphor. Breton and Reverdy. Characteristics of poetry. Presentation of Supervielle.

1.

Fantasy

13

The fantastique. Ordinary and extraordinary. Metaphor and metamorphosis. From simile to fantasy in Supervielle's short stories. Other authors .

2 Convention

20

The laws of fantasy in Supervielle's stories: time, animism and spirit over matter. The convention of stock characterization and the hierarchy of imagination. Other authors. Supervielle's use of mythology. Stories about afterlife. Fantasy in the conventional, everyday, modern context. The ordinary detail as fantastic. Poetic blending of opposites in Supervielle; in the conte fantastique. The juxtaposition of ordinary and extraordinary in both.

3.

Causality

27

Its place in narrative logic. Causality based on the conventions of fantasy. Contradiction, and determinism parodied. Logic, order, predictability versus surprise and suspense. Techniques for undercutting causality: juxtaposition without explanation, borrowing, inconsistent destiny, elaborate gratuity, unfulfilled expectation. Logic and causality in the prose poem. In the contes poétiques of other authors. In the contes fantastiques', the tradition of diabilical disorder.

4.

The Unique and the Universal

Mimesis and the historical setting of narrative. Modern attempts to avoid specific time and place in narrative. Supervielle's poetic ideal of cosmic unity. Specific situation and character: the problem of self and other. Supervielle's stories, from the most action-packed to the most static, the most narrative to the most poetic. Thematic characterization and polarized plot. Unique and typical action. Linear time, story and narrative interrupted and distorted. Specific reference broadened through contradiction and ambiguity. Other authors compared throughout.

36

TABLE OF CONTENTS

6 5.

Perception

49

The tradition of subjective fiction. Contes fantastiques. Reliability of a narrator's vision. Modern ambiguities in various authors. Hallucination and character counts: the double. Supervielle's use of objective narrator: to guarantee the reality of fantasy; to be deliberately invraisemblable and inconsistent. Dramatic irony. Supervielle and Mérimée with ghost stories. Rhetorical situations: complicity and mystification. Other authors. Hostility and silence. Fraternity and lucidity. The outsider hero; narrative as separation; character change as increased perception; two possible plot directions. A special case. 6.

Texture and Tone

61

Narrative as syntax. Literature at the sentence level: Supervielle's vocabulary as a mixture of the colloquial and the exotic, the banal and the surprising. Humor and poetry: surprise and elaboration. Supervielle's puns, humorous and poetic. Immediate and greater context; the importance of the narrator's sympathy. Satire and poetry. Fantasy again. Mixtures of word and referent. Other authors. Conclusion

67

Analysis of 'Orphée' by way of summary. Supervielle and his contemporaries: the nineteenth century heritage; the esthetic generation; the involved generation; the fifties. Fantasy today. The future of the novel. The length problem in genre study. Bibliography of Works Consulted

78

By Supervielle, about Supervielle, and works of general interest. Index

83

INTRODUCTION

It is often said of the twentieth century novel that it is dying. Even critics who can say good-bye without regret to the Balzacian concept of the novel feel that things are not what they used to be, and opinions, as always, are divided on the nature and value of the change. Theorists of the New Novel — and most New Novelists are theorists — take pride in having rejected the mimetic ideal of fiction; even Robbe-Grillet's neo-realism,1 according to Ricardou's perceptive analysis,2 builds up imaginative patterns valuable in themselves, not as reflections of reality. In the midst of this debate are the new genres, hard to classify: narratives of differing lengths and styles, frequently aspiring to poetic status. It may be agreed that the problem of taxonomy is a false one; still remains the more important question of what genres may mean for contemporary writers and readers. How are the conventions of the last century used or rejected today? Narrative, whether myth, epic, or novel, has always meant continuity. It involves action through time, transition from one moment to another. Narrative also needs a protagonist who remains recognizable for the duration of the action. This latter in turn may be understood as movement from one equilibrium to the next: the story begins at one point, something happens to change the situation, a new balance is established. Even if the dénouement is a return to the point of departure, in the middle is change. There must be some constants of character, location, chronology which enable the reader or listener to relate one moment to those preceding and following. Any or all of these elements may vary greatly, yet still a story needs sequence. In the nineteenth century, narrative prose means imitation of reality as it was defined by historians. The exact situation in time and space is provided as if factual. Each person, place, event is presented in its most particular

1 2

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un Nouveau Roman (Paris: NRF, 1963). In Problèmes du Nouveau Roman (Paris: Seuil, 1967).

8

INTRODUCTION

detail by a narrator who can somehow observe them all. Language must remain unobtrusive, 'transparent', 3 so as not to reveal the mechanics of illusion. The reader is most courteously invited to believe in the fiction as 'real'. The trick seems more convincing, however, if no detail is arbitrary: hence every object, every décor, every evaluation by the helpful narrator contributes to the exposition of character and the furthering of action. The pistol mentioned casually in the beginning serves a murderer in the end. 4 So the nineteenth century storyteller combines entertainment and enlightenment. A summary of this sort is necessarily over-simple and there are many exceptions. Notable among these is the fiction of the imagination, the spiritual part of 'reality' which is not, or not yet, accessible to the positivist. The conventions of this type of narrative, insofar as they differ from the above sketch, will be brought up in the chapters to follow. The poetry of the same period is subject to as much theory but less system, and is harder to summarize in terms of its conventions. Romantic and Symbolist poetry have been so frequently described that I will risk only the remarks most pertinent to the narrative-poetry problem. The Romantic poets on the whole still depend on anecdote as a point of departure. The lyrical moment that provides inspiration and matter for reflection, is frequently presented as specific: "Souvent sur La Montagne, à l'ombre du vieux chêne / Au coucher du soleil, tristement je m'assieds" (Lamartine, "L'Isolement"). 5 In this way, a logical relationship survives between outward stimulus and inner experience: the latter develops naturally from the former. Baudelaire still does this but the externals are transfigured as they are brought inwards. He begins a poem with a real circumstance ("A une Passante", "Une Charogne", etc.) and ends with an hallucination. With the symbolists, as often noted, the outside world is rejected in favor of the imagination so that the logical connectives, the anecdotal framework, are dropped. Poetry gradually refuses its direct links with experience. The historical development of the metaphor reflects this voyage into the interior. Romantic poets still use many similes or metaphors in which the logical basis for the comparison is quite clear. The revolution against rhetoric is not entirely successful at this point, in spite of Victor Hugo's 3 Transparency not only as defined by Flakbert's famous remarks on style, but also by Roland Barthes in his Degré Zéro de l'Ecriture (Paris: Seuil, 1964). 4 This example is used in the excellent analyses of narrative done by the Prague school theorists, particularly Chklovsky. In English, see A Prague School Reader, ed. Paul Garvin (Georgetown, 1964). In French, Théorie de la Littérature, ed. Todorov (Seuil, 1965) or the review Change, no. 3, devoted to "Le Cercle de Prague" (Paris: Seuil, 1969). s Lamartine, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1963), p. 4.

INTRODUCTION

9

declaration of war. There is rarely any doubt which term of a metaphor represents the sens premier, i.e. 'reality', and which term is descriptive. The first term comes from without, the second from within. Although much of the best poetry owes its richness to a real exchange of characteristics, as in the following lines from Hugo's "Booz Endormi", there is no real ambiguity: Quel dieu, quel moissoneur de l'éternel été Avait, en s'en allant, négligemment jeté Cette faucille d'or dans le champ des^étoiles.6 Baudelaire still makes much of the simile, but the first is less obviously rooted in observation, its exchange with the second less logical. Verlaine uses vagueness of vocabulary, lack of contour and definition, to avoid a rational framework, and his descriptiveness depends on connotation more than on denotation. 7 With Rimbaud, by far the most modern nineteenth century poet from this point of view, the image has lost its mimetic emphasis and its logic — and some of its intelligibility — but gained in suggestiveness. In the Illuminations, a texture of metaphors, it is often impossible to say which term is the sens premier and which is descriptive. "Fleurs", for example, begins as follows: D'un gradin d'or, — parmi les cordons de soie, les gazes grises, les velours verts et les disques de cristal qui noircissent comme du bronze au soleil, — je vois la digitale s'ouvrir sur un tapis de filigranes d'argent, d'yeux, et de chevelures.8 Almost all the words suggest the artificial and the human — not flowers. The complete poem (two more paragraphs) does not resolve the enigma: is Rimbaud describing a garden or the interior of a theater? The critics are divided. Incongruous juxtaposition is one of the secrets of Rimbaud's power. Reverdy and Breton later disagree on precisely this aspect of metaphor. For Reverdy, "le lyrisme va vers l'inconnu, vers la profondeur, participe naturellement du mystère, . . . il nait de deux mots pour la première fois et avec justesse accouplés".9 Reverdy is still, influenced by the symbolists. He believes in transcendence, in the image as a "pure création de l'esprit". For 6 Hugo, La Légende des Siècles (Paris: Editions Baudelaire, 1966), p. 6. 7 As described by Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement (New York: Random House, 1967). 8 Rimbaud, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1963). 9 Reverdy, Le Gant de Crin (Paris: Pion, 1926). The debate with Breton is summarized in P. Caminade, Image et Métaphore (Paris: Bordas, 1970).

10

INTRODUCTION

him, "le propre de l'image forte est d'être issue du rapprochement spontané de deux réalités très distantes dont l'esprit seul a saisi le rapport". Breton however rejects both the need for "esprit" and the criterion of "justesse". The former he considers too intellectual and too transcendental, the latter too imbued with conventional ideas of harmony. For the surrealist, poetry depends on shock — the last, most extreme stage of Romantic originality. What in fact makes language poetic? Different things for different people no doubt — yet some answers come up over and over again. Typical of the late nineteenth century is the connotation theory: poetic language does not convey information but mood; it is emotional, not logical. I.A. Richard's famous opposition of statement (discursive language) and pseudo-statement (poetry) summarizes this approach. A related idea emphasizes ambiguity, which may be provided by the connotative richness of the vocabulary. But there are other kinds of ambiguity: a word may gain meaning simply because of its context. Both types usually provide for an ordered patterning when many words of a poem have similar connotations brought out by their proximity. Jakobson defines poetic language as this projection of associations on the axis of continuity. 1 0 He includes even versification: whereas in everyday speech it is considered a distraction or a joke to use words which resemble each other in sound, poetry combines then rather than choosing between them. Finally, most writers agree that poems have a certain density of meaning and structure which distinguishes them from narratives. The latter are usually longer and can afford small changes of wording without drastic change of the whole. But just these standards of length and density are questioned by contemporary authors, and even by critics in poetically oriented readings of nineteenth century novels. 11 All of these theories are true of some poetry. And since all reflect the dominant esthetic of their time, all influence the contemporary writer. The critic, however, must distinguish theory and practice. The poet as critic can be very misleading, even in such a self-conscious period as the present. Poetic fiction can only be studied in the works themselves. Although only a wide selection of quotes and examples can illustrate such an inquiry, there is always the risk of fragmenting works, destroying the deeper meanings of structural unity. As a point of departure for my own observation and the basis for wider comparisons, I will use the short stories of Jules Supervielle. This author, publishing from 1919 to 1959, spans as much of the period in question as any one man; if he has not the great originality of some writers, 10 His most concise statement of this is in "Linguistics and Poetics: A Closing Statement", Style in Language, ed. Sebeok (MIT, 1959). 11 For example, Victor Brombert's paralleling of Flaubert and Mallarmé.

11

INTRODUCTION

he is more typical than they of modern convention; best known as a poet, he in fact wrote in all genres, providing a possibility for contrast. Four volumes of contes poétiques present some of his finest pieces: L'Enfant de la Haute Mer (1931); L'Arche de Noê (1938); Les B.B.V. (1949) and Premiers Pas de l'Univers (1950) . 12 These include modem fairy tales, familiar Greek and Christian myths reworked, burlesques and prose poems. All combine narrative and poetry, all reveal contemporary problems and techniques.

12

Quotes

from

these

collections

abbreviations:

L 'Enfant de la Haute Mer L'Arche de Noé Les B.B.V. Premiers Pas de l'Univers

- EHM - AN - BBV - PPU

in

future

chapters

will

use

the

following

1.

FANTASY

Fantasy and poetic fiction — what links the two together? Supervielle's critics use the word 'fantasy' about the imaginary world of his stories — but since all fictions are imaginary worlds, the word is too vague. One cannot put the question as for irony, satire, metaphor, since 'fantasy' suggests not so much a literary mode as a description strictly of content, separated from its formal correspondences. It implies a mimetic concept of literature and is associated with the reference aspect of literary language. 'Fantasy' is half of a duality; its implicit partner is 'reality'. As everyone knows, le fantastique as a genre flourishes during the great period of mimetic fiction in the last century, although it is perhaps more the bad conscience (metaphysical and erotic) of a positivist society than the affirmation of a spiritualist one.1 Scholars of this literature generally contrast the fantastique and the merveilleux though not always in these terms: Le fantastique . . . ne se confond pas avec l'affabulation conventionelle des récits mythologiques ou des féeries qui implique un dépaysement de l'esprit. Il se caractérise au contraire par une intrusion brutale du mystère dans le cadre de la vie réelle . . ," 2 (The "fantastique" . . . must not be mistaken for the conventional affabulation of mythological tales or fairy tales which imply a disorientation of the mind. It is on the contrary characterized by a brutal intrusion of mystery into the framework of real life.) French and English vocabulary reflect this opposition of ordinary and extraordinary, natural and supernatural. At this period, fantasy is a shock in the

1 An interpretation presented by Todorov in his Introduction à la Littérature Fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970). He stresses very much the laient erotic content of fantasy. 2 P. Castex, Le Conte Fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (Paris: Corti, 1951), p. 8. See also the range of opinions presented ip 3 survey called "Enquête sur la Valeur Artistique et Psychologique du Fantastique", in the Revue des Vivants, 8 (August, 1934), pp. 1274-1302.

14

FANTASY

everyday context of a moral, well-ordered, materialistic, highly conventional reality. In its fictional form, it is supposed both to frighten and attract. 3 But excursions into the forbidden are carefully controlled, like experiments in hypnosis. The reader's emotions are guided and protected by the author who often stresses the reassuring presence of science. We seem to be far from poetry. The symbolists, however, make an affirmation out of this transcendence of the everyday while rejecting a society embittering in its mediocrity. 4 But the need to "purifier les mots de la tribu" is reflected not only in vocabulary but in syntax, and rhetorical situation: the loss of logical connectives and of anecdote discussed earlier results naturally from the emphasis put on subjective experience. It is in this context that fantasy and poetry come together. Mimesis and metaphor can combine to express the action of the inner world on the outer. André Breton, whose generation refuses the transcendental concept of poetry but explores still further the inner world, describes his discovery of a very special type of image. Like Rimbaud, he does not separate reality into two levels, here and beyond, and his association of discovery with sleep is very typical: Un soir, donc, avant de m'endormir, je perçus, nettement articulée au point qu'il m'était impossible d'y changer un mot, mais distraite cependant du bruit de toute voix, une assez bizarre phrase qui me parvenait sans porter trace des événements auxquels, de l'aveu de ma conscience, je me trouvais mêlé à cet instant-là, phrase qui me parut insistante, phrase oserai-je dire qui cognait à la vitre . . . c'était quelque chose comme: "Il y'a un homme coupé en deux par la fenêtre", mais elle ne pouvait souffrir d'équivoque, accompagnée qu'elle était de la faible représentation visuelle d'un homme marchant et tronçonné à mi-hauteur par une fenêtre perpendiculaire à l'axe de son corps. A n'en pas douter il s'agissait du simple redressement dans l'espace d'un homme qui se tient penché à la fenêtre. Mais cette fenêtre ayant suivi le déplacement de l'homme, je me rendais compte que j'avais affaire à une image d'un type assez rare et je n'eus vite d'autre idée que de l'incorporer à mon matérial de construction poétique . . , s (One evening, then, before going to sleep, I perceived, so clearly articulated that it was impossible for me to change a word, yet nonetheless abstracted from the sound of any voice, a rather strange sentence which came to me with no trace of the events in which, according to my conscious perception, I found myself involved at that moment, a sentence which seemed to me insistent, a sentence which, dare I say, was tapping at the window pane . . . it was something like: "There is a man cut in two by the window", but it 3 An interpretation defended by Louis Vax, La Séduction de l'Etrange (Paris: PUF, 1965). 4 As bitterly satirized, for example, by Villiers de l'lsle-Adam in his Contes Cruels (Gamier, 1968). s André Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme (Paris: Pauvert, 1962), pp. 34-35.

FANTASY

15

was completely unambiguous, accompanied as it was by the weak visual representation of a man walking about sliced through the middle b y a window perpendicular to the axis of his b o d y . Beyond doubt this was a simple change in spatial orientation of a man w h o is leaning out of a w i n d o w . But this w i n d o w having f o l l o w e d the displacement of the man, I realized that I was face to face with a rather rare type of image, and I quickly thought only o f incorporating it into my material for poetic construction . . . ) The logical development o f the image can be analysed as f o l l o w s : 1) a man leans out o f a w i n d o w , perpendicular to the frame (observation); 2 ) the observer notes that the man looks as if he were cut in t w o b y the w i n d o w (logical simile); 3 ) the observer strengthens his formulation b y saying that the man is cut in t w o b y the w i n d o w (metaphor, n o t meant to be taken literally); 4 ) the man straightens up and walks around with the pane o f glass through his middle (narrative change o f equilibrium resulting f r o m the literal reading o f the metaphor). In the final stage, the metaphor is interpreted as a mimetic description o f a real event continuous in time (albeit b r i e f l y ) and representing the action o f a protagonist. The image owes much o f its force t o its use as narrative, and the result is something like science fiction. Metaphor becomes metamorphosis, the ordinary becomes fantasy. This extension o f metaphor is an important aspect o f contemporary literature and appears in many forms. Supervielle, more o f a traditionalist, does not share the surrealist attraction for the violent image. Y e t his works in all genres use this technique; his stories illustrate all the stages o f the transformation. In " L ' I n c o n n u e de la Seine", a drowned girl finds an underwater society ruled by " l e Grand M o u i l l é " . She is welcomed, especially b y her host, w h o begins to court her: Chaque jour le Grand Mouillé venait lui rendre visite et ils restaient là tous deux avec leurs phosphoresences, comme des morceaux de la V o i x Lactée chastement allongés l'un près de l'autre. ( E H M 83-4) (Each day the Great Wet One came to visit her, and they remained there together with their phosphoresences, like pieces of the Milky Way chastely stretched out one beside the other.) T h e narrator uses a simile here but the syntax is ambiguous: does " a l l o n g é s " refer to the pieces o f the Milky Way, personified, or t o the characters themselves? In any case the comparison is not meant literally since the " m o r c e a u x de la V o i e L a c t é e " d o not develop into characters. Rather this is a typical Superviellian blend o f sky and sea, stressing the quality o f light. Another c o m m o n type o f imagery in Supervielle's poetry plays on an

16

FANTASY

unusual perspective of the body. A hand may be personified apart from the rest, or the veins considered a new territory for exploration by the self. In "Antoine du Désert" the saint wanders in the desert accompanied by his pet pig. When the latter is bitten by a snake, Antoine despairs of saving him: Il sentait bien qu'ils étaient trois maintenant dans le désert: le porc, le poison et lui-même; et des trois un seul agissait visiblement, élargissait son domaine, cherchant à atteindre, dans les ténèbres, et le dédale du sang, le coeur même de la bête. (AN 6 2 )

(He realized that they were three now in the desert; the pig, the poison and himself; and of the three only one was visibly active, extending his domain, striving to reach, in the darkness and the labyrinth of the blood, the very heart of the beast.) Here fantasy appears momentarily when the personified poison acts as a character in the story, through the eyes of Antoine. The pig's body in turn becomes a labyrinth in the desert: "domaine", "dédale". But both transformations are limited since the poison plays no further role and no further action is described in this locale. The metaphor is still fanciful description. The next example shows more development. In "Le Boeuf et l'Ane de la Crèche", the Nativity story, the child Jesus falls asleep: L'enfant baisse les paupières. Il a hâte de se rendormir. Un ange lumineux l'attend, à quelques pas derrière le sommeil, pour lui apprendre ou peut-être pour lui demander quelque chose. L'ange sort tout vif du rêve de Jésus et apparaît dans 1 étable. Après s'être incliné devant celui qui vient de naître, il peint un nimbe très pur autour de sa tête. Et un autre, pour la Vièrge, et un troisième pour Joseph . . . (EHM 3 4 - 5 )

(The child lowers his eyelids. He is impatient to go back to sleep. A luminous angel is waiting for him, just a few steps beyond sleep, to tell him or perhaps to ask him something. The angel, quite alive, steps out of Jesus' dream and appears in the stable. After having made a curtsey before the newly born, he paints the purest halo around his head. And another, for the Virgin, and a third for Joseph . . .) The first paragraph seems a whimsical description of the child's sleepiness. There is even a suggestion of causality: because the angel is waiting, the child is impatient. The second sentence resolves this ambiguity by insisting on a literal reading of the first: the dream world is a simple extension of everyday space and the angel a 'real' being who continues to act. In the prose poem "Une Enfant", Supervielle describes the little girl's delightful discovery of language :

17

FANTASY

Hier, on lui fit cadeau du mot dimanche. Elle sait maintenant que ce jour-là possède, comme les comètes, une belle queue mélangée à l'air et dont les autres jours sont jaloux. (BBV 3 4 - 5 )

(Yesterday, we made her a gift of the word "dimanche". She knows now that this day possesses, like the comets, a beautiful tail mixed with air which makes the other days jealous.) In this example, the word-thing "dimanche" is not only personified but inhabits its own world, in company with the other inferior week-days. Supervielle's marked tendency to personification can be understood as a projection of the pathetic fallacy; not only does he attribute his own emotions to the inanimate and abstract, he suggests a continued, independent existence in which the object has its own feelings, quite separate from those of the original projector. 6 Francis Ponge's prose poems go a step further in their descriptions of the private lives of bread, oranges, pebbles, cigarettes, etc. : the human emotions seem to come directly from the object, not from a mediating poet. The confusion of word and referent in the "dimanche" example is also typical of Ponge. In "Le Petit Bois", the extension of comparison into fantasy underlies the main action of the story. Supervielle describes a town in which the inhabitants, after death, become trees in a nearby wood. The narrator cannot quite explain the relationship between man and tree, but everyone recognizes it: On le savait de loin grâce à je ne sais quelle ressemblance d'arbre à l'homme. Un enfant ne s'y serait pas trompé. Et pourtant ce n'était pas une ressemblance directe mais bien plus subtile,essentielle. Ainsi Tante Félicie était une grande bonne femme genre sergent-major et elle avait donné naissance en mourant à cet arbre rabourgi. (PPU

161-2)

(Everyone knew from far away, thanks to I don't know what resemblance between tree and man. A child would not have guessed wrong. And yet it was not a direct resemblance but something more subtle, essential. Thus Aunt Felicia was a great strapping woman, sergeant-major type, and she had given birth in dying to that scraggly tree.) The story goes on to describe the addition of a pair of young lovers to these natural surroundings. Supervielle is quite aware of his extended metaphors even in his poetry, although he describes them a little differently: 6 Idea developed in an article by G. Martin, "Metaphors in Superviglle's Poetry", Modern Language Review LIX (1964), pp. 579-582.

18

FANTASY

Autrefois j'avais beaucoup d'images dans mes poèmes, maintenant il m'arrive de n'en avoir qu'une qui sert d'épine dorsale à tout le poème. Dans le premier cas se trouve "Le Portrait", dans le second, "Des Chevaux du Temps" ou "L'Escalier". Quand il n'y a qu'une image d'un bout à l'autre, on obtient une sorte de mythe qui se dégage du poème et a sa vie propre. Alors le poème se rapproche du conte, il en a le déroulement. 7 (Formerly I had many images in my poems, now it happens that I have only one which serves as a spinal column for the entire poem. An example of the first case is "The Portrait" and of the second, "The Horses of Time" or the "Staircase". When there is only one image from beginning to end, one obtains a sort of myth which grows out of the poem and has its own existence. Then the poem approaches the short story and has the same development.) In his critical comments, as above, and in the novels, he is quite explicit. The novels put questions about identity; all the heroes search, through many metamorphoses, the form which is truly their own. Physical is always a reflection of emotional and the final stability is a kind of sanity. In Le Jeune Homme du Dimanche et des Autres Jours, the heroine reads a book on metempsychosis and explains: Savez-vous ce que je cherchais dans ce livre? Si on y trouvait quelque chose de ce qui rapproche un fils de son père, de sa mère, la ressemblance, qui est sur le chemin de la métempsycose mais a su s'arrêter à temps. 8 (Do you know what I was looking for in this book? If one could find in it something of that which brings the son closer to his father, to his mother, resemblance, which is on the way towards metempsychosis but is able to stop in time.) The projection of metaphor into fantasy, though a natural element of Supervielle's narrative, may thus be a threat to identity, hence viewed by the characters with apprehension. Similarly for Michaux: the "je" of the prose poems is constantly exposed to violent changes of form against his will. Or again in "Mes Propriétés" and "En Circulant dans Mon Corps" he explores, like Supervielle, his mind and body as things external to himself. 9 The narrative use of metaphor may however have different values. An example from Villiers de l'lsle Adam's "Vera" illustrates the fantastique.10

7 Supervielle, "Eléments d'une Poétique", Valeurs 5 (Alexandria, April, 1946). 8 Supervielle, Le Jeune Homme du Dimanche et des Autres Jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp. 125-126. 9 For a sampling, see Michaux: Poètes d'Aujourd'hui by René Bertélé (Paris: Seghers, 1969). 10 Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Contes Cruels, pp. 14-29. Examples from the fantastique

FANTASY

19

A h u s b a n d so loves his dead wife that he continues t o behave as if she were alive. For him death so resembles life that the w o m a n literally returns f r o m the grave. Apollinaire, in " Z o n e " , describes his life with a m i x t u r e of metaphoric fragments, of which the following: "C'est u n tableau p e n d u dans un sombre musée / Et quelquefois tu vas le regarder de p r è s " . 1 1 Robbe-Grillet will write m u c h of Dans le Labyrinthe a r o u n d a similar ambiguous identification between a painting and the world. T h e m e t a p h o r i c nature of fantasy lends it the novelty of original vision; its narrative nature provides conventionally ordered sequence. The n e x t two chapters will elaborate this contrast between surprise and stability.

that express the imagery of separate parts of the body include Nerval's "La Main Enchantée", Maupassant's "La Main", and many others, il Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools (Paris: Gallimard, 1920).

2.

CONVENTION

Supervielle's stories reveal a new, magical world. The reader soon realizes however that this delightful unreality is taken for granted by the narrator and all the characters, and he learns to adjust his standards to theirs. In a single story, events will show an intriguing consistency and after several, the reader is no longer surprised by the kinds o f things that happen; he has by now learned the rules. These rules, reassuringly recognizable, might be called the conventions of fantasy. The co-ordinates are quickly established as the story opens although they may, already here, be contrasted with some new concentration of thè magic, a greater degree o f fantasy which does cause concern and surprise. The birth of Christ in " L e Boeuf et l'Ane de la Crèche" brings about such a period of miracle, causing the narrator to explain carefully what is 'normal' magic and what is unusual. In "L'Arche de Noé", the change — the flood — is o f course a negative one for the characters. The opening paragraph shows clearly the most important conventions of fantasy and their relationship to the new dangers: Au moment de sécher ses devoirs, une petite fille d'avant le déluge avait trouvé son buvard tout mouillé. Cette feuille qui donnait de l'eau, elle dont la nature était d'être toujours assoiffée! L'enfant se dit (c'était de beaucoup la meilleure élève) que le buvard souffrait peut-être de quelque maladie merveilleuse. Parce qu'elle était trop pauvre pour s'acheter un autre buvard, elle mit la feuille rose à sécher au soleil; mais celle-ci ne parvenait pas à se défaire de cette humidité chagrine. Et de son côté, voilà que l'encre du devoir refusait aussi de sécher. (AN 5 7 )

(When it was time to blot her homework, a little girl from before the flood found her blotter all wet. This paper which exuded water, this creature who had always been by nature so thirsty! The child said to herself (she was by far the best pupil) that the blotter was perhaps suffering from some marvelous disease. Because she was too poor to buy herself another blotter, she put the pink sheet out to dry in the sun, but it was unable to get rid of that sorrowful wetness. And didn't the ink of her homework, for its part, also refuse to dry.)

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The first striking incongruity is time. The title of the story, "L'Arche de Noé", refers to a remote, legendary period, but the first situation described is clearly modern. Only the expression "d'avant le déluge" in the first sentence brings the two periods together, underlining the anachronism. Even the use of "au moment de" and the pluperfect, by their immediacy, stress this kind of temporal telescoping. Similar effects may be humorous, as later when Noah tells the megatherium: "Votre destin est d'être un antédiluvien" (Your destiny is to be antediluvian). Through this blatant use of anachronism, Supervielle lessens the distance between reader and story, making the latter more familiar and immediate. Other stories use an illogical mixture of present and past tenses. And many of Supervielle's poems are built around the juxtaposition of distant points in time: in "Mouvement" 1 two horses, twenty thousand centuries apart, make the same gesture which projects them into an eternal present. In the poems of Oublieuse Mémoire, Supervielle reveals a Proustian concept of memory converting time into space. In the stories, there are many other confrontations between narrative and chronology that I will discuss in chapter five. The second sentence of "L'Arche de Noé" shows another law of this world. The blotter not only has an inherent, given nature, "d'être toujours assoiffée", but a life of its own; it can be the subject of an action like the little girl.2 She herself assumes that the blotter may be vulnerable to illness and the narrator guarantees her lucidity on this point ("c'était de beaucoup la meilleure élève"). Later expressions, "ne parvenait pas" for example, underline the blotter's independent if not very successful will. After this, the use of "refusait" in the last sentence becomes amusingly ambiguous: although it is a common manner of speaking about inanimate objects which behave unexpectedly, it now seems to be meant literally, suggesting that the ink also has a mind of its own, "de son côté". This kind of animism is an aspect of fantasy familiar from the examples of the last chapter. It is never incidental and is very pervasive. Everything in the world is capable of life and feeling. A simple ambiguous pronoun (here "tout le monde") may imply animism: "Cette sorte de délire acquatique gagna rapidement le règne végétal. . . Tout le monde s'y mettait, même les grains de sable du désert" (This kind of acquatic delirium rapidly spread to the vegetable kingdom . . . Everyone was doing it, even the grains of sand in the desert). Humans, objects, and animals are equivalent: "quelques gouttes

1 Supervielle, Gravitations (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 113. 2 Transformational linguists would describe this aspect of Supervielle's language by saying that all nouns take the feature 'animate' regardless of their normal restrictions. For this kind of analysis of poetic imagery, see Owen Thomas, Metaphor and Related Subjects (Random House, 1969).

22

CONVENTION

suffirent à noyer sur la route un paysan, sa charette et son cheval" (A few drops on the road were enough to drown a peasant, his cart and his horse). Animism and metamorphosis are closely linked in these stories. Supervielle's characters obey a rigid duality of body and spirit, yet form and content so mirror each other that every new emotion may mean a change of form. For example, the little girl whose blotter refuses to dry is very upset; she shows it to her teacher, and "force fut à la maîtresse de voir son élève inconsolable disparaître, devant elle, tout son être changé en larmes" (AN 10) ( . . . and as the teacher looked on, her inconsolable pupil disappeared, before her very eyes, her entire being changed into tears). The context makes it clear that this transformation is literal, not figurative; it is the result of overwhelming regret. Another example from the same story describes the animals lucky enough to be saved and again contrasts normal and unusual fantasy: "Alors que la joie chez les animaux reste d'habitude opaque à cause de tout le poil, la plume, l'écaillé qui la retiennent, toutes les bêtes, avec aisance, rayonnaient de la tête à la queue" (AN 13) (Whereas the animals' joy usually remains opaque because of all the fur, feathers and scales which hold it in, every beast shone from head to tail, quite naturally). The three most important aspects of Supervielle's natural-supernatural world are distorted chronology, animism, and the predominance of spirit over matter. Every example quoted henceforth is sure to illustrate one or more of these aspects, they so permeate every story. But there is another kind of convention in the first quoted example — the little girl with the blotter — and that is Supervielle's use of character types. In this case the child, female, poor ("elle était trop pauvre pour s'acheter un autre buvard") has all the easy associations of humility and vulnerability. She will be a frequent personage in other stories (for example "L'Enfant" and "L'Enfant de la Haute Mer"). Here Supervielle is deliberately using a stereotype rather than creating his own convention. Other reasons for using simple, common types will be clear later on, but the most obvious one at this point is the evident value of the associations: the innocence of childhood or of animals (such as the ox at the Nativity) is precisely that quality from which fantasy springs. Supervielle's stock characters, nothing fantastic in themselves, form a hierarchy in their potential for imaginative experience, where children, sometimes animals, and outcasts of all kinds occupy the privileged positions. Marcel Aymé does the same thing even more explicitly: in "Les Bottes de Sept Lieues" the little hero is distinguished by his illegitimacy;his mother is a young fïlle-mère, humiliated, and much closer to childhood than the hard, materialistic parents of her son's companions. Because of her credulity, she alone buys the magic boots. In the much less satirical Contes du Chat Perché, the animals are the most humble; next are the two little girls and of these it is still the younger, "la plus blonde", the most naive, who is purest.

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The adults, who represent reason and experience, are not antipathetic here but are often wrong. Jacques Prévert's "Contes pour Enfants pas Sages" have the same ordering, even more violently established. Here the animal and children characters are definitely victims of exploiting adults who are no longer capable of fantasy. While Supervielle's scale is more implicit, it still fits the same easily recognizable tradition and is clearly a reflection of the Romantic- Surrealist nostalgia for childhood. Supervielle's fantasies all express a definite longing for pre-rational innocence. His use of mythology illustrates this further since it often reveals a fascination for beginnings: the Nativity story, the innocence of early Christians like St. Anthony, God's first creation of the animals. The collection Premiers Pas de l'Univers is mostly a retelling of Greek myths, which blend very easily with the author's own conventions. Like Anouilh, Cocteau, Girandoux, Supervielle gives the old stories modern tone and interpretation, translating them into the twentieth century ironic sensibility. Metamorphosis is frequent among the gods, and animals have an important role: "On parlait beaucoup en ce temps-là des animaux, encore mal séparés des hommes et des dieux. C'était l'époque des bêtes illustres. . . " (PPU 140) (People talked a lot in those days about animals, still badly separated from men and gods. It was the age of illustrious b e a s t s . . . ) . Here again the world at its origins is more magical, distinctions are not yet rigidly set. A similar Rimbaldian feeling of wonder is strong in the poems of La Fable du Monde, God's meditation on the creation. The mythological stories also use character types (see chapter four). When critics describe Supervielle's stories, they often attempt some kind of categorization on the basis of content. 3 Biblical stories and Greek myths seem to' form natural groupings, another of which is the series of stories about afterlife. "L'Inconnue de la Seine", "L'Enfant de la Haute Mer", "Les Boiteux du Ciel", "La Femme Retrouvée" all depict worlds of the dead, in the sea or in the sky. 4 The conventions of these worlds present a mirror image of the others: there are no longer moments in time since all time is the same; the world of objects is no longer animated since nothing concrete exists, no matter how much the dead may long for some kind of sense impression; where matter no longer exists, there is no further possibility of metamorphosis, and the dead suffer from the great burden of their own immobility. Miracle for them is a chance to return to the concrete world of the living.

3 The best of these attempts is by Tatiana Greene in Jules Supervielle (Paris: Minard, 1958). 4 Poems situated under the ocean or in the sky are common (see especially Oublieuse Mémoire and Gravitations). In L'Homme de la Pampa one of the hero's friends is a mermaid.

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CONVENTION

These three groups of stories, if they can be clearly separated at all, are closely related. After all, both Christian and Greek mythologies have their worlds of the dead, b o t h of which contribute to Supervielle's. There is also a clear thematic connection between the constant metamorphoses of the gods in pursuit of their own vanity and the eternally fixed form of the dead: both express futility, both are the negation of life which must unite physical and spiritual into a harmonious whole. A final possible grouping brings together the modern stories, which have even more stock characters and situations. How do the laws of fantasy work here? The author's surrealistic sympathies are apparent in the sense of magic with which he endows the most banal surroundings. In "L'Adolescente", a young girl feels rejected by her father and, as a result, causes a revolution among the everyday objects of the household (the Poltergeist situation). Her parents are upset but see this in no way as supernatural: Comment lui, si rude, tout barbouillé de barbe, et sa femme, uniquement préoccupée des mi'le tracas d'une vie difficile, avaient-ils pu donner naissance à cette fille, que le destin, depuis quelques jours, chargeait d'attentions dont la singularité et l'insistance semblaient laisser des traces dans l'air même de la modeste demeure? Oui, un homme et une femme sans détours s'unissent pour fonder un ménage. Qui oserait les en empêcher? Ils n'ont jamais étonné leurs voisins par leurs façons d'être ni leurs propos. Mais ce n'est pas une raison pour que chacun de leurs enfants soit capable de retenir en soi l'étrangeté qui nous habite en ne demande qu'a se répandre de par le monde. (AN 75) (How could he, so coarse, all smeared with beard, and his wife, preoccupied only with the thousand annoyances of a difficult life, have given birth to this girl whom destiny, for several days now, had been plying with attentions whose singularity and insistence seemed to leave traces in the very air of their modest home? Yes, a straightforward man and woman unite to form a household. Who would dare prevent them? They have never surprised their neighbors by their behavior nor their conversation. But this does not mean that each of their children should be capable of keeping inside the strangeness which inhabits us all and asks only to spread through the world.) Supervielle stresses the ordinary nature of the characters ("un homme et une femme sans détours . . . qui n'ont jamais étonné personne . . ."), avoiding details which would singularize them. And when the exceptional happens, this is in itself treated as commonplace, the " n o u s " of the last sentence implicating even narrator and reader. But the movement is not all in one direction: the banal may be surprising or mysterious. In this quote there is the playful vocabulary ("barbouillé de barbe"), the rhythm of the intricate syntax, the suggestion of Freudian symbolism (so important in this story) through the description of destiny as a first suitor (". . . chargeait d'attentions dont la singularité et l'insistance . . .") — all of which add rich-

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ness to a commonplace situation. The most ordinary details of place and character description, not given in the exposition according to Balzacian convention, may be unexpectedly introduced: when the young girl prepares a fish dinner for an important guest, the reader is by now not too surprised to learn that the cooked fish jumps from the platter out of the window; but at the same time he suddenly discovers the presence of a river beside the house, through which the fish makes his escape. This detail had not been previously mentioned, but if it seems arbitrarily invented for the needs of the moment (thus tending to undermine the mimetic illusion) it will be fully integrated into the narrative later when the girl considers suicide. Finally, the fantasy in this story, however obviously the narrator takes it for granted, however familiar its forms from other stories, is still not part of any reader's ordinary experience. It is interesting to observe the conventions taking on a slightly different emphasis in the modern stories: it is objects rather than animals which are humanised, and the physical-emotional correspondences are revealed almost always in family situation with Freudian overtones (father-daughter and mother-son). Each of Supervielle's conventions of fantasy reflects an important preoccupation of his time. The rejection of chronology and the nostalgia for innocence, the stress on a close relationship between mind and world, the preference for subjective experience, the alienating sense of changing selves, the mistrust of logic and language — all these aspects of modern Romanticism are much discussed by contemporary critics. Supervielle has been considered a phenomenologist by some writers, but he himself considers philosophy and poetry incompatible (part of his nineteenth century heritage). 5 His poetry is in fact a denial of logic insofar as it identifies separate categories of experience, attempting to blend harmoniously those things which seem most opposed. Since this quality has already been much analysed in his poetry, I will show how it works in the stories. The juxtaposition of points in time, blending mythic and modern, is an obvious example; animism breaks down the usual animal-human-object distinctions by ascribing a similar personality to all; easy metamorphosis is a natural result of tenuous form when the informing spirit is shared by the entire

s Compare the following quote from "Chercher Sa Pensée", NRF 6eme année (1 mai, 1958), pp. 769-774: Il m'arrive souvent de me dire que le poète est celui qui cherche sa pensée et redoute de la trouver. La trouve-t-il qu'il pourrait bien cesser d'être un poète pour devenir un logicien, un prosateur, quelqu'un qui use d'abstractions pour s'exprimer. (I often say to myself that the poet is he who looks for his thought and fears to find it. Should he find it, he might well cease to be a poet and become a logician, a writer of prose, someone who uses abstractions to express himself.)

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cosmos.6 Great distances become small for Supervielle, humble personalities become great. Every chapter of this study will provide further examples of this overwhelming sense of illogical unity. Supervielle's fantasies are based on his own conventions, originally created and consistently used in his stories. In the poetry there is not enough length to allow them the status of laws which condition action: there they are images recognizable in type from one poem to another. But the stories seem so unlike the contes fantastiques that one may again ask if there is any historical justification for using the same vocabulary to cover both. There are resemblances however: both the earlier contes and Supervielle's describe events contrary to common experience and logic, and both depend for their effects on a clear juxtaposition of commonplace and unusual; the most ordinary types of experience, most familiar and easily recognizable for most readers, provide the point of departure for the exotic and the esoteric. Of course, Supervielle's is a much more ambiguous blend right from the beginning — much of the poetry comes from this — but even the nineteenth century authors build their imaginative worlds on the rejection of logical distinctions, at least partial: time becomes space when it can be travelled through; ghosts bring together the past and the present as well as life and death. All the traditional forms of monster are some kind of animal-human hybrid — werewolf, vampire, etc. — and are capable of metamorphosis. But the major difference, from the point of view of conventions, is that these mixtures are not the fancies of a single author; even when they occur in highly literate and cultivated fiction, they are folk motifs, used repeatedly in much the same form by many writers.

6 It is a commonplace of Superviellian criticism to call his poetry cosmic. Examples include: Ferdinand Lot "Tentatives modernes de poesie cosmique", ¿ a Grand Revue, 12 (December, 1932),pp. 276-286; Luc Estrange, "Supervielle du dimanche et des autres jours", Le Figaro Littéraire (10 August, 1957); Alain Bosquet, "Jules Supervielle ou l'Amitté Cosmique", La Revue de Paris (September 1956); Robert Brasillach, "Poésies Cosmiques", La Revue Universelle (February 15, 1933); Sénéchal, Jules Supervielle, Poète de l'Univers Intérieur (Paris: Joan Flory "Les Presses du Hibou". 1939), p. 131.

3.

CAUSALITY

Logic in narrative implies causality. This is one of the chief powers of organization in a story, since it relates specific incidents. By showing what brought events to pass, authors and storytellers have always extended the scope of their descriptions beyond single situations, reaching from the strictly particular quality of narrative to the more general aspects of theme, symbolism and evaluation. Thus Aristotle considered poetry (epic) more philosophical than history. In the nineteenth century, authors worked out carefully consistent laws governing and conditioning their characters' actions: the psychological concept of character depends on knowing why a man committed even the tiniest act, and his relations to others evolve in a framework of social restriction. These conventions create an illusion of determinism which is reinforced by the author's philosophical remarks. The deterministic tradition has left its mark in Supervielle's stories — the problem is to discover to what extent and with what value. In the last chapter I described the conventions of Supervielle's fantasy: if these laws are to be convincing in the nineteenth century sense, they must be necessary conditions for action. Plot development must depend on them, at least partially. In other words, Supervielle, here as elsewhere, starts from traditional narrative. In "L'Arche de Noé", the close association between form and emotion is causal. The rain is really an expression of God's anger and sorrow in the very concrete form of tears. The narrator explains near the beginning: "Il n'y avait plus aucun rapport entre le contenant et le contenu, tant la colère de Dieu était grande" (AN 11) (There was no longer any relationship between the container and the contained, so great was God's anger). Otherwise stated, because God was angry and because his emotions must have physical expression of cosmic proportions, there was the flood. The most explicit passage is reserved for the end of the story: . . . tout serait allé pour le mieux sans cette pluie qui ne cessait point. Pas une seconde de sèche pendant les vingt-quatre heures de la journée. C'est que la Terre et ses hommes avaient fait au Ciel une peine si grande! Et comment Noé, avec son maigre équipage, aurait-il pu consoler toute la voûte céleste?

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Parfois les ténèbres s'éclaircissaient un peu et on pensait que le Ciel allait éprouver quelque apaisement. Mais les pleurs reprenaient de plus belle sans s'inquiéter des conséquences. Un jour enfin, il semble que le firmament faisait un effort désespéré pour sourire à travers ses larmes. Une lumière, d'abord grisâtre, se précisa et soudain toutes les couleurs du beau temps y furent rassemblées: l'Arc-enCiel! ( A N 27-8) (. . . All would have been well but for this rain which wouldn't let up. Not a single dry second in twenty-four hours. The Earth and her inhabitants had pained Heaven (the sky) so deeply! And how could Noah, with his scanty crew, console the entire heavenly vault? Sometimes the darkness cleared a little and they thought that Heaven might be somewhat appeased. But the tears began again even harder, with no thought for the consequences. One day, finally, it seemed that the firmament was making a desparate effort to smile through its tears. A light, at first greyish, became more distinct and suddenly all the colors of fine weather were gathered together: the Rainbow!) Personification equally affects the earth ("la Terre et ses hommes") and heaven ("le f i r m a m e n t . . . ses larmes"). For the latter it depends very much on the double meaning of 'ciel', using both its physical and religious connotations. The abstract quality of heavenly wrath is not only transformed into physical results as the flood but all aspects of the situation are fused into a humanisation (if one can say so) of the two opposite forces involved: the Earth waits for Heaven to get over a crying spell. The rainbow-smile comparison provides a charming conclusion to the extended metaphor. Supervielle's treatment of the Minotaur myth is similar. The hero's emotions are first described as follows: "Et la mélancolie minotaurine devint telle qu'elle envahit une grande part de sa vaste tête, la colère occupant le reste" (PPU 26) (And the minotaurine melancholy became such that it invaded a large part of his vast head, anger occupying the rest). His emotions react like animal matter: La fureur de l'homme-animal mettait un tel feu dans sa tête qu'il se mit à répandre une monstrueuse odeur de corne brûlée. Oui, rien n'égale en puanteur la corne de Minotaure quand elle se met à fumer. C'était une longue et sourde vengeance qui trouvait enfin à se satisfaire et se répandait dans toute la ville. La nuit, le ressentiment de la tête du taureau s'apaisait un peu durant le sommeil, mais il reprenait de plus belle après un repos réparateur. Et l'odeur devint si intense que ce fut un jeu pour elle de traverser tout un bras de mer et de gagner le continent. Il ne faut pas chercher ailleurs l'origine de la peste qui fit alors trembler toute la Grèce et les îles. (PPU 31) (The fury of the man-animal put such fire into his head that he began to give a monstrous smell of burnt horn. Yes, nothing equals in foulness the

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smell of a Minotaur's horn when it starts to smoke. It was a long drawn-out vengeance which finally found satisfaction by spreading throughout the city. At night, the resentment of the bull's head weakened a little during his sleep; but it began again with greater force after a refreshing pause. And the smell became so intense that it was child's play for it to cross a whole inlet and reach the continent. This and nothing else is the origin of the plague which made all Greece and the islands tremble at that time.)

Based on the usual substitution of concrete for abstract, the causality is implied by a subtle grammatical development: "la fureur. . . mettait un tel feu . . . qu'il se mit à répandre . . ." and "L'odeur devint si intense que ce fut un jeu . . ." The anger becomes concentrated into a force capable of independent — and destructive — existence. But there is something strange about the narrator's determinism. He explains to the reader: "Oui, rien n'égale en puanteur la corne de Minotaure quand elle se met à fumer." Through the very process of stating this general law, he weakens his own logic: he treats a unique, mythical hero as if he were a common type. How is one to read this contradiction? It may be ironic attack on his own determinism, a clue that we are not to take it seriously. It may also be an indication that the Minotaur is not to be read as the Greek monster but as a representative of some larger group (this interpretation to be developed in the next chapter). Such a logical conflict on the first level of narrative always sends the reader beyond the literal for another explanation; as such it is the basic technique of allegoric and symbolic narrative and frequently directs the reader to metaphorical interpretation. 1 For the moment, only the first reading, the ironic one, is relevant: is Supervielle in fact making fun of his own determinism? There are no stories whose plots are not carefully built around the causality of fantasy: in "La Piste et la Mare" a murderer is denounced by a talking dog; in "Le Boeuf et l'Ane de la Crèche", the Ox starves because he refuses to eat grass that is aware, as he is himself, of the birth of Christ; in "Sir Rufus Flox", the hero turns into a racehorse that he intensely admires, but becomes human again when jealous of his human fiancée. The narrator constantly stresses the logic of events: "Les âmes ignorant la résistance de l'air peuvent se mouvoir beaucoup plus vite que les corps" ("La Fuite en Egypte", AN 41) (Since souls have no resistance to the air, they can move about much more quickly than bodies). In other words, because souls . . . etc.: it is a general causal principle.

i Cf. again Thomas, Metaphor and Related Subjects (based on an extension of Cassirer's theories, even if unacknowledged) and J. Cohen, Structure du Langage Poétique. Both relate poetic imagery to contradictions of normal usage.

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All of this creates a well-ordered, logical, familiar continuity. The problem is complicated by the fact that so many plots are borrowed. When the stories are already well-known, the conclusion seems all the more inevitable — where is the suspense? Every author, in every genre, must of course create a balance of convention and originality, predictability and surprise. Supervielle, like many of his contemporaries, uses narrative in its conventional nineteenth-century traditions as one term of an opposition; the other is poetry, and its presence is revealed through contradiction. Poetry here depends on surprise, on ambiguity of interpretation and on richness of suggestion which logic is powerless to reduce, but which the parody of logic contributes to. The author's first step is to undermine the continuity which he himself carefully set up. He does this by basing his logic on fantastic premises for which the reader is unprepared. 2 Then, as the reader gets used to a new world, fantasy is no longer surprising, though the ordinary may be (see example in the last chapter). This paradox itself is strange. It is soon clear that the author has many techniques for disconcerting the reader as soon as the latter feels too secure, and several of these relate directly to causality. "L'Arche de Noé" provided a clear example of fantastic cause and effect. It is also one of the most familiar, hence most predictable, of Supervielle's plots. But borrowing can be used in a variety of ways: Supervielle's explanation for the flood does not so much contradict the biblical one as extend it beyond the original version into a special Superviellian set of values. Moreover, the author uses the familiarity of the story as a pretext for being abrupt in his introduction of characters, and as a way of avoiding explanations. Events are simply juxtaposed and the sequence left ambiguously open. "L'Arche de Noé" starts with a description of the flood's effects on a small community, whose inhabitants are mystified by the change. Suddenly a new paragraph begins: Noé n'avait pas attendu le déluge pour construire son arche; il l'établit avec tant de soin et de ruses que la pluie évitait son voisinage comme si contre elle il n'y avait absolument rien à faire ni même à tenter. Les bêtes désignées pour figurer dans le vaisseau de Noé arrivaient deux à deux et parfois de très loin . . . ^ ^ 12) 2 This is precisely what Marcel Aymé does in almost all the stories of Le PasseMuraille. In each case, one basic spatio-temporal principle is no longer valid, resulting in the man who goes through walls, the girl who divides herself into thousands, the time traveller, etc. But Voltaire, to take just one other example, also delights in stating an absurd principle and elaborating its consequences very logically. Here the premise is not new to the reader, however, but a familiar aspect of his society which only the following reductio ad absurdem of the narrator points up as ludicrous. The basic technique of absurd premise and logical development is the same in Supervielle, Aymé and Voltaire but the lack of logic is made clear to the reader at different points. The balance of convention and surprise, acceptance and shock, is quite different.

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(Noah had not waited for the deluge to build his ark; he established it with such care and cleverness that the rain avoided its location as if against it there was nothing to be done or even attempted. The animals designated to appear in Noah's vessel arrived two by two and sometimes from far away . . .) Noah, the source of his instructions, and the agent behind the passive "désignées" are never otherwise introduced; can they be assumed from our general knowledge of the myth? The mystery is never really dissipated, particularly as none of the victims of the flood are more wicked than those saved (the narrator's evaluation). The only explanation given is the weeping-smiling passage at the end of the story, and in this too metaphor takes precedence over logic. A plot need not even be borrowed for the narrator to refrain from explanation, in " L e Bol de Lait", a child carries milk to his mother across Paris every day. Why does he not live with her? Why is he not allowed to cover his bowl to prevent spilling? The lack of logic forces a symbolic interpretation which alone gives meaning to the action. " L e Minotaure" also conveys a sense of mysterious fatality. Theseus and Ariadne are minor characters, all the more so since they are agents of a force much greater than they. When Ariadne gives her lover the spool of magic thread, she explains: "C'est une invention à moi. Ou plutôt, j'ai bien peur de n'y être pour rien; c'est la pesée de toute la fable grecque sur un coeur de jeune fille qui vous aimait avant de vous connaître" (PPU 34) (It's an invention of mine. Or rather, I'm afraid I had nothing to do with it: it's the weight of all of Greek fable on the heart of a young girl who loved you before knowing you). When the thread loses its brightness, the narrator attributes this to "la mission du Destin accomplie". This kind of explanation has much the same effect as no explanation at all, since it serves to increase rather than to dispel the mystery. In some stories where a situation seems eternally fixed there will be some sudden inexplicable change — chance, or destiny again? In "L'Enfant de la Haute Mer", a little girl is condemned to solitude in a phantom village in the ocean. One day, a real boat comes into this unreal world and the village does not, as it should, disappear. The narrator suggests this is "une distraction du destin, une fêlure dans sa volonté" (a distraction of destiny, a crack in its will). The eternally abstract world of " L e s Boiteux du Ciel" is similarly interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious white box, made of real wood. In "L'Adolescente", it is pure coincidence that the father's horse has a fall near the inn where his runaway daughter has taken a job. Rather than try to make the arbitrary more 'realistic', Supervielle underlines it, brings out its improbability, with a question: "comment se fit-il qu'un jour les chevaux s'emballèrent tout près de l'endroit où travaillait notre jeune fille? Mais c'était sans doute la première fois que le père venait de ce côté"

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(AN 85) (How did it come about that one day the horses ran wild near the place where our young girl was employed? But it was no doubt the first time that her father came by that way). The form of the second sentence suggests an answer but there is no obvious connection with the question. Was the very proximity of father and daughter the cause of the accident? Or is it purely 'accidental' in all senses of the word? Here Supervielle rejoins those modern authors, so different from him in other ways, who cultivate the arbitrary most extravagantly. Gide mocks determinism much more satirically in his soties, Queneau's novels all contain elaborate tissues of coincidence, unlikely and illogical surprise, the New Novel underlines the seeming gratuity of repetition to create non-narrative patterning. A final source of surprise in Supervielle's stories brings out the arbitrary even as it is contained in the logical relationship of general and particular. The reader may be familiar with the convention and also aware of a specific situation, but still be unable to predict which way the fantasy will develop. In "Le Modèle des E p o u x " , a woodcutter falls in love with a nymph. As a natural result of his new sensuality, he develops a goat's leg, " u n e jambe de b o u c " , like the satyrs. His wife is at first delighted by this exotic change, then disappointed. At this stage the advice of a friend and the remarks of the narrator set up a definite expectation: if the woodcutter returns to his legitimate human love with due humility and prayers, his leg will return to normal. But the following happens: Le Roi de l'Olympe finit par dresser l'oreille. Il n'aimait pas le travail fait à moitié et eut pitié de cet invalide de la métamorphose. Mais, ce qui arriva directement du ciel au bûcheron, ce f u t une deuxième jambe de bouc. C'était la solution morale. (PPU 6 3 )

(The King of Olympus finally took notice. He didn't like a job half done and took pity on this invalid of metamorphosis. But what came directly from heaven to the woodcutter was a second goat's leg. It was the moral solution.)

Jupiter's pity leads us to expect that he will comply with the woodcutter's request. Therefore the very syntax of the third sentence, which reserves the important information for the very end, magnifies the shock of the unexpected result. And the final sentence, an explanation after the fact, only creates a new ambiguity. The context suggests that the mistake is more likely due to Jupiter's carelessness than his moral convictions. The gods often act arbitrarily in response to the most important prayers, and they themselves are not known for their proper behavior. The woodcutter, however, finds a happy ending after all:

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Devenu un véritable chèvre-pied, le bûcheron oublia du même coup son hamadryade et fut de plus en plus attiré pas sa femme humaine, qui avait beaucoup gagné pour lui en mystère. (PPU 6 3 )

(Now a genuine satyr, the woodcutter immediately forgot his hamadryad and was more and more attracted to his human wife, who had gained much mystery in his eyes.) The real moral of the tale turns out to be that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but this conclusion was no more predictable than the stages by which it was reached. Similarly in "La Géante", the heroine is in love with a man of ordinary size. Her emotion is strong enough to bring about change, but she does not diminish — her lover grows. She, naturally, loses interest. It would be hard to find a prose poem that does not illustrate in some way this parody of narrative logic, if only because the language itself, when structured into a sequence of paragraphs, necessarily provides connectives. Rimbaud often does this by using the definite article to imply earlier reference; conversely he destroys sequence by his unlikely use of plurals. An imperfect may create a link between two points, and a confusion of passé simple and present make the link ambiguous. Many paragraphs of the Illuminations begin with such words as "alors" — is this result, simple sequence in time, or real contradiction? Péret, whose transformations of time and character are deliberately incoherent, so abruptly do they occur, insists even more on the logical connectives of " d o n c " , "ensuite" etc. Max Jacob, in " P o è m e " ( t o take only one example) begins: "Quand le bateau f u t arrivé aux îles de l'Océan Indien, on s'aperçut qu'on n'avait pas de cartes. Il fallut descendre! Ce fut alors qu'on connut qui était à bord . . ." (When the boat arrived at the islands of the Indian Ocean, we realized that we had no cards. It was necessary to get off! It was then that we learned who was on board . . .). The definite article ("le bateau"), the indefinite pronoun " o n " , assume connecting knowledge which is never given the reader. Each action seems to follow naturally the last: "ce fut alors . . .", but this is a grammatical trick. The events are unreal in the reader's experience if read literally and their logical ordering is not at all self-evident. Ionesco, more satirical, depends even more on easily assimilated conventions, the most banal clichés of the language, as his point of departure. 3 And if Breton's image of the man in the window is again considered, it is clear that the transition f r o m comparison to fantasy must always involve some absurdity. 3 Examples from La Cantatrice Chauve are well known: they may be based on a familiar proverb, as in "Prenez un cercle, caressez-le, il deviendra vicieux", or on the expectations set up by a series which slowly disintegrates.

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Authors like Noël Devaulx and André Dhôtel write poetic stories which more closely resemble the contes fantastiques than do Supervielle's. Their way of undermining narrative logic is simply to leave the mystery unexplained, open-ended and thus highly suggestive, like an unsolved detective story in which all the clues are equally important. 4 Hence their tone is much less ironic than Supervielle's. How do the traditional contes fantastiques reflect the tension of sequence and interruption, order and destruction? Obviously the afore-mentioned opposition of ordinary and extraordinary is important here, but there is more. Fantasy is by tradition an expression of disorder. A history of its development would closely parallel Foucault's history of madness. 5 In the Middle Ages, the marvellous is always positive, an expression of divine harmony and beauty, truth, virtue and order. But the diabolical, the origin of le fantastique, is always ugly, painful and dark, forbidden and chaotic. At this point there is nothing arbitrary or absurd about this disorder (cf. Breton's remarks on Bosch); 6 it is an ordained part of the cosmic system. It is only when the symbolic reference to the ideal world is gradually lost that such fantasy seems truly modern. Signorelli's paintings of the Apocalypse in Orvieto, with their green devils, today may remind us of science fiction. For Rabelais, fantasy still means disorder but this is concrete and healthy, order being the abstractedness of the syllogism. Because of its heavy moral heritage, fantasy is always closely associated with satire. 7 By the eighteenth century this tendency is well established, as are the underground forms of fantasy revealing the forbidden extremes of eroticism (like madness, a social threat). In England, Dr. Johnson and Coleridge oppose fancy and imagination in terms which recall the diabolical and the mar4 Much has been made of the effect of the detective story genre on the serious modern novel, as in Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes or Butor's Emploi du Temps. Like the conte fantastique, the detective story assumes a world in which logical explanations of mystery are possible, even inevitable, if the right kind of hero puts his mind to solving the enigma. Remove this assumption, and all the trappings of rational thought become an arbitrary patterning that remains on the surface. Objects, once clues - i.e. valuable for their role in human abstractions - have a tantalizing life of their own. The narrator is no longer a comfortable, reliable story-teller, and may even be the murderer as in Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. For further discussion, see Todorov on the fantastique, Morrisette on Les Gommes, Sartre in Situations and in La Nausée, and many others. 5 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Folie (Paris: 10:18, 1961). A major point here is that fantasy like madness and pornography, is socially determined and may be felt as a threat by a carefully, rationally ordered society (or one which has such an ideal). 6 Breton, Les Vases Communicants (Paris: NRF, 1970), p. 65. Breton rejects the surrealistic interpretation of Bosch because of the painter's symbolic Christian frame of reference. i The best treatment of fantasy and satire, in my opinion, is by Frye in Anatomy of Criticism.

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vellous. But Victor Hugo, as everyone knows, finds beauty in the grotesque, and the contemporary Romanticism begins its development. Baudelaire's satanism is another way of underlining the link between the new esthetic and the diabolical. For him as for so many others, the poet's mistress-muse is no longer beauty and virtue, combined and inaccessible; her very unworthiness exerts a fascination on the now masochistic poet and she is a diabolical, not a divine, temptation. The conte fantastique is quite at home in this context. Its tight narrative, highly ordered, is the defense of logic against the diabolical which is in turn both feared and desired. But its order contains the seeds of its own disintegration since its elaborate rational structures are built, like Supervielle's, on fantastic premises (such as the possibility of the dead being alive). The emphasis of this genre gradually shifts from narrative to poetry, to a new blending of fantastique and merveilleux, of diabolical and heavenly. 8 Supervielle's animals are innocent, not monstruous; his Flood victims are not more guilty than those saved. The moral connotations of fantasy have become much more ambiguous, satire and poetry much more closely allied.

8 Compare again the imagery of Ionesco, who constantly opposes weight and the proliferation of matter to airiness and the ability to fly. All his works show this polarity, but perhaps none as explicitly as Le Piéton de l'Air. Transcendence always proves illusory, however; like so many others, Ionesco sees man condemned to hell.

4.

THE UNIQUE AND THE UNIVERSAL

With the advent of the "ère du soupçon", 1 fictional logic changes its frame of reference: cause and effect in the nineteenth century novel were supposed to show the developments of history and society, corresponding to the diachronic and synchronic approaches of historian and sociologist. The rational treatment of plot related specific events to general laws. But when fiction loses its innocence (or returns to an earlier awareness of its illusions), when it learns to mistrust the logic of imitation, it discovers other ways of going beyond unique situations. Narrative time and characterization change together, as they must. Balzac provided the état civil of his characters and their exact location; 2 Jarry carefully sets Ubu Roi in Poland, "c'est-à-dire nulle part". His characters are an impossible mixture of exaggerated convention and forbidden passion. Nowhere and everywhere are the same; the characters are everyone when they are no one in particular. Ionesco and especially Beckett further develop Jarry's technique of contradiction and vagueness in character and situation. Many Surrealists get the same result with the opposite approach — an excess of detail. Péret's prose poems contain many specific historical allusions but the speed of his transitions destroys the continuity of reference. The Jungian universal unconscious, similar to Breton's, is another way of relating individual to type, the moment to eternity. Supervielle's ideal of cosmic harmony leads him to something similar to Jung's solution. He expresses the problem in one of the most pressing of his "Interrogations": Comment fait-on pour se mettre en un vers Lorsque bourdonne en nous tout l'univers, Pour isoler une rose entre toutes 1 An expression appropriately used by Nathalie Sarraute in her book L'Ere du Soupçon (Paris: NRF, 1959). 2 Magny mentions in Histoire du Roman Français Depuis 1918 (Paris: Seuil, 1950) that Gide's Les Faux Monnayeurs was criticized in 1925 for not being more specifically dated: did the action take place before or after the war, for example?

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Lorsque notre âme est sur toutes les routes, Pour se couler tout vif dans un objet, Chasser le reste en un même rejet, Lorsque l'on est plus dispersé au monde Qu'une comète à la queue vagabonde, Comment fait-on pour être de ce temps Quand l'éternel vous mord à tout instant . . . 3 (How to put oneself in a single line When the whole universe hums inside us, To isolate one rose among many When our soul is on every road, To pour the living self into one object, And chase the rest away with equal disdain When one is more dispersed in all the world Than a comet with a vagabond tail, How can one manage to be of this time When eternity gnaws you at every moment . . .) Supervielle does not start from the specific, trying to find for it a wider context. In other words, narrative is not his most natural medium. Rather, as a poet, Supervielle begins with his sense of the eternal, the universal, and wonders how to choose, how to create a unique work of art (much less one with the specificity of narrative). 4 Moreover, since creation and identity are so closely linked for Supervielle, he is also putting the question of self and other: starting from a kind of formless fraternity ("lorsque l'on est plus dispersé au monde"), how will he create a separate self? In narrative, the I-you-they relationships are of crucial importance; 5 all basic techniques express them in some way. That is the problem of chapter five, however; here I want to discuss Supervielle's treatment of specific event and character. Any story is about something particular: how does Supervielle, rejecting nineteenth century rationalism, connect the unique and the universal? There is great variety in Supervielle's contes. They range from actionpacked, fast developing plots to the almost purely descriptive, those which

3 Supervielle, Oublieuse Mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 153. 4 The relationship between concrete representation and wider meaning is perhaps the basic concern of all art that can be in any sense mimetic. Bonnefoy, in his book Rome 1630 (Flammarion, 1970), analyses the various solutions to this problem found by Roman painters and architects in the baroque period. His fascinating conclusions point to possible parallels with the modern period. 5 See, for example, Butor in Répertoire (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1960, 1964), Todorov's discussion of the themes of je and tu in Introduction à La Littérature Fantastique, and even the reflections of modern theologians, such as Martin Buber in La Vie en Dialogue (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1959).

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are called prose poems. Examples from different points on this scale of action will illustrate his various treatments of time and characterization. The stories of Premiers Pas de l'Univers have the most movement. They frequently begin in médias res\ the points of equilibrium are very brief and the changes very sudden. But it is precisely this speed which creates an important source of ambiguity: it is often difficult to distinguish actions which are typical illustrations of a general state from actions which, truly unique, advance the story. "L'Enlèvement d ' E u r o p e " begins with description of a custom, fading quickly into a specific conversation : Tous les matins, Junon parcourait les flancs de l'Olympe en criant: "Fidélité." Et chacun lui répondait: "Fidélité." Et les bêtes beuglaient ou miaulaient leur assentiment. — Tu pourrais bien répondre comme les autres, dit-elle un jour à Jupiter. _ J'ai répondu. — A voix si basse que je n'ai rien entendu. — Tu sais bien que je ne puis crier sans mettre en mouvement l'orage et le tonnerre. Or les mortels se plaignent qu'il y ait eu beaucoup de pluies ces temps-ci. Et elle continuait sa tournée criant toujours: "Fidélité". (PPU 39-40) (Every morning, Juno wandered over the sides of Olympus crying "Fidelity." And everyone answered her, "Fidelity". And the animals mooed or meowed their assent. — You could answer like everyone else, said she one day to Jupiter. — I answered. — So low that I couldn't hear. — You know I can't shout without starting up storms and thunder. And the mortals are complaining that there has been a lot of rain recently. And she would continue on her rounds crying as always: "Fidelity".) Verb tenses and temporal adverbs create the ambiguity here. " P a r c o u r a i t . . . tous les matins" and "dit-elle un j o u r " are in contradiction, but the concluding imperfect, "continuait", could be read either as habitual action or continued action on that particular day. This paragraph introduces immediately the two major characters, Juno and Jupiter, whose opposition will be the framework of the plot. The quickness of the dialogue underlines their confrontation, while a minimum of narrative situation or comment makes for fast pacing. The next paragraph switches back to the specific for the real story to begin: "Ce matin-là, la Déesse avait entendu dire que son mari, à la recherche de nouvelles amours, devait se métamorphoser une fois de plus" (That morning the Goddess had heard it said that her husband, looking for a new love, was going to change forms again). But this description also combines specific and typical — for Juno this is an old story. The plot slows

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down momentarily to allow Juno an internal monologue. Supervielle often uses these; static moments in the action, they invariably define a character according to some thematic value. Juno and Jupiter are opposed in this story not only as man and wife (mythical or modern) but as honesty and deceit; their psychology is no more subtle than this. Humor frequently results from a character's recognition of himself as a symbol; here Juno turns to the reader to explain: " . . . Je voudrais me venger vingt fois par jour comme une fille de mauvaise vie. Le malheur veut que je n'aime que ce qui est complètement honnête: les femmes enceintes de leur mari; les vagissements des nouveau-nés légitimes, une mère allaitant ses jumeaux, la même mouchant ses autres enfants, l'odeur du linge frais lavé, les pots d'ambrosie bien alignés à l ' o f f i c e " . Elle aimait aussi à donner des conseils dont elle connaissait la parfaite inutilité à l'oreille des jeunes filles au seuil de leur chambre nuptiale. C'était là son seul vice. (PPU 4 1 )

(. . . I would like to revenge myself twenty times a day like a girl of the streets. My misfortune is to love only what is completely honest; women pregnant by their husbands, the cooing of legitimate new-born children, a mother suckling her twins, the same wiping the noses of her other children, the smell of fresh laundry, jars of ambrosia neatly lined up in the pantry. She also liked to give advice which she knew would be perfectly useless in the ear of young girls on the threshhold of their nuptial chambers. That was her only vice.) None of the details limit this description to a particular period of time, with the whimsical exception of the pots of ambrosia; and there the two temporal associations, Greek and modern, cancel each other out. But every detail contributes to the definition of Juno as honest wife and homemaker. Every one of Supervielle's characters carries some such one-dimensional thematic value. Where

physical

form

changes, the character hesitates

between two values, such as with Sir Rufus Flox horse and man. Sometimes the conflict is built in, as with the animal man Minotaur. In any case plot conflict, depends on a thematic polarity, the values of which are expressed by a simple characterization. Supervielle's world of contrasts has the primitive quality of Romanesque sculpture, but the simplicity is self-conscious. Transcendence of matter through symbol is not taken for granted but aspired to. Jupiter, the philanderer, naturally uses metamorphosis for his deceptions. Europa unwittingly plays on this when she first sees him: "Pourquoi veux-tu me faire croire que tu es un taureau? lui dit-elle. C'est absolument faux. Un agneau, voilà ce que tu es" (Why do you want to make me believe you are a bull, she said. That's all wrong. A lamb, that's what you are). Stories with such abrupt transitions are of course likely vehicles for humor. The conte

continues a constant and sudden shifting from scene to scene

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and from character to character. Although the tenses are almost always past definite, the scenes brief and description at a minimum, the very speed destroys the continuity. Moreover there are frequent interruptions by other characters and by the narrator. When Neptune intrudes on the two lovers, the narrator stops to explain: "En vérité, Neptune avait bien reconnu son frère . . . mais il avait voulu marquer que la mer lui appartenait" (To tell the truth, Neptune had recognized his brother all right. . . but he had wanted to show that the sea belonged to him). This incident remains unconnected with any preceding or following. Paralleling Juno's monologue, Juno gets a more fragmented internal dialogue in which he comments on the action. Finally, at the end of the story, the episode with Europa concluded, Jupiter returns to Olumpus. He realizes that Juno knows all, and reacts: — Après tout, je ne vois pas pourquoi j'ai la délicatesse de recourir à la métamorphose. N'ai-je pas tous les droits? Toutefois, il résolut d'être plus rusé à l'avenir . . . — After all, I don't see why I have the delicacy to resort to metamorphosis. Can't I do anything I want? However, he resolved to be more clever in future . . . "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" applies not only to the content of this story but also to its narrative structuring. In the stories using Greek myths, thematic opposition is most frequently between gods and mortals (as in "Le Modèle des Epoux", last chapter). The only god positively presented is Vulcan, considered to be the most human. He is thus a resolution of the two poles. "Le Minotaur", however, is more complex and shows more of Supervielle's narrative techniques. The internal conflict between human and animal leads to an external one between individual and society: a common plight for Supervielle's heroes. Stories about outsiders frequently begin with a character sketch: Ce fut un bien joli enfant de Crète, le front cornu et bouclé, un parfait lapsus de la nature. D'une intelligence fort au-dessus de son âge, il était à deux ans un brillant sujet et à trois ans, adulte, ce qui scandalisa les parents d'élèves, dont l'intransigeance le fit renvoyer de toutes les écoles. "Qu'est-ce qu'ils ont tous à me toiser comme un sauvage, se disait le jeune monstre. J'ai une tête de taureau et puis après? (PPU 2 3 )

He was a pretty child of Crete, with a horned and curly forehead, a perfect lapsus of nature. His intelligence was far above his age level, and at two he was a brilliant subject, at three, adult, which scandalized the parents of the other pupils whose intransigeance had him sent away from all the schools. "Why do they have to look down their noses as if I were a savage" the young monster used to say to himself. So I have a bull's head, so what? . . .

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The narrator's evaluation of the hero is clearly positive: his animal nature, apart from his pretty forehead, is expressed only through his comparatively greater intelligence. "Le jeune monstre" is perfectly normal; it is the others who are narrow-minded, not appreciating his special qualities. This partisan description leads directly into the internal monologue, introduced as elsewhere by the imperfect tense of "se disait" to show that it recurs regularly. The paradoxical use of paraphrasis ("le jeune monstre") and the modern school situation ironically underplay the Minotaur's uniqueness; rather he is a familiar type, the child rejected by his playmates. The more universal interpretation of his circumstances takes precedence over the literal one. Next comes a series of typical incidents which increase the Minotaur's resentment, leading to the outcome quoted earlier. The most violent passage in the story is likely to be the climax, the hero's murder by Theseus, but Supervielle cuts down on the drama as much as possible: Des le premier coup de massue, on vit tomber le monstre. Il crachait du sang de taureau, épais comme de la confiture de groseille, et vite un autre coup pour aider la mort dans une tâche qu'on aurait crue plus difficile. Les enfants cachaient mal leur déception. Ils avaient compté sure un plus long spectacle. (PPU 3 4 - 5 )

(From the first blow of the club, they saw the monster fall. He was spitting bull's blood, thick as currant jam — quick, another blow to help death in a task which one would have thought more difficult. The children hid their disappointment badly. They had been counting on a longer show.) The description concentrates on attitudes, not action. The first allusion to violence is a noun, "coup", tucked into a subordinate verbless phrase "dès le premier coup de massue", then a weak impersonal verb ("on vit tomber le monstre"). Vaguely attributed free indirect discourse ("vite, un autre coup") allows the narrator to again avoid a finite verb, while the whole passage • stresses the Minotaur's lack of dramatic resistance. He is not a violent character, monster or not, and this is a martyrdom. The personification of death seems to make this ambiguous noun the direct agent of the murder — a further way of gaining distance from the action. The children here as elsewhere are primitive, but in this case they are on the enemy's side. Yet their presence contributes to the atmosphere of magic which transforms the violence, just as the bull's blood seems to become currant jelly. In this way Supervielle chooses, as always, humility and sweetness over anger and resentment - much less violence. After the death the townspeople regret their haste and give the monster a hero's funeral. A cycle seems to close when the minor characters of the opening paragraphs reappear to follow the

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procession. Many stories seem thus to return to their point of departure when the author brings back one of the opening motifs. In "The Minotaur", the conclusion, far from proving the highest point of suspense, creates an atmosphere of diffused sadness and regret. "L'Enfant de la Haute Mer" is also a tale of an "être infiniment déshérité". This little girl is condemned to live in a phantom village on the ocean. The first twelve pages of the eighteen page story describe her repeated attempts to act effectively. Some are unique but representative of the daily routine: "Une fois elle fit, au heurtoir d'une porte, un noeud de crêpe noir. Elle trouvait que cela faissait bien" (EHM 13) (One day she made a bow of black crepe to hang on a doorknocker. She thought it looked good there). Here the past definite is used. Other incidents are repeated day after day, and the imperfect conveys the repitition: "Tous les matins elle allait à l'école communale avec un grand cartable enfermant des cahiers, une grammaire, une arithmétique, une histoire de France, une géographie" (EHM 16-17) (Every morning she went to school with a big bookbag containing notebooks, a grammar, an arithmetic book, a history of France, a geography). All the details stress her unchanging solitude. The action, when it comes, is introduced as simply another incident in this descriptive series, one of many, whereas in fact it represents a radical change : Un autre jour il y eut comme une distraction du destin, une fêlure dans sa volonté . . . un cargo passa dans la rue marine du village sans que les maisons disparussent sous les flots ni que la fillette fût prise de sommeil. Il était midi juste. Le cargo fit entendre sa sirène, mais cette voix ne se mêla pas à celle du clocher. Chacune gardait son indépendance. (EHM 21)

(Another day there was, as it were, a distraction of destiny, a flaw in its w i l l . . . a cargo ship passed in the ocean street of the village without making the houses disappear under the waves or the little girl fall into a deep sleep. It was exactly noon. The ship sounded its siren but its voice did not mingle with that of the bell tower. Each kept independence.) The action is neutralized not only by the misleading presentation of the incident as just one in a series but also by the restatement (in the last two sentences) of the event in a static, nominal form. The same information is repeated more abstractly. As with the Minotaur, fusion of outsider and community is not possible in this story, hence the tragedy. "L'Arche de Noé" has a different kind of polarization. Here two kinds of time are juxtaposed: ordinary and extraordinary. There are no really major characters, not even Noah, since they are not needed to carry thematic value. In "Le Boeuf et l'Ane de la Crèche", character and time contrast are

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both used. Joseph is first to notice the new period of miracle: "Joseph sort et ne tarde pas à revenir, portant sur le dos de la paille, mais quelle paille, si vivace et ensoleillée qu'elle est un commencement de miracle" (EHM 2 0 ) (Joseph goes out and quickly returns, carrying straw on his back, but what straw, so vivacious and sunlit that it is the beginning o f a miracle). Most of the events follow in simple juxtapositition, all illustrating the special time, all of equal value, without any seemingly necessary order in the sequence. The visit of the three kings leads to the visit of all the animals, followed in turn by all the atoms: the order is more hierarchical than temporal. A t the same time, humility and pride are embodied in the ox and the ass. Abrupt shifts of point of view show the reader what each is thinking in turn. For example, on page forty-eight, the story suddenly stops for a "Prière de B o e u f ' , a separate titled paragraph, but it continues after this interruption when the ass comments on the prayer, just as if he had overheard it. Again, unique characters (the only ox and ass present at the birth o f Christ) take on an enlarged importance. Each in turn speculates about his ability to represent his race for such an important occasion. The ox feels unworthy: Parfois je me demande si tu [Jésus] n'aurais pas été mal informé et si c'est bien moi qui devrais être ici; tu n'as peut-être pas remarqué que j'avais une grande cicatrice dans le dos et qu'il me manque du poil sur le côté, ce qui est assez vilain. Sans même sortir de ma famille on aurait pu désigner pour être ici mon frère ou mes cousins qui sont beaucoup mieux que moi. Est-ce que le lion ou l'aigle n'auraient pas été plus indiqués? (EHM 4 9 ) (Sometimes I wonder if you were not misinformed, and if it is really I who should be here; you perhaps haven't noticed that I have a big scar on my back and that some of the hair is gone on my side, which is rather ugly. Even without going outside my family, they could have chosen my brother or my cousins who are much better looking than I am. .Wouldn't the lion or the eagle have been more appropriate?) The proud donkey's speculations are not about his personal advancement but about that of his race: " A n e s de trait, ânes de bât, la vie va être belle sous nos pas et dans de gais pâturages les ânons attendront les événements" (Donkeys who pull, donkeys who carry, life will be beautiful under our feet and in gay pastures young asses will wait for events). The contrast in tone between

the t w o passages is striking: the ox's familiar language is less

humorous than the ass's poetic pretensions. The narrator, as usual, reflects on what is happening, weighing and interpreting on the reader's behalf: Premières nuits de la chrétienté . . . La Vièrge, Joseph, l'Enfant, le Boeuf et l'Ane étaient alors extraordinairement eux-mêmes. Leur propre ressem-

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blance qui le jour se dispersait un peu et s'éparpillait auprès des visiteurs prenait après le coucher du soleil une concentration et une sécurité merveilleuses. (EHM 5 1 )

(First nights of Christianity . . . the Virgin, Joseph, the Child, the Ox and the Ass were then extraordinarily themselves. Their own resemblance which was dispersed a little during the day and was scattered among the visitors took on after sunset a miraculous concentration and security.) At the beginning of the paragraph, the lack of verb and the three dots create the atmosphere of suspension; the world is holding its breath. The use of capitals stresses the uniqueness of the characters, since it suggests proper names; yet the child is all children, the ox all oxen, the ass all of his brothers. The story ends when action begins again: Joseph has his dream and the family departs. The ass moves into the next panel of the painting: "l'âne de la crèche devient peu à peu celui de la fuite en Egypte" (the ass of the manger becomes little by little the ass of the flight into Egypt). The ox, so accustomed to this rarified atmoshere that he has become a mystic, substituting communion even with grass and flowers for his usual eating habits, gently dies of starvation. The final paragraph describes him left behind in the manger. It is in the present tense until the last sentence:"Quand la voisine entra, un peu après l'aube, le boeuf avait cessé de ruminer" (When the neighbor entered, a little before dawn, the ox had ceased ruminating). The change of verb tenses marks the end of suspension and the return to the world of past, present, and future. "Le Bol de Lait" is even closer to the prose poem. In this story, a little boy brings a bowl of milk to his mother every day, carefully carrying it across Paris. There are no distinguishing details, no names, backgrounds, place descriptions (except the name of Paris). The family relationship and the milk immediately suggest symbolic interpretation for this irrational behavior which the simplicity of the characterization confirms. Yet the people are not abstractions; it is their, actions — the story — which make them alive. Time here again is cyclical, a seemingly endless repetition of days. At one point however there is an unrepeatable event, the mother's death. What happens then? Here is the description of the event with the passage preceding and following: Quand le jeune homme entrait dans la chambre, il commençait toujours par dire: "Bois, maman." C'était sa façon de lui dire bonjour . . . "Elle ne pourra pas tenir longtemps", pensait avec tristesse le garçon qui évaluait chaque jour les forces de la faiblissante buveuse de lait. - Mais ce grand bol, c'est tout de même pas mal et peut-être plus qu'il

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n'en faut à mon âge. D'ailleurs, je me sens très vaillante et si ça ne va pas, je me coucherai. Et elle était morte depuis longtemps que son fils continuait d'apporter le lait chaque matin, d'en retirer la suie ou la poussière, mais gardant pour lui son: "Bois, maman" . . . (AN 4 3 )

(When the young man entered the room, he always began by saying, "Drink, mama". It was his way of saying hello. "She won't last long" thought with sadness the boy who measured each day the strength of the weakening milk drinker. — But such a big bowl; that's still not bad and perhaps more than I need at my age. Besides I feel strong and if I'm not well I'll go to bed. And though she had been dead a long time her son continued to bring the milk each morning, to remove the soot and dust but keeping to himself his "Drink, Mama" . . . Death changes little. The ritual act is now completely internalized ("gardant pour lui. . .") but dependency continues.6 Death and its changes are relegated to subordinate clauses; it is as if in the everyday world subsists a microcosm of eternity. The story is told in past tenses, yet the continuity of the imperfects can be assumed to go on forever. This story ends, like "Vulcan", like "L'Enfant de la Haute Mer", in a direct address to the reader. Like the fabulist pointing out his moral, Supervielle asks if this tale is not rather common: Les hommes que vous croisez dans la rue, êtes-vous sûrs qu'ils aient toujours une raison compréhensible d'aller d'un point de la ville à un autre . . . n'en est-il pas qui seraient aussi embarrassés pour vous répondre, si vous preniez la peine de les interroger, que ce malheureux garçon condamné à accomplir ces mêmes gestes, chaque jour, à la même heure, par tous les temps? (AN 9 3 - 4 )

(The men you meet in the street, are you sure that they always have an understandable reason for going from one point of the city to another . . . are there none who would be as troubled to answer you, if you bothered to question them, as this unhappy boy condemned to fulfil the same gestures, every day at the same hour, in all kinds of weather? However unusual the particular events, they are common experience in their irrational necessity. The final example is a real prose poem: for Supervielle this means a concentrated use of all the anti-narrative techniques presented above, combined with a more metaphoric organization. Here there is no unique 6 A Freudian interpretation is given by Elizabeth Stübel in "Einführung in die Novellen von Jules Supervielle", Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, LXV, 5-6 (Jena und Leipzig), pp. 311-336.

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action, not even in a subordinate clause, or implied in an historical infinitive, that can be read as plot progression; all incidents are typical of a continuing state. "La Vache", "Les Nymphes", and "Une Enfant" all fit this description. The latter begins as follows: Cette petite fille, je ne la voudrais pas malheureuse ni trop heureuse, mais semblable aux saisons qui ne s'occupent pas de ça. Elle va, elle vient dans l'appartement. Elle rentre de la campagne et ne sait plus où se mettre. (BBV 3 1 )

(This little girl, I wouldn't want to see her unhappy or too happy, but similar to the seasons who are not concerned with such things. She comes and goes in the apartment. She comes back from the country and doesn't know what to do with herself.) She is obviously somebody's little girl, perhaps the narrator's own, but no details are provided. The demonstrative and definite article assume that the reader will recognize this situation as familiar. The first sentence is ambiguous due to "voudrais": is she real or about to be created? The doubt seems to apply to her future rather than to her mode of being. She lives in time, but what kind of time? The narrator would like it to be cyclical, seasonal, not full of the events which cause happiness and misery. The next paragraph develops this identification with nature: "Là-bas, tout est fruit, fleur, gazon, ciel, et elle se sentait elle-même ciel, gazon, fleur, fruit. Ici, les murs, à chaque instant la rappellent à l'ordre, la grondent, lui font des objections" (In the country, everything is fruit, flower, lawn, sky and she felt herself become sky, lawn, flower, fruit. Here the walls at every moment call her to order, scold her, make objections). Metamorphosis is suggested simply by the sentence structure, nicely underlined by the reversal of the terms in the second half. But this is still a case of "se sentait", an emotional metamorphosis not necessarily affecting the physical. It is the walls that introduce genuine fantasy here when they are personified. The narrator goes on to explain their mentality in a direct address to the child: " E n f a n t , . . . le mur a la vie dure . . . " ( C h i l d , . . . walls have a hard life ...). Their "hardness" is form and order, underlined by the pun. The rhetorical situation changes again abruptly and its logic is seriously questioned in the following paragraph: Cette fillette dont je vous parlais hier, elle joue du piano quelque part, non loin de ma chambre. Ou ne serait-ce pas plutôt dans ma mémoire? Ou dans ce livre qui n'est pas encore écrit et dont elle sera le meilleur? Tant de douceur réfléchie, consistante, tant de mesure, pas un mot plus haut que l'autre, cette enfant qui n'a rien de son frère le petit garçon, toujours à l'assaut, lui, de quelque chose. (BBV 3 3 )

(That little girl I was telling you about yesterday, she is playing the piano somewhere, not far from my room. Or might it be somewhere in my

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memory? Or in that book, not yet written, of which she will be the best part? So much reflective, consistent sweetness, such measure, never a word higher than the last, that child has nothing of her brother the little boy, he who always has some castle to storm.) Suddenly we have reached tomorrow, and again we have the narrator's attention. The echo of music is an echo indeed: does it belong to the past, the present, or the future; memory, actuality, or the creative imagination? The music itself becomes ambiguous when it seems no longer piano sounds but the child herself; it is she who has the sweetness and the measure. The strangeness of the effect is accentuated by the contrast with "son frère, le petit garçon", the little boy, just as she is the little girl. They are no longer individual children. The music continues to dominate the narrative with its many rich associations: "Les notes sont jolies sous ses doigts, elles joncheraient l'air et le tapis de leurs pétales si la poésie se voyait" (The notes are lovely under her fingers, they would cover the air and the carpet with their petals if poetry could be seen). Notes are flowers, flowers are poetry, all of this is the little girl who becomes a musical movement in the next paragraph: Elle n'est pas fière, bien sûr, de n'être qu'une enfant et ne pense qu'à grandir. Et ce que j'aime tant sur sa figure, c'est peut-être ce lent, ce très lent (ici, il faudrait énormément de lenteur), ce passage, ce murmure, ce tout petit murmure de l'âge qui avance sur ce visage incroyablement jeune et frais. Elle est comme ça. Elle est très légèrement, mais tout de même visiblement, différente. (BBV 33-4) (She is of course not proud of being just a child, and thinks only of growing. And what I like most on her face is perhaps that slow, that very slow (here, a tremendous amount of slowness is needed), that passage, that murmer, that very tiny murmur of age which progresses on that incredibly young and fresh face. She's just that way. She's very good that way and every time I see her, she is very slightly, but still visibly, different.) The adagio of the child's growth is expressed by the murmur of age personified. The child is a concentration of herself, like the characters of "Le Boeuf et l'Ane de la Crèche", and like them she shares the paradox of same and different which so fascinates her creator. The musical image is continued but through renewed evocation; literal extension is always suggested but not realized so that the description is suspended between metaphor and fantasy. The discontinuity is greater here, the links even less logical than in the other stories, no one action is developed enough for a narrative interpretation. Connotations are more richly unfolded and it is their echoes around one central figure which give sequence. All of these differences are of degree however; this story is less narrative, more poetic,

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than the others through use of the same techniques. And the characterization by quality and type is identical. Three final paragraphs describe the child's attempt to grow by learning language and, finally, by being lifted upwards in the arms of her nurse, another play on words. Growth is the third movement of the p o e m , after nature and music. There is no conclusion since there was no beginning: this is not an interruption for Supervielle, a separation, but rather a natural expression of the timeless (an idea discussed in detail in the next chapter). Ponge, who sometimes uses similar techniques, frequently destroys b o t h object and language at the same time: the poem ends when the cigarette goes up in smoke, the orange is eaten. Whatever the variation in tone and subject, however thick or dispersed the action, Supervielle's stories have in common their attack on linear time and on psychological characterization. The scale of being is parallel t o the scale of action: the gods on the one end with their constant metamorphoses are like the dead on the other, who can never change; and the fastest moving stories with the greatest number of characters undermine narrative as successfully as those which present a timeless description of a single essence. But the meaning here springs from the narrative, fragmented into poetic paradox. Supervielle's techniques, while much simpler, resemble Proust's: the latter also uses mixtures of tenses, blends on specific and typical, momentary and repeated, real and imaginary, to make linear time cyclical and, finally, eternal. 7

' Combray alone is a highly complex tissue of such temporal ambiguities, starting with the first sentences: "Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois . . . mes yeux se fermaient si vite . . ." (For a long period, I went to bed early. Sometimes . . . my eyes would shut so quickly . . .) The English translation cannot capture the vague opposition of the perfect tense ("me suis couché"),: the continuity of "longtemps" and the following, apparently repeated but occasional rapid eye-shutting. The rest of the volume describes simultaneously a typical night of sleeplessness at one point (undefined) in the narrator's life and a typical childhood day spent at Combray. The day in turn is both during Aunt Léonie's lifetime (she is the character most obsessed with habit and repetition) and after her death when Marcel's parents own Combray. But of all the incidents, that illustrate these two typical periods, some are unique enough to deeply affect the future (the rupture with the uncle, for example) whereas others carry weight only because of their repetition ("le drame du coucher"). A book could be written on this kind of elaboration in just this one volume of A la Recherche, but this section, which fittingly ends with dawn, is only the beginning.

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PERCEPTION

In the poetic transformation of narrative, the story teller very often loses his claim to objective vision; he no longer guarantees that the story is 'true', i.e. a true illusion, and no longer takes pains to convince the reader. He may deliberately identify imagination and reality: did narrator or character dream it or did it all 'really happen'? Is the story hallucination? The fantasy of a madman? Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Constant, and Nerval are perhaps the most famous early experimentors with subjective narrative: their tales are usually in the first person, even if, as in Réné, this story is enclosed in another, according to the conventions of vraisemblance in earlier novels. Here the reader is first of all trying to understand a psyche, probably unreliable in its reports, and the determination of fact is a tool to this end. The contes fantastiques, though emphasizing fact, may use similar ambiguities to create suspense: Maupassant's hero in "Le Horla" is himself unsure if there are supernatural forces at work or if he is going mad. The authors works in a satisfactory 'objective' explanation, but the conclusion shows that the other one also holds: the hero does lose his mind. Villiers de l'lsle Adam, in "Vera", carefully leads the reader to believe that the amorous husband is only imagining his wife's return from the grave; the discovery of the key to the tomb, which only she could have brought, proves otherwise. In Julien Green's Le Voyageur sur la Terre, two such interpretations remain equally possible even at the end. Obviously the narrator's conciousness has been a major concern of modern fiction, influenced by existentialism and phenomenology. Today novelists no longer dare claim objectivity; the best, as Proust, exploit the narrator's limited vision for a new synthesis of perception and creation. Gide plays with point of view by contrasting his récits and his soties. Céline, in Voyage au Bout de la Nuit does everything possible to make his reader distrust his narrator: Bardamu is often feverish, on drugs, starving, in any state conducive to hallucination. Many of his actions are calculated to make him appear cowardly, repulsive, morally unreliable. Yet it is the truly fantastic descriptions and Bardamu's moral search which provide the great strength of the book.

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In Supervielle's first novel, L'Homme de la Pampa (1923), he also experiments with hallucination. The hero's conflicts again lead to madness, externalized in the form of a pet volcano which the character, Guanamiru, takes travelling in a suitcase. The narrator gives us a clue early on: Or, un jour huit marins noirs de l'Etat emportèrent au large ce qui restait de sa raison, à toute rames. Les hommes ne tournèrent même pas la tête, malgré les appels poussés par Guanamiru jusqu'à ce que le canot ne fût plus qu'un petit cachet avalé par l'horizon. (Now, one day eight black sailors of the State carried away what was left of his reason, rowing as fast as they could. The men did not even turn their heads, in spite of the cries uttered ~by Guanamiru until the boat was nothing but a little pill swallowed by the horizon. 1 The somewhat surrealistic descriptions throughout the novel do not come from the character directly — there is no first person narrative. Hence they are deceptively objective and it is only in such occasional passages that they are clearly ascribed to the character's madness. In such fiction it can be hard to tell people apart. Is Guanamiru's volcano a separate character? Does Robinson exist separately from Bardamu or is he really the hero's evil genius, his alter ego? Again, we are reminded of the early Romantics, of Musset's pale shadow, Vigny's Dr. Noir, Baudelaire's "hypocrite lecteur"; also of Stevenson's Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde and many other double personalities of fantastic fiction. In other modern novels, Queneau's for example, it is impossible to count the characters — too many ambiguities. The double is a favorite of Supervielle's, too, and evolves naturally from his form-spirit duality. In "L'Adolescente", after the young girl has run away from her father, she finds herself thinking about him: Et quand elle se trouvait seule, le soir, dans sa chambre de bonne, elle se disait souvent: "J'oublie mon père, je l'oublie de toutes mes forces. Je ne veux plus me parler de lui". (AN 8 5 )

(And when she found herself alone, in the evening, in her maid's room, she often said to herself: "I am forgetting my father, forgetting him with all my might. I don't want to discuss him with myself anymore.") The girl extends a common manner of speaking, "se disait", into an image which stresses the dual nature of consciousness in an unusually strong manner. This is similar to the poetic body-soul dialogue, "Les Deux Voix", in A La Nuit. In the novels, one character may be the alter ego of another or

l

Supervielle, L'Homme

de la Pampa (Paris: Gallimard, 1923), p. 34.

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a hero may travel only as a spirit, leaving his body behind. 2 In the play Schéhérazade, the heroine and her sister are complementary versions of each other. For Supervielle these relationships naturally exteriorize emotions, sometimes the alienation of self from self, sometimes the close ties between two separate characters. 3 But the double is still a special case. In the short stories in general, Supervielle uses a floating, non-dramatized narrator, not directly involved in the action. There is no first person narration but a lot of interpretive comment, and a good deal of intimate knowledge of the character's emotions. In other words, Supervielle is again starting from narrative conventions much like Balzac's. One of the advantages in this case is connected with his use of fantasy: while on the one hand he creates a world too extravagant to be credible, he describes it with the usual mimetic rhetoric, designed to convince the reader of its reality. The narrator's objectivity must be firmly established to lend him authority; only then can he guarantee the truth of fantasy. In "Le Boeuf et l'Ane de la Crèche", when the ox has mystic visions, the narrator helps us keep the various levels straight: Les apparitions supernaturelles au milieu desquelles vivait le boeuf lui coupaient souvent la respiration. Ayant pris l'habitude de retenir son souffle, à la manière des ascètes de l'Asie, il devint lui aussi visionnaire et, bien que moins à l'aise dans la grandeur que dans l'humilité, il connut de véritables extases. Mais un scrupule le guidait et l'empêchait d'imaginer des anges ou des saints. Il ne les voyait que si réellement ils se trouvaient dans le voisinage. (EHM 61) (The supernatural apparitions amid which the ox now lived often took his breath away. Having developed the habit of holding it in, like Asian ascetics, he also became visionary, and though less at ease in grandeur than in humility, he experienced genuine ecstasy. But a scrupule guided him and kept him from imagining angels or saints. He saw them only if they were really in the neighborhood.) The first explanation might suggest that the ox's physical state was alone responsible for his visions, though his shortness of breath is already caused by the supernatural. But the narrator is as usual playing with the reader and hastens to assure him that the ox, our hero, can in fact distinguish imaginary and real angels: he has not lost his sense of objectivity. Narrators of this sort are usually omniscient. Supervielle brings out the 2 Supervielle, Le Jeune Homme du Dimanche et des Autres Jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). The hero goes to South America leaving his body behind in I-'rance. 3 The extraordinary resemblance between mother and daughter (both called Fanny) in Robinson is an effect of closeness, not of sameness.

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invraisemblance of this convention, where the narrator's role is impossible and illogical. This he does, here as elsewhere, with contradiction: the narrator is sometimes omniscient and sometimes not, and likely to make mistakes. One of the best stories, "L'Enfant de la Haute Mer", illustrates this well. The description begins as a series of questions: Comment s'était formée cette rue flottante? Quels marins, avec l'aide de quels architectes, l'avaient construite dans le haut Atlantique à la surface de la mer, au-dessus d'un gouffre de six mille mètres? . . . (EHM 9)

(How had that floating street been formed? What sailors, with the help of what architects, had constructed it in the high Atlantic on the surface of the sea, above a gulf of six thousand meters?) These continue another half page. The reader assumes that they are rhetorical: the narrator knows the answers and will eventually provide them. But the narrator, arbitrarily, says otherwise: Nous dirons les choses au fur et à mesure que nous les verrons, et que nous saurons. Et ce qui doit rester obscur le sera malgré nous. (EHM

10)

(We will tell things as we see them and learn them. And what must remain obscure will be so in spite of us.) Nonetheless the narrator knows a great deal more than the little girl herself, who is unaware that she is living on the ocean at all. It is this contrast between her village life and the great expanse of water which creates the dramatic irony of such remarks as: "Et toute l'année, elle devait prendre soin du drapeau de la mairie, si exposé" (and all year, she had to take care of the flag at the town hall, so exposed.) The narrator interprets the little girl's loneliness over her head to the reader: Dans la rue, la seule de cette petite ville, l'enfant regardait parfois à droite et à gauche comme si elle eût attendu de quelqu'un un léger salut de la main ou de la tête, un signe amical. Simple impression qu'elle donnait, sans le savoir, puisque rien ne pouvait venir, ni personne, dans ce village perdu et toujours prêt à s'évanouir. (EHM

11)

(In the street, the only one in that little town, the child sometimes looked right and left as if she might have expected from someone a slight wave of the hand or nod of the head, a friendly gesture. A simple impression which she gave, without knowing, since nothing could come, and no one, in that lost village, always on the point of fading away.)

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In the last sentence he conveys information unknown to the little girl while telling the reader what lies behind appearances. The narrator here could hardly have more authority. Ten pages later, something, and someone, the boat and its crew, do come into the town, which against all the rules does not disappear. The narrator's assertions cannot really be relied on. At the end of the story, he does give us the traditional explanation but, as usual, with his own logic: Marins qui rêvez en haute mer, les coudes appuyés sur la lisse, craignez de penser longtemps à un visage aimé. Vous risqueriez de donner naissance, dans des lieux essentiellement désertiques, à un être doué de toute la sensibilité humaine et qui ne peut pas vivre ni mourir, ni aimer, et souffre pourtant . . . comme cette enfant de l'Océan, née un jour de cerveau de Charles Liévens, de Steenvoorde, matelot de pont du quatremâts Le Hardi, qui avait perdu sa fille âgée de douze ans, pendant un de ses voyages, et, une nuit, par cinquante-cinq degrés de latitude Nord et trente-cinq de longitude Ouest, pensa longuement à elle, avec une force terrible, pour le grand malheur de cette enfant. (Sailors who dream on the high seas, elbows leaning on the railing, beware of thinking too long in the black of the night about a beloved face. Y o u would run the risk of giving birth, in essentially deserted places, to a being endowed with all of human sensitivity and who can neither live nor die, nor love, and yet suffers . . . like that little girl of the Ocean, born one day from the brain of Charles Lievens of Steenvoorde, deckhand of the fourmaster The Bold, who had lost his twelve year old daughter during one of his voyages and one night, at fifty-five degrees of latitude North and thirty-five of longitude West, thought about her a long time with terrible force, for the great misfortune of the child.) In this story, Supervielle reverses the usual procedure for ghost stories. Instead of giving the particular circumstances at the outset and watching the action develop from the point of view of human explorers, he lets his narrator do the discovering, starting with the ghost and ending with the specific details, condensed into the last half of the last sentence. And even this is part of a general invocation, not part of the plot development. Moreover, although the narrator here takes on the functions of the scientificallyminded hero of the haunted houses, he never reveals how he made his discoveries. The positivist approach to ghosts is nicely turned inside out through the rhetorical situation. The traditional conte fantastique, in presenting the unreal and the impossible, works for a gradual sense of complicity with the reader. Mérimée describes this process in his correspondence: On sait la recette d'un bon conte fantastique: commencez par des portraits bien arrêtés de personnages bizarres, mais possibles, et donnez à leurs traits la réalité la plus minutieuse. Du bizarre au merveilleux, la transition est

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insensible, et le lecteur se trouvera en plein fantastique avant qu'il ne se soit aperçu que le monde réel est loin derrière lui. 4 (The recipe for a good conte fantastique is well known: begin with carefully drawn portraits of strange, but possible characters and give to their features the most minute reality. From the strange to the marvellous, the transition is gradual, and the reader will find himself in the midst of the fantastic before realizing that the real world is far behind him.) 5 Supervielle's approach, in this case, is the exact opposite, since he ends with the possible and begins with the fantasy. But if he always plunges into the fantastic as if it were the most normal thing in the world, he is content with small disorientations; his narrator nonetheless helps the reader find his way around. There is still an explicit entente; even if the narrator is not always a reliable guide, he is still in good faith, and his interpretations are an important part of the story. Other writers go much further: their initial plunge into fantasy produces a far greater shock when the fiction is more discontinuous; if the disorientation is strong enough it may be construed as an attack upon the reader. There is no doubt that modern fiction — and poetry — avoid the polite invitation approach for the most part: the narrator will either simply present the action with as little comment as possible — a new and equally illusory kind of realism in which the synthesis is left up to the reader — or he will use narrative techniques as a form of aggression. Either way, the reader has to fend for himself. Narrators no longer condescend to sollicit the reader's complicity. If the roman engagé typifies the 'no comment' approach, the surrealists are past masters in the techniques of deliberate confusion, usually called 'mystification'. 6 Robbe—Grillet, perhaps the bestknown contemporary mystificateur, combines both styles. Discontinuous fragments without explanation are always setting the reader up for a sensational climax that never comes. How can these changes be explained? René Girard offers a searching analysis in terms of the Romantic dialectic of self and other: modern authors continue the Romantic tradition of superiority, distinction of the Self as opposed to Other. The real superiority would then express itself by not publishing at all, not solliciting the attention of a world one would like to believe inferior; but if a writer really needs readers (Girard implies that all 4 As quoted by R.C. Dale in The Poetics of Prosper Mérimée (Mouton, 1966), pp. 94-95. 5 Mérimée, in accumulating detail, also builds up atmosphere by carefully choosing people, objects, scenes and describing them with appropriate connotations. In Supervielle's stories, where suspense is unimportant, the whole story is atmosphere, a pattern of suggestive association often expressed as metaphor. 6 Many other authors might be quoted in relation to mystification, of course, such as the Baudelaire of "Le Mauvais Vitrier" and the Gide of the soties.

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55

writers d o ) he can only retain the R o m a n t i c pose b y insulting those he is obliged t o interest. There is a certain a m o u n t of R o m a n t i c masochism on b o t h sides of this transaction. Girard's analysis, m u c h more subtle than this short summary might imply, provides a compelling explanation. Other approaches suggest that m o d e r n writers are now t o o aware of the failures of logic and language, of the impossibility of using these as vehicles for c o m m u n i c a t i o n . In such an acutely self-conscious period, m u c h concerned with the values of silence and inexpressivity, n o one is going to p r e t e n d that literature can be an easy complicity, like a social gathering. The reader's task c a n n o t be easier than the writer's. But this does n o t really explain w h y the writer's f r u s t r a t i o n s are sometimes expressed with such hostility. Fraternity, as already pointed o u t , is a m a j o r t h e m e of Supervielle's. A poetic vision which depends on an ideal of cosmic h a r m o n y c a n n o t maintain the R o m a n t i c elevation of the superior self, neither for narrator nor character. Supervielle's narrator, b y his self-parody, shows that he participates in the extreme self-consciousness of the time (and in this he resembles the characters); but he e x t e n d s his good will t o the reader, suggesting t h a t b o t h share similar problems in the same world. Perception is also a t h e m e in Supervielle. Several of the stories show a hierarchy of characters on a scale of lucidity and this faculty, for Supervielle, means the ability t o believe in the illogical (see the comparison with Marcel A y m é in chapter one). In " L a Fuite en E g y p t e " , natural sequel t o " L e Boeuf et l'Ane de la Crèche", the dead ox follows the Holy Family as a ghost. Wanting to help t h e m somehow, he borrows the b o d y of a little cow in order to o f f e r her milk t o Mary. Will the characters recognize their friend? Joseph, the eldest and a m a n , is very sceptical. Mary believes, but not so m u c h as the child: " P o u r lui, vraiment, le b o e u f et la vâche c'était une m ê m e bête. Merveilleux pouvoir de confusion chez l ' e n f a n t , qui lui permettait de voir si clair" (AN 4 8 ) ( F o r him, really, the ox and the cow were the same animal. Marvellous power of confusion in the child which permitted him t o see so clearly). The animals of " L a Création des A n i m a u x " are superior to man in the same way. In " T o b i e Père et Fils" the m e t a p h o r of moral blindness is fully developed: the son at first resembles his doubting, nagging m o t h e r b u t gradually develops his father's faith: t h u s he is able to cure the latter's physical blindness, b u t his m o t h e r , significantly, never notices the change in either of her m e n . Lucidity faith allows holds back. other shows 7

and f r a t e r n i t y are closely linked. 7 In each case, the characters' him t o reach o u t t o others, where the sceptical c o u n t e r p a r t This c o m b i n a t i o n of perception with the t h e m e of self and u p in still o t h e r aspects of characterization. Since the characters

Cf. the names of the poetry volumes: Le Forçat Innocent and Les Amis Inconnus.

56

PERCEPTION

are one-dimensionally defined, each is separate from the others with no risk of confusion (except occasionally in extreme examples of metamorphosis, such as Sir Rufus Flox horse and man). Each such static personality plays some role in the polarized plot, as described earlier, and this for Supervielle is an interruption of cosmic harmony; the characters must be separate, just as the narrator must be objective, to create this imperfection which is narrative movement.8 Supervielle's techniques for going beyond the particular represent one aspect of the attempt to overcome separation by reaching for the universal: that which is shared. Another is the recurrence of a similar personality, much like the lyrical je of the poems. In the great majority of the stories there is a character who is in some way cut o f f , like the little girl of the Ocean, like the Minotaur, like the dead ox of " L a Fuite en Egypt". He feels different from others, who are "professionnels de l'existence". He is always described with much the same vocabulary: "douceur", "délicatesse", "humilité" and "angoisse". Very modest, though easily "froissé", this character is essentially innocent (often a child). The Minotaur is easy prey for Daedalus because "il ne pouvait lui venir à l'esprit de mettre en doute la bonne foi de Dédale" (it could not occur to him to doubt Daedalus' good faith). Supervielle's reversal of the fantastique, presenting the monstrous and supernatural from the point of view of the monster of ghost, makes sense in this context: like all creatures, they are outsiders, the only je in a world of ils. These characters frequently go beyond wanting to belong, like the Minotaur and the dead; they often want to be helpful, like St. Anthony, or the inventor of the "Bombes de bonne volonté". But there is always a tension between fear of others and the desire to trust. Supervielle puts all the positive value on trust, as in the case of Noah, whose first appeal to God is a crow, "pour montrer au bon Dieu la profondeur de son angoisse" (to show God the depths of his anguish). But he gets a reply only when he sends a dove, "dont la blancheur et la confiance en l'avenir étaient si grandes qu'elles devaient traverser les siècles jusqu'à nous" (whose whiteness and confidence in the future were so great that they were to span the centuries to our time). God naturally rewards faith. The narrative movement of these stories begins with the predicament of the outsider, the disinherited, who longs to be reunited with the group. At some point in the story there is a dramatic increase of lucidity: the character's perception of himself is increased. This is the only sense in which one may speak of psychological change in Supervielle's characters, and it is still presented in very simple terms. After this prise de conscience, two conclusions are possible: when the character can help himself, he moves from 8 This is much like Valéry's considerations expressed in Monsieur Teste or " L ' E b a u c h e d'un serpent", where narrative is also " u n défaut dans la pureté du non-être".

PERCEPTION

57

anguish to fellowship; when the situation remains unchanging, hope gives way to despair and the fusion is unrealized. The latter is the case of the little girl of the Ocean who suddenly understands that she will always be the same. "Rani", the story of an Indian disfigured in a fire, ends in a similar way when all the villagers run away from him. He must accept his own ugliness. "Le Minotaure" is a combination: although the outsider is murdered by the community, his death somehow reconciles him and makes him respected. But the results can be more positive: St. Anthony realizes in the desert, when he is unable to help his sick pig, that he must not live as a hermit and returns to cure others. "La Fausse Amazone" is both more ironic and more complicated; the heroine is saved by becoming an outcast in an unhealthy society which she finally leaves for a better one. But always Supervielle sets fraternity against solitude, trust against fear, faith against scepticism and feeling against logic. Such are Supervielle's most typical stories. Among the others is one which stands out, though it shares many of the same techniques and problems. "Les Bonshommes de Cire" is Supervielle's most ambiguous conte from the point of view of perception, and if this degree of ambiguity is unusual for Supervielle, it is so typical of many of his contemporaries that the story is worth an examination. The non-dramatized narrator, here as before, compares his hero's inner impressions and the actions of others. The central character is a playwright whose work is just opening in Paris. The central vehicle of fantasy is an identification between the stage and the author's mind: both reveal his inner self to the merciless judgements of others. The title refers to another aspect of the fantasy: when the play does not draw a large audience, the director brings out wax figures that are mechanized to applaud, so that audience and actors will feel encouraged. There is an almost identical motif in Villiers de l'lsle Adam's "La Machine à Gloire" 9 but the treatment is far more satirical. There the writer's vanity is criticized from the outside whereas Supervielle again takes the point of view of the loser. And most of the ambiguity comes from this point of view: for once Superveille, like Céline, like Michaux, and so many others, plays with the distorting consciousness of an obsessive. The first paragraph makes this clear: Le directeur du théâtre était un homme fort aimable. S'il déchirait devant l'auteur un petit bout du manuscrit pour s'en faire une boulette, c'était toujours avec une telle bonne grâce qu'on pouvait voir dans ce geste une attention plutôt qu'autre chose, une façon un peu insolite de s'occuper de la pièce, voilà tout. Et, ce faisant, il ne cessait de considérer l'auteur d'un oeil plein de virile tendresse. Oui, on ne pouvait s'y tromper. Ce regard semblait dire: faut-il que je vous aime, hein, pour pouvoir déchirer ainsi cette feuille 9

Villiers de Isle-Adam, Contes Cruels, pp. 61-81.

58

PERCEPTION

devant vous sans qu'il vous vienne à l'esprit de vous fâcher, faut-il que nous ayons confiance dans notre amitié? (AN 95) (The theater director was a very pleasant man. If he tore up in front of the author a little bit of the manuscript to roll it into a ball, it was always with such good grace that one could see in this gesture a courtesy rather than anything else, a rather strange way of dealing with the play, that was all. And, in doing this, he did not for a moment stop looking at the author with an eye full of virile tenderness. Yes, there could be no mistake. This look seemed to say: how much I must care for you, eh, to tear this page in front of you like this, without your thinking of getting angry, how much we must have faith in our friendship?) The first sentence appears to be à clear affirmation by the narrator. But the use of free indirect discourse following raises some doubts: "on pouvait voir. . ." and "Oui, on ne pouvait se tromper. . . " The highly unlikely interpretation of the director's action suggests that it is really the author who is trying to talk himself into it. "Ce regard semblait dire . .,." — whose impression is this? Supervielle often uses free indirect discourse in his stories, but usually to show up an identification between narrator and character that expresses the former's sympathy for the latter. His use of popular language in many stories not only creates an intimacy of tone but an ambiguity of reference, particularly when he uses on and vous', but here the tone is not familiar and the effect very different. Rather than increasing the reader's involvement with the character, free indirect discourse here creates an uneasiness. It is connected to a dramatic irony which separates rather than unites. The reader senses right away that he knows more than the character and that the invraisemblance is not fantasy but a common case of psychological distortion : wishful thinking. The next paragraph begins the description of the répétition générale. The metaphorical identification starts here to be developed throughout: the curtain is like the author's forehead, removed to reveal to the spectators what goes on behind. Like Céline's Bardamu, this hero is feverish throughout the action, and his perceptions of his friends are already hallucinatory: Il semblait même à l'auteur, un peu fiévreux ce soir-là, que chacun d'eux avait voulu faire quelque chose pour témoigner que c'était pour lui aussi un grand jour. L'un paraissait un peu plus grand que d'habitude et l'autre plus large d'épaules, celui-ci vraiment plus gros, cet autre d'une maigreur insolite. Ce blond-là boitait pour la première fois de sa vie . . . (It even seemed to the author, a little feverish that evening, that each of them had wanted to do something to show that it was a special day for him too. One appeared a bit bigger than usual and another more broadshouldered, this one really a bit fat, another strangely thin. That blond was limping for the first time in his life...)

PERCEPTION

59

The narrator keeps his distance with a clear use o f "semblait" and "paraissait". If not thus ascribed to the hero's feverish vision, these changes would be natural fantasy for a reader familiar with the other stories. At this stage however, the hallucinatory perception becomes more and more extreme. The play fails, and the author faces his friends at intermission. One shows the hypocrisy o f his praise when his face turns half red half white, with a vertical line in the middle. Others wear magic rubber gloves which let them applaud without making any noise, and wave them in front o f the author's nose. And all o f this is presented thus: " C e ne furent pas les seuls témoignages d'hypocrisie qui frappèrent l'auteur, de plus en plus fiévreux" (These were not the only signs of hypocrisy that struck the author, whose fever was growing). Another man, known for his sincerity," admits when confronted that he doesn't like the play: "Mais l'aveu coûtait tant à cet excellent coeur qu'il se mit à rapetisser devant l'auteur qui le calmait") (But that confession cost the honest soul so much that he began to shrink before the author, who tried to calm him). With this example, the narrator stops using "seems" and "appears" and the reader has finally arrived at the genuine fantasy, existing outside the playwright's consciousness and guaranteed by the narrator. For once Supervielle, like Mérimée, first builds up an atmosphere. "L'infanterie de cire" is now brought out and its mechanism explained by the narrator, who momentarily forgets his hero. The latter withdraws more and more as he feels more and more persecuted; as the theater grows emptier, his heart starts missing beats. He begins to notice a taste o f wax in his mouth, and finally stops going to the theater altogether. But with the development of his physical symptoms, the theater comes to him. His wife seems a spectator, the doctors are "cachés derrière un rideau": " I l se refuse à faire partie de cette espèce de complot du monde extérieur contre son monde à lui qui devient de plus en plus intérieur et silencieux" (He refuses to participate in that stupid plot o f the outside world against his own world, which becomes more and more interior and silent). The narrator is temporarily neutral. With the next paragraph, where the doctors announce the playwright's death, the point o f view shifts completely and concentrates on the thoughts o f doctor and wife. Not that the husband has lost consciousness: the doctor is forced to admit that his brain is alive, his brow still furrowed, his body cramped into a sitting position. His wife, whose genuine concern is now revealed, finally whispers in his ear that the deathlike wax figures are no longer in the theater, the play is over. With this the body relaxes, accepting death. In the last paragraph, when the wife reappears in tears, "les amis de l'auteur, encore insuffisamment renseignés, envahissaient sa chambre sur la pointe des pieds" (the author's friends, still insufficiently informed, invaded his room on tiptoe). At this final stage, where fantasy exists for all concerned, the narra-

60

PERCEPTION

tor's vocabulary seems to confirm the author's fears of intrusion by the outside world. In this story ambiguity between subjective and objective perception grows with the plot development: hallucination is at its most intense when the hero is most withdrawn and feverish, and when he capitulates, point of view shifts to the victorious outer world. It is never really clear how much the playwright's view was distorted, or against what norms the distortion should be measured.

6.

TEXTURE AND TONE

Narrative is a kind of syntax. A narrator-speaker makes a statement about a subject-hero engaged in some action, an affirmation which may be considered true or false. It is precisely this familiar assertive quality of narrative which has always permitted the mimetic illusion, but since its truth cannot be confirmed from other sources, it depends on its internal coherence for convincing effect. Like a sentence, narrative is a sequence with a conventional ordering — familiar to all "native speakers".1 The author has limited choices in his manner of proceeding. He must make clear the relationships between the parts, point out the transitions and subordinations and give to the end a sense of conclusion. Poetic fantasy disarticulates the narrative by making the sequence ambiguous and destroying conventional emphasis. The potential truth value is undermined by contradiction and by the description of events which the reader cannot interpret literally. The attack on narrative is naturally accompanied by an attack on syntax — from Mallarmé through the Surrealists to the theater of the Absurd. But reader and writer, in trying to reach originality, start from the familiar; the known is the stepping stone to the unknown. When the author can go beyond or upset the reader's expectations, and when the novelty has some deeper reference in experience, such that the reader can eventually assimilate the unfamiliar, the sequence may be poetic. Literary interpretation at the sentence level no longer means just a study of style, at least not as the icing of elegance on the cake of significance. The texture of the work — its homogeneity — and its tone — the author's attitude to his material — both depend on choice of vocabulary and syntax. These are the essential building blocks of the whole. Supervielle again typifies a modern problem here through his use of poetic humor. Freud's analysis of wit, Breton's humour noir, Céline, i For this description of syntax, see the work of the transformational grammarians, e.g. Chomsky in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (MIT, 1965) or Language and Mind (Harcourt-Brace, 1968).

62

TEXTURE AND TONE

Dostojevsky, Kafka, Beckett and the American black humorists: many major examples of the contemporary integration of symbolism and laughter. The much discussed concept of the absurd depends on this connection, whether humor is considered an expression of the mechanical, of aggression, or of release. Supervielle's critics sometimes reproach him with a mixture of tones: the juxtaposition of poetic and burlesque is considered a weakness. But this criticism reflects the old esthetic of poetry as harmony discussed at the end of chapter three. Since humor depends on incongruity, according to this tradition it cannot be poetic. The two have many common elements, however: if surprise is an ingredient of humor, it is usually the result of some original vision, some twist of meaning, which is ambiguously linked or even blended with the conventional one. Dissonance and harmony are closely related. All of Supervielle's critics remark on his use of simple, colloquial language, noting that this contributes a good deal to the intimacy of his myths. The narrator's syntax is often colloquial too: many sentences are awkward and seem to have extra clauses tacked on at the end, as if the speaker were thinking it out as he went along. He constantly uses "Oui", at the beginning of sentences to reaffirm his own observations. The popular " o n " occurs frequently, especially in forms such as "on parlait beaucoup de . .", which suggest a kind of public opinion referred to in "L'Arche de Noè" as "la sagesse populaire". The familiar tone is closely linked to the general impression of humility: the expressions "petit" and "un peu" are often woven into descriptions as if to show hesitancy on the part of narrator and character. But just as modern family and social situations are mixed with myth, Supervielle's slang, popular and colloquial language, and clichés occur side by side with expressions which might be called precious, exotic, or obscure. The resulting irony is not necessarily derogatory, though it may occasionaly be aimed at a character such as Jupiter whose pretensions thus appear common. More often this juxtaposition corresponds to the blending of intimate and cosmic in the poetry: the former is elevated when the latter is less distant. John Orr, who has best described Supervielle's style, mentions his use of technical terms and sometimes, "when we least expect it, some piece of modern political, administrative or academic jargon like 'le rapport de cause à effet' in 'La Géante' or 'aux fins d'écrasement' in 'Cerbère' or 'une majorité écrasante' in 'Le Minotaure' or 'le regret et son poids incontrôlable' in 'L'Arche de Noè' ", 2 The narrator may nominalize adjectives, as in the description of the stars as "les Infiniments Eloignées" ("Le Boeuf et l'Ane de 2 John On, Introduction University Press, 1950), xix.

to Jules

Supervielle:

Contes

et Poèmes

(Edinburgh:

T E X T U R E AND TONE

63

la Crèche") or for the rightful owners, "les ayants droits" ("Castor et Pollux"); he uses of an adjective instead of a prepositional phrase as in "la mélancolie minotaurine", "leur face moutonnière" or " u n e queue poisonnière". Orr also mentions some striking effects perhaps due to the influence of Spanish, such as " u n e journée chaleureuse" (a personification?),"cette vache suiveuse". Are these surprises disruptive? Orr concludes: . . . we have no sense of incongruity when our author, mingling the concrete and the abstract, or bridging the gulfs of time, unites in a single phrase ideas that are rarely juxtaposed; achieving those delightful effects of style and shedding a gleam of humor or a ray of poetry in the most unexpected places. 3 One can imagine humor and poetry related on a scale ranging f r o m sudden disarticulation t o gently prepared union. Humor depends on the surprise of an unexpected juxtaposition; metaphor, traditionally, is carefully introduced and explored in some of its extensions. Supervielle does this, for example, with his stage-mind metaphor in "Les Bonshommes de Cire", developing it in many of its nuances. What makes Supervielle modern is his use of different points on the scale in close succession, thus showing what metaphor and humor have in common. Supervielle is a great lover of puns, and these perhaps best illustrate his treatment of poetic incongruity. They occur in all of the stories. The Minotaur, for example, asks no questions of Daedalus because "il ne voulait pas être pris pour une b r u t e " (he didn't want to be taken for a brute). This is humorous because of the shock involved: the reader first acknowledges the conventional sense of the expression, a cliché, but suddenly realizes that the literal meaning is appropriate as well: the Minotaur is half animal. Supervielle's paradoxes frequently turn on this association of the figurative and the conventional; the literal meaning becomes then, in its turn, an image. But this example is also poetic insofar as it underlines the Minotaur's sensitivity; it is part of the whole network of animal-human associations on which the story is built. Another pun f r o m the same story is much more limited in scope: when the monster finds himself deserted in the labyrinth, his first response is " C o m m e n t sortir de là-dedans?" (How to get out of this?). But if the echoes are much less extensive, the process is the same: recognition that a cliché can be applied literally. In " E u r o p a " , the heroine remarks after her encounter with the bull, "Par Zeus! Vous m'avez déshonorée!" (By Zeus! You have dishonored m e ! ) and Io first notices Argus.in the following way: " I o tourna la tête et vit un homme qui la regardait de tous ses yeux, il en avait plus de cent sur le visage, le torse et les bras" (Io turned and saw a man 3

Orr, xvi.

64

TEXTURE AND

TONE

looking at her intensely with all his eyes, — he had m o r e than a hundred on his face, torso and arms). T h e story " C a s t o r et P o l l u x " o f f e r s a g o o d example o f the d i f f e r e n c e between disruptive and harmonious puns. T h e birth o f Léda's children, in bird and human

fashion, is described in terms that again underline the

god-mortal polarity, but also the closeness linking these t w o brothers. When Castor finally realizes that he is mortal and about t o die, he says to P o l l u x : " A h ! Je c o m m e n c e à croire que nous ne sommes pas sortis du m ê m e o e u f . " (Ah! I'm

beginning

to think w e d i d n ' t c o m e f r o m the same egg).

The

familiar technique is a bit o f a shock in the tragic circumstances and lessens the reader's involvement ( h i t h e r t o carefully sought) in the death o f the character. A n d in fact it is not so serious — there is a happy ending shortly after when the brothers are reunited as a constellation in the heavens. Here another pun occurs: " E t tous deux, dans le f e u de leur a f f e c t i o n , se reconnaissaient à la façon des étoiles . . . " ( P P U 9 7 - 8 ) ( A n d b o t h , in the fire o f their a f f e c t i o n , recognized each other in the manner o f stars . . . ) " F e u de leur a f f e c t i o n " is again a conventional image that can be applied literally, but " f i r e " has so many appropriate connotations that the e f f e c t is much more diffused, the shock considerably lessened. T h e image is also e x t e n d e d by " à la façon des é t o i l e s " , which c o n f i r m s b o t h the references t o fire and to shared intimacy. Both the immediate c o n t e x t — preparations and extensions o f w o r d play — and the general c o n t e x t — the narrator's presentation o f the characters as laughable or sympathetic

-

influence the e f f e c t o f the pun. " C a s t o r et

P o l l u x " is essentially towards the p o e t i c end o f the scale and the heroes achieve their cosmic harmony and fraternity more literally than any others in all o f Supervielle's works. " L a V e u v e aux T r o i s M o u t o n s " is the opposite e x t r e m e ; here all the w o r d plays are grotesque, the characters ludicrous. A m o t h e r has triplets w h o are all sheep, literally — does the c o n n o t a t i o n o f c o n f o r m i t y introduce an element o f satire? This reading is possible, since the mother's chief concern is to make her children socially acceptable: Quand elle allait en visite, elle se présentait toujours avec ses trois enfants qu'elle appelait " m e s petits a g n e a u x " pour mettre tout le m o n d e à l'aise . . . (PPU 2 0 6 - 7 ) (When she went visiting, she always appeared with her three children w h o m she called " m y little l a m b s " to put e v e r y o n e at ease . . .) She explains to a friend: " — Je les fais aller dans le m o n d e pour qu'ils ne deviennent pas de petits o u r s " ( I make them go out in society so they w o n ' t b e c o m e little bears). When war breaks out, these children are u n f i t f o r the army, but the c o m m u n i t y insists that they be sacrificed because o f the f o o d shortage. T h e y die ignobly, and n o one is very sorry.

TEXTURE AND TONE

65

Supervielle's puns, which combine the literal and conventionally figurative meanings of one word, naturally remind one of his metaphorical fantasies. The latter also involve a literal reading of figurative language, though the point of departure is usually an original image, not a cliché. Fantasy may depend on a pun, however, as in "La Femme Retrouvée". The hero, whose name is Chemin, returns from heaven to visit his wife. Since according to the rules of heaven he cannot keep his own form, he becomes a fox terrier named Placard who is adopted by the girl. He is the unwilling witness of a love affair between her and the local butcher. More and more frustrated, he exclaims: "il y a de quoi devenir enragé" (AN 159) (It's enough to make one go mad). The anger of the man becomes physical in the dog who does go mad, in the clinical sense, by developing rabies. The narrator explains: "Oui, la rage née au confluent redoubtable de l'homme et du chien en lui . ." (Yes, madness born at the dreadful juncture of man and dog in him . . .). The disease induces in him a strong desire to bite someone, particularly his wife, and his teeth take on an independent existence: "Chacune des dents de Placard, devenues vivantes et autonomes, réclamait sa part d'Elise. C'étaient les quatre canines qui criaient le plus f o r t " (Each of Placard's teeth, become alive and autonomous, demanded a share of Elisa. The four canines cried loudest). The dog is stoned to death and Chemin, disincarnate once more, returns to heaven. Even a short summary of this long tale is enough to convey its leanings toward the grotesque. None of the characters or situations has much nobility or genuine sorrow and the love story is a burlesque of the comic adulterous triangle with all its clichés. This larger framework undercuts any poetic effect that might be gained from the extended word play. Nevertheless, this is an important example for poetic fiction because of its mixture of the levels of word and referent; it is only because the word "enragé" can refer, albeit with different meanings, to both men and dogs, that the causal link can be established. Such interchangeability of signifier and signified is the natural product of a literature which distrusts reference. J.P. Richard points out how important this exchange is in Ponge's poetry, 4 and many of Queneau's novels turn on similar twists. Ricardou discusses this in the New Novel, returning constantly to the view of language as an end in itself, independent of the world of non-verbal experience. 5 For Supervielle it is of course another blend, another way of rejecting the bases of logical thought. Supervielle's mixture of tones shows how close are the links between satire and sympathy, the grotesque and the sublime, the incongruous and the harmonious. His irony may be gentle or biting, his humor tender or 4 s

J.P. Richard, Onze Etudes sur la Poésie Moderne Ricardou, Pour un Nouveau Roman.

(Paris: Seuil, 1964).

66

TEXTURE AND TONE

aggressive; in every case this d i s t i n c t i o n turns o n the degree o f i d e n t i f i c a t i o n w h i c h the narrator wishes t o p r o d u c e w i t h the characters. T h e scale o f s y m p a t h y is the scale f r o m satirical criticism t o p o e t i c elevation and similar t e c h n i q u e s o f image and w o r d p l a y are used t o sollicit r e a c t i o n s f r o m the reader at a n y p o i n t on the scale. Boris V i a n a n d J a c q u e s Prevert are v e r y like Supervielle in thus c o m b i n i n g satire and p o e t r y , a n d like h i m use f a n t a s y as a natural vehicle contemporaries,

for b o t h . A l l o f these a u t h o r s , like so m a n y o f their continue

in the esthetic

tradition o f V i c t o r H u g o ,

but

implicit in this scale o f tone a n d value is t h e m u c h o l d e r o p p o s i t i o n o f real and ideal — o n e p o l a r i t y Supervielle never really resolves.

CONCLUSION

In each of the previous chapters I have discussed one aspect of the poetic quality of Supervielie's narrative and some of his major themes. By way of summary, I will analyse a single story from all these points of view; unity is after all of major importance, and in this way it will be clear what each aspect of the story contributes to the whole. " O r p h é e " , in Supervielle's treatment, divides naturally into two parts: in the first, Orpheus' singing so disturbs natural order that even snow and rocks come to sit at his feet. The modest poet refuses to perform until nature agrees to stay out. Life then continues normally. The second part is the story of Eurydice. Orpheus neglects her because of his music, — this is the initial cause of the tragedy. After her death, he again refuses to sing until the gods give him permission t o fetch her from Hades. Because he is "le plus humain des poètes", he cannot resist looking back, with fatal results, and his final song is one of grief. In the end the jealous Bacchantes tear him apart and the last scene shows his head and lyre floating together on the ocean. The first part (six pages) is a series of incidents which illustrate Orpheus' power over animals, plants and rocks; no particular event in itself advances the action but all together have a cumulative effect, leading to the concluding: "Orphée fit comprendre à la nature que tout devait rester à sa place . . ." (Orpheus made it clear to nature that everything had to stay in its place . . .) (PPU 16). The "real story" is compressed into half as many pages (three) and all its action is undercut in the usual ways: historical infinitives and colloquial fragments used instead of finite verbs- in some places, illogical alternance of present and past tenses in others. Passages without importance for Supervielle's treatment are greatly condensed: "Orphée f u t autorisé à aller chercher sa morte ressucitée et à la sortir des enfers . . ." (Orpheus was authorised to fetch his dead wife revived and to take her out of Hades). The authorisation is treated as the act itself since in the next sentence Orpheus is already looking over his shoulder. In this way detail unnecessary for Supervielle's purposes is jumped over; moreover, he exploits this for the sake of paradox, compressing two opposites into a single expression, "sa morte ressucitée".

CONCLUSION

68

What determines relevance in the choice of detail is, as always, a thematic polarity. In this case it is silence versus poetry (associated in various ways with immobility and mobility). The t w o parts of the story are symmetrical: in the first, Orpheus moves mountains, is unhappy about it, but brings about a successful ending; in the second, he moves the dead, as he wishes to do, but the conclusion of the episode is tragic. In both cases, his power is his poetry: it is his poetry, his "tendres accords", that makes him "l'animateur des rochers". The causality of fantasy here depends on animism and the transforming effect of emotion on matter. And what else is poetry but that inner harmony capable of bridging tremendous distances, uniting opposites: . . . la musique de son monde intérieur se répandait au loin, supprimant les distances, formait des relais et repartait, gagnant largement l'air et le c i e l . ,. (PPU 13) (. . . the music of his inner world spread far around, suppressing distances, forming relays and starting off again, reaching widely to air and sky . . .) In the long opening passage of the story, Orpheus describes his parents, " m o n fleuve de père" ( m y river o f a father) w h o liked to travel and his mother, Calliope, who loved to stay in the river. He shows that he himself is a union of opposites: Je suis le fruit de cette union mi-charnelle, mi-acquatique, mi-blanche, miglauque, mi-silence (ma mère fut taciturne jusqu'à ma naissance), mi-musique. J'ai la poésie dans le sang. (PPU 11) (I'm the fruit of that union, half carnal, half acquatic, half white, half sea-green, half silence (my mother was taciturn until my birth) half music. Poetry is in my blood.) Here again Supervielle makes the same statement in two different ways in order

to

point

up an equivalence:

with such combinations,

naturally

Orpheus is a poet. But the second sentence is also a typical pun, a cliché taken literally. Poetry introduces a state of miracle into the world. The opening paragraphs describe nature before and after Orpheus: Jusqu'à lui le vent dans le feuillage était sans voix, la mer lissait ses vagues dans le plus grand silence, la pluie tombait sans murmure sur les toits et on parlait beaucoup du mutisme des torrents et des cascades. La nature attendait son premier poète. (PPU 8 ) (Until him, the wind in the leaves was voiceless, the sea smoothed its waves in the greatest silence, the rain fell without a murmur on the rooves and

CONCLUSION

69

people talked a lot about the mutism of torrents and cascades. Nature was waiting for her first poet.) Familiar language allows Supervielle the humorous paradox of "on parlait beaucoup de mutisme . . ." but the general effect of this and the following paragraphs is lyrical. Nature needs poetry to realize her own'potential. Poetry allows even silence to be expressive, when the lion (who naturally lies down with the lamb) thanks the poet "de ses yeux si éloquents" (with such eloquent eyes). The paragraph is built around the description of the lion's mute "regard". Such wordless expressivity, often associated with the eyes, is a common theme in Supervielle's poetry and is of course familiar in contemporaries such as Eluard, who writes: "Les poèmes ont toujours de grandes marges blanches, de grandes marges de silence" 1 (Poems always have big white margins, big margins of silence). For both men, this is a central paradox of language and art. Characterization in "Orphée" is completely an embodiment of theme. Orpheus, the poet, has the attributes of the universal Superviellian hero: "Et le poète, dans l'innocence de sa modestie de songer. . . " (And the poet, in the innocence of his modesty, t h o u g h t . . .). But he is all poets and all poetry. Eurydice stands out because of her discretion: "Je n'aime le miracle que clandestin", songeait-il. "Et si j'ai choisi Eurydice pour épouse, c'est qu'elle ne levait pas, les bras au ciel comme les autres jeunes filles quand je me mettais à chanter. Elle gardait pour soi son tumulte." (PPU 1 4 )

("I only like miracles when they are clandestine", he thought. "And if I chose Eurydice as my wife, it's because she didn't raise her arms to heaven like the other girls when I began to sing. She kept her emotions to herself.") This is, incidentally, only one of several occasions when Orpheus gives us his opinion of a situation. The most striking example occurs after the narrator's introductory remarks which finish with an allusion to Orpheus' death. Suddenly, in the following sentence, he hands over the microphone, so to speak, to the hero himself, saying, "Mais écoutons-le . . ." However remote the mythical setting, death does not prevent Orpheus from speaking for himself. Mostly however, the poet's remarks are presented by "songeait" for its dream connotations, always in the imperfect, even here where Eurydice is mentioned for the first time, in a subordinate clause. She, like all the others, is simply a function of the hero. Eurydice in turn is loved by "un berger brutal du nom d'Aristhée qui depuis longtemps avait tué en lui toute musique" (a brutal shepherd named i

Paul Eluard, Donner a Voir (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), p. 81.

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CONCLUSION

Aristhée who had long ago killed all music in himself). The Bacchantes appear with equal brevity as "Les Bacchantes, qui haissaient la musique et la poésie où les sens étanchent leur soif aux dépens de la lubricité . . ." (the Bacchantes, who hated music and poetry where the senses quench their thirst at the expense of lubricity). Orpheus' death follows immediately on the failure of love and poetry, in a story where every event is also an expression of thematic values: . . . il se désespérait d'avoir si mal aimé son épouse, et, dans son délire l'animateur des rochers rassemblait en grande hâte des strophes accourues des lointains de lui-même pour tenter, malgré tout, de remettre en mouvement le coeur d'Eurydice, devenu de pierre. (. . . he despaired at having loved his wife so badly and, in his delirium, the animator of rocks hastily brought together stanzas which rushed in from the farthest regions of himself to try, in spite of everything, to start up the motion of Eurydice's heart, turned to stone.) He can move rocks, but a heart turned to stone is beyond him. Every word, without exception, echoes in this way the thematic patterning which gives the story both texture and structure, This quotation, which describes the movement accompanying an absence of action — but an increase in lucidity — is the climax of the story, all the other potentially dramatic points being underplayed. The two movements of the poem are related only by sharing a central character and a developing theme. What is the narrator's role in all this? Although he is occasionally disconcerting, as when he introduces the dead poet to speak for himself, he is as usual the reader's guide and interpreter. His objectivity is necessary to allow a broader perspective than that of any character: thus he can take us back in time to moments before and after Orpheus' death. And in fact the two episode structure of the story is embedded in a larger context, passages of pure description which precede and follow the action. The opening evocation of nature, with its allusion to the death which will occur at the end (the cyclical motif technique) parallels the final paragraphs, in which the lyre becomes a character of importance: Le poète réduit à sa tête tranchée mais encore musicienne et à surnageante continuait de chanter . . des images neuves, de beaux que nul ne pouvait entendre sinon les poètes à venir. La lyre toute proche et qui se voulait encore docile, sans mains mettre en branle, mue par le souffle intermittent de l'esprit, jouait nant toute seule et comme de mémoire, d'une mémoire en lambeaux

sa lyre accents pour la mainte...

(PPU 1 7 )

(The poet reduced to his head — severed but still musical — and to his floating lyre, continued to sing . . , new images, beautiful tones which no one could hear except the poets of the future.

CONCLUSION

71

The lyre close by, still inclined to be docile, with no hands to set it in motion, stirred by the intermittent breath of the spirit, was now playing all by itself as if from memory, a memory in rags . . .) The hopeful waiting of the story's beginning is renewed when the drama and finality of death are diffused into promise for the future. There is no real ending. Fantasy in this story is the expression of its central theme: the impact of poetry on the world. Causality based on fantasy makes the events seem natural and even inevitable, contributing to the sense of continuity. The latter is built on symmetry, developing patterns of connotation, and never on plot: although the essential steps of the action are all given, even if condensed, previous knowledge of the story is assumed and exploited, as in the opening sentence: "Jusqu'à l u i . . . " . Orpheus is a symbol, as are all the other characters, and all the action shares the wider symbolic reference. Chronology is tenuous and unimportant. The modest hero, the most human of poets, fails only from lack of lucidity ; his awakening — too late — means a new awareness of love. The whole story is told with the familiar gentle mixture of humor, colloquialisms, exoticisms and extended imagery. Other stories have more parody; this one, while retaining a basic plot, is an essentially lyrical prose poem. Supervielle's work is a microcosm of his time. All major trends are reflected in it. What makes him a secondary author is precisely this eclecticism: There is no intense development in any one direction. He writes with charm, joie de vivre, some anguish, mild social criticism, and those qualities which he most cherishes in a hero: douceur, modesty, and the kind of innocence that precludes passion. He is sensitive to the problems and preoccupations of all his greater contemporaries but has none of their impressive tension. Supervielle is typical of the entire modern period in his rejection of mimetism in literature, and in his recognition that the conventions of nineteenth century fiction are arbitrary to modern eyes. His use of causality, interpretive comment, complicity of writer and reader, omniscience and dramatic irony — all part of the nineteenth century inheritance - is entirely self-conscious, playful, inconsistent and often a parody. In the same way Gide played with determinism; Ionesco, who never liked the theater, wrote plays so that he could "montrer les ficelles".2 But Supervielle has more roots in the nineteenth century than either Gide or Ionesco: his cultivated country-gentleman tone still reminds one of the period of Anatole France. Chronologically, however, Supervielle belongs with the pre-nineteen thirty literary generation, the one which, as Magny describes at length, 3 2 3

Eugene Ionesco, Notes et Contre-Notes (Paris: NRF, 1964). C.E. Magny, Le Roman Français Depuis 1918.

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CONCLUSION

defines its values in esthetic terms, treats art as the point of departure for life, and all moral problems as inextricably involved in the creative process. There are echoes of Gide's disponibilité in Supervielle's treatment of metamorphosis, where a character may hesitate to choose, yet long for the choice to be made; echoes too of Valéry's persistent antithetical themes of être and non-être in Supervielle's concept of narrative as an interruption of cosmic unity. The latter's ironic use of myth and love of precious paradox are reminiscent of Giraudoux. But perhaps he is closest to Proust, in his equation of identity and the creative process: so the "jeune homme du dimanche", in his final metamorphosis, becomes a poet. The creative potential of memory is a central theme of Oublieuse Mémoire. Supervielle similarly considers chronology a superficial organization of time, and describes the tenuous, changeable nature of the self. Our author also shows the influence of the Surrealists. He treats fantasy as a natural part of life, inherent in everyday reality, not external or exceptional. He likes to play games with his reader, but never to the extent of unpleasant shock or serious mystification. He loves contradiction and mistrusts logic, rejects conventional categories (such as art and life) and cultivates the ideal synthesis of logical opposites. Here, of course, he is echoing in his own small way a most important philosophical development, beginning with Hegel's dialectical process. Breton quotes Engels in this context: . . . au point de vue dialectique qui doit à tout prix surmonter le point de vue de la logique formelle, "les notions de cause et d'effet se concentrent et s'entrelacent dans celle de l'interdépendance universelle au seir. de laquelle la cause et l'effet ne cessent de changer de place". 4 (. . . from the dialectic point of view which must at all costs replace that of formal logic, "the notions of cause and effect are concentrated and interwoven with that of universal interdependence, within which cause and effect keep changing places".) Breton's own theories about the causal role of the "hasard objectif' grow from this rejection of formal logic. Freud's influence should also be stressed, particularly in his works on wit and dreams, where he writes, "Même dans l'inconscient, toute pensée est liée à son contraire" and "Il n'est pas rare que le travail de rêve se plaise à former une image composite avec deux idées contradictoires" (even in the unconscious, each thought is linked to its opposite; it is not rare for the dream process to form a composite image with two contradictory ideas). 5 The Breton-Reverdy debate on the image has its roots in this trend. Breton writes about the metaphor: 4 André Breton, Les Vases Communicants (Paris: NRF Idées, 1970), p. 60. 5 Freud as quoted by Breton, p. 60 and Le Rêve et son Interprétation (Paris: NRF, 1955), p. 48.

CONCLUSION

73

Ce qu'il s'agit de briser, c'est l'opposition toute formelle de ces deux termes; ce dont il s'agit d'avoir raison, c'est de leur apparente disproportion qui ne tient qu'à l'idée imparfaite, infantile qu'on se fait de la nature, de l'extériorité du temps et de l'espace. Plus l'élément de dissemblance immédiate paraît fort, plus il doit être surmonté et nié. C'est toute la signification de l'objet qui est en jeu. 6 (What must be broken is the purely formal opposition between these two terms; what must be surmounted is their apparent disproportion which stems only f r o m the imperfect and infantile idea that we have of nature, of the exteriority of time and space. The stronger the impression made by the element of immediate disparity, the more it must be overcome and denied. The whole significance of the object is at stake.) Here Breton shows himself a precursor of later movements. But developments in philosophy and psychoanalysis have already affected time and space concepts, corresponding to the formulation of the relativity theory by the physicists. If Proust, again, is the greatest experimenter with time as space, Surrealism — and Supervielle — also show the influence of these new ideas. Supervielle also shares the Surrealist attitude towards childhood, the nostalgic belief that the earliest periods of life — that of a civilisation and that of an individual — are the most creative, the most genuinely perceptive. It is this that gives his writings their self-conscious naivety, their deliberate primitivism. One critic of his works draws telling parallels between his types of imagery and the categories of primitive thought as described by LeviBruhl, 7 but one need not look to anthropology to recognize in Supervielle fantasy that his own generation, rightly or wrongly, 8 would have considered childlike. The Surrealists in their conflicts with the Communists, herald the new generation which returns to increased political awareness and social consciousness. While Supervielle cannot be said to write 'des romans engagés', his central theme of fraternity is not unlike that of Malraux or Camus. But again, the simplicity of his symbolism — which permits his primitivism — automatically precludes in depth social observation. His treatment of action is the antithesis of Malraux's and his novels a good deal shorter. His characters are entirely passive. This in itself is an important

6 Breton, p. 129. Cf. on our traditional dualities, a recent article by Jacques Ehrman, " H o m o Ludens Revisited", in Games, Play and Literature (1969) (= Yale French Studies, 41), pp. 31-57. "7 Louis Allen, "Magic as Art: the Work of Jules Supervielle", Durham University Journal, III, 2 (March, 1960), pp. 70-88. 8 Rightly as it turns out, according to the work in children's concept formation done by Jean Piaget.

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CONCLUSION

contemporary tradition and is, for Northrop Frye, 9 the natural state of the hero in an ironic stage, whether he be the bewildered victim of the supernatural in Maupassant's stories, the Chariot of the Chaplin films or Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. He cannot cope. Things happen to him that he cannot understand. Malraux's novels, taking all this into account, try for a new, positive synthesis of intelligence and action, a return to dignity. Céline's Bardamu is still a victim — and so is Camus' Meursault. L'Etranger and "Le Minotaur" treat the same basic situation of the outsider very differently, but even if Camus' version is found to be far more compelling, Supervielle is nevertheless working with a major contemporary theme. There is an important distinction, however, between nineteenth and twentieth century irony: both may paint social pressures overwhelming the individual, but when society is not directly called into question, as in the contes fantastiques, man is still the victim of a system, an organisation too big for him to understand. Supervielle's allusions to destiny reflect this tradition, even though fate can be inconsistent. The more modern version is of course man as victim of the purely arbitrary. Or to go a step further with Robbe-Grillet: "Le monde n'est ni signifiant ni absurde. Il est, tout simplement" (The world is neither significant nor absurd. It quite simply is). 10 What place for man then? I have had occasion several times to compare Supervielle and Ponge. The problem of objects has naturally been a major concern of the period, and both these writers reject the utilitarian approach, imagining instead the separate existence of things independent of man. Again, Ponge goes much further with this theme, as do Sartre, Ionesco, Robbe-Grillet, and many others. But Supervielle's games with language and reference are also reminiscent of Ponge, who, in the following comment, expresses an attitude common to both writers: " 0 ressources infinies de l'épaisseur des choses, rendues par les ressources infinies de l'épaisseur sémantique des mots! " ( 0 infinite resources of the density of things, conveyed by the infinite resources of the semantic density of words!). 11 Similarly, Supervielle has been called a phenomenologist because he rejects the objective-subjective distinction, stressing the creativity of perception and the importance of le regard. As for the nineteen fifties — the Theater of the Absurd and the New Novelists — again one must say that Supervielle, whose writings give such a different impression, has nonetheless something in common with these movements. His use of cliché, jargon, and proverbs, while much less acid than Ionesco 's, depends upon similar techniques. His deliberately vague use 9 Frye, Anatomy, the first chapter dealing with historical modes, defined according to the position of the hero with respect to his world and to the reader. 10 Robbe-Grillet, Pour un Nouveau Roman. 11 Francis Ponge, Proêmes (Paris: NRF, 1948).

CONCLUSION

75

of narrative situation, his nostalgia for better days and his undercutting of narrative conventions recall Beckett. His replacement of plot by pattern, suspense by thematic elaboration and repetition, while turning the traditional continuous elements of narrative into static fragments, is very like the approaches of Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Sarraute, etc. But he continues to place greater emphasis on 'message'. Although greatly aware of the "ficelles" of his art and their inherent meaning, although rejecting completely the continuities of mimetic convention, he would not go as far, for example, as Genette in this typical statement: "La littéralité du langage apparaft aujourd'hui comme l'étoffe même de la poésie" (The literality of language today appears the very stuff of poetry). 12 So Supervielle touches on the greatest conflicts of his time, sympathetically sensitive to all but deeply involved in none. Throughout this essay, I have constantly referred to fantasy, comparing the conte fantastique to contemporary fiction. I think one must ask why the fantastique has recently become so popular again, and what its interest may be for the reader of the nineteen seventies. One is tempted first to see in this renewal of interest a kind of nostalgia - like the Camp movement - for earlier, more naive cultural myths, where the thrills cannot be taken too seriously but nonetheless enjoyed. Nostalgia, too, perhaps, for a more manageable kind of threatening unknown, where positivism always lurks reassuringly in the background. But there is more than this. Supervielle considers himself a writer of the fantastique in the sense described by Marcel Aymé: Ni réel, ni déformation du réel, le fantastique est un moyen de traiter et d'exprimer certaines réalités rebelles à un autre traitement. Il n'y a rien de plus ordinaire et tout le monde "fait du fantastique", à peu près comme M. Jourdain fait de la prose. La plupart des métaphores, telles que lumière de l'esprit, étoile de cinéma, ou flammes de l'amour, appartiennent au fantastique. Sa place a une importance capitale dans les arts, et il en est le principe même; les règles de l'art, les codes, les écoles, n'ont pas d'autre prétexte que de servir le fantastique, de lui faciliter l'accès des chemins où il est seul à pouvoir s'aventurer. (Neither reality nor the deformation of reality, the fantastic is a method for dealing with certain realities which refuse any other treatment. There is nothing more ordinary and everyone "practices fantasy" in much the same way as M. Jourdain spoke prose. Most metaphors, such as light of the spirit, movie star, or flames of love, belong to the fantastic. Its place has a major importance in the arts of which it is the very principle; the rules of art, its codes, its schools, have no other pretext than to serve the fantastic, to give it easier access to paths where it alone may adventure.) 13 12 13

Gérard Genette, Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 206. Marcel Aymé's answer in "Valeur Psychologique et Artistique du Fantastique".

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CONCLUSION

This definition has many Surrealist echoes and it is perhaps this school which most contributed to the continuing importance of the fantastique. Reverdy still feels that "Une image n'est pas forte parce qu'elle est brutale ou fantastique, mais parce que l'association des idées est lointaine et juste" 1 4 (an image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because the association of ideas is distant and right), but Bosquet writes of Eluard's poetry: "Nous sommes en présence du fantastique le plus pur, qu'il est à peu près vain d'analyser" (We are in the presence of the purest fantastic, which is almost hopeless to analyse). 15 If the fantastic is considered the natural inheritance of the diabolical and the chaotic, (and one is reminded of Barbey d'Aurevilly's laborious attempts in the eighteen-seventies to convert the clichés of the minor, heaven-bent symbolists into his Diaboliques) it represents another expression of Frye's age of satire, irony — and absurdity. Finally, even in the New Novel, the fantastique is in fashion. When Ricardou describes how the métaphore expressive can be extended into the métaphore structurelle, he concludes: "Apparaît donc alors, en quelque façon, un fantastique nouveau, le fantastique de l'écriture." (Then there appears, in some sense, a new fantastic, the fantastic of the textual.)16 This is indeed a new use for the word, since it is a deliberate denial of the links between fantasy and reference, but it still shows how pervasive the tradition of fantasy remains. The last transformation of the concept reflects the fate of the novel, which is only dead if it must remain essentially mimetic. The problem of its future is the problem of an art that must, by its medium, be referential, but mistrusts this most basic aspect of its nature. Length is an important aspect of this question. I have constantly, in this summary, stressed that Supervielle's narratives are simpler than those of other writers and this is one reason for his choice of genres. His novels lack the structure necessary for longer works (one, Le Jeune Homme du Dimanche et des Autres Jours, was first a nouvelle to which new episodes were added). The one-dimensional thematic characterization, the single, occasionally double, polar plot conflict, loose their impact if expanded. Length after all means development — more actions, more descriptions of places, more psychological differentiation of character. Patterns of metaphor must be kept in mind from beginning to end. They can be repeated, developed, as in the New Novel, but there must be some practical form of recall. Psychologists tell us that sentences of the form "This is the cat that ate the rat that lived in the house that Jack built" or "I got up, went to the door, opened it, 14 15

Pierre Reverdy, p. 33. Bosquet, quoted in Caminade, p. 128.

16

Ricardou, p. 136.

CONCLUSION

77

etc." even if endless, are much easier to understand and follow than sentences that contain embedding, such as: "The man the dog bit ran away", or "The man the dog the cat scratched bit ran away". The latter type is necessarily very short if it is to be understood, or else it must be carefully reread and worked out. One explanation is that this type makes far greater demands on memory than the first. All the subjects, in complex relation to one another, must be kept in mind until one reaches the pile-up of verbs at the end. 1 7 So narrative, in which one action leads logically to the next (according to a familiar, conventional logic) and in which all the episodes are at least partially digested before the next takes place, are much easier t o assimilate than the pure pattern novel, whose plot, when there is one, has to be reconstructed after the fact. Good mimetic novels have always had that kind of design, of course, that makes each new reading a fresh discovery. The conte fantastique, for all its affinities with symbolist poetry, gives greatest emphasis to its linear progression; the suspenseful ambiguities once resolved, re-reading is disappointing. The New Novel, for all its stress on design, still depends for its suggestiveness on the content of its metaphors. In each case, the difference is emphasis. Different choices can be made within the limits of the medium of language, each one expressing a different philosophy of life and art.

17 These types of syntactic structures are described by transformational grammarians in works such as Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. The comparison as it stands is only of general illustrative value. In narrative it would have to be extended to distinguish the kind of embedding used in eighteenth century novels, where each plot is linear in itself, the novel within the novel of the sort that fascinated Gide, and the New Novel with its far greater textual repetition of such small units as sentences and paragraphs - the least linear of the three.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CONSULTED

WORKS BY SUPERVIELLE Poèmes, Préface by Paul Fort (Paris: Eugène Figuièrc, 1919). L'Homme de la Pampa (Paris: Gallimard, 1923). Le Voleur d'Enfants (Paris: Gallimard, 1926). Le Survivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1928). Le Forçat Innocent (Paris: Gallimard, 1930). L'Enfant de la Haute Mer (Paris: Gallimard, 1931). Les Amis inconnus (Paris: Gallimard, 1934). L'Arche de Noé (Paris: Gallimard, 1938). La Fable du Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1938). Poèmes de la France Malheureuse (¡939-1941) (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, Collections des Cahiers du Rhône, 1945). 1939-1945 (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). A la Nuit, Post-face by André Béguin (Paris: Editions du Seuil, Collection des Cahiers du Rhône, 1947). Robinson (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Oublieuse Mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, Collection "Métamorphoses" XXXVII, 1949). Schéhérazade (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). Le Voleur d'Enfants (play) (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). Les B.B. V. (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, Nouvelles Originales VII, 1949). "Le Temps Immobile" and "La Première Fois", published in Claude Roy, Jules Supervielle (Paris: Seghers, 1949). Premiers Pas de l'Univers (Paris: Gallimard, 1950). Naissances (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). Le Jeune Homme du Dimanche et des Autres Jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). Bolivar, followed by La Première Famille (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). L'Escalier (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). Le Corps Tragique (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). Les Suites d'une Course (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). Gravitations, preceded by Débarcadères (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Poésie, 1966). La Belle au Bois, included in Deux Pièces sur la Fin d'une Monde, edited by R.R. Hubert (New York: Macmillan, Modem French Literature Series, 1966).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

79

CRITICISM ON SUPERVIELLE Agel, Henri, "Orphée et autres contes", Paru, 32 (July, 1947). Allen, Louis, "Magic as Art: The Work of Jules Supervielle", Durham University Journal, III, 2, new series XXI, 2 (March, 1960), pp. 70-88. Anon., "The Poetry of Respect", TLS 2541 (Friday, Oct. 13, 1950), p. 61. Arland, Marcel, "L'Arche de Noé", NRF (May 1st, 1938), pp. 818-822. -, Lettres de France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1951), pp. 190-198. -, "Quel Age Ont Les Fées", NRF (May 1st, 1955), pp. 879-884. Blair, Dorothy, Jules Supervielle, A Modern Fabulist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960). Bosquet, Alain, "Jules Supervielle ou l'Amitié Cosmique", La Revue de Paris, (September, 1956), pp. 124-131. Bounoure, Gabriel, "Jules Supervielle", Cahiers du Sud, 101 (May, 1928), pp. 329-342. Bousquet, Joë, "L'Arche de Noé", Cahiers du Sud (July, 1938), pp. 556-577. Brasillach, Robert, "Poésies 'Cosmiques' ", La Revue Universelle, 15 (February, 1933), pp. 507-509. Cassou, Jean, "Jules Supervielle", in Pour la Poésie (Paris: R.—A. Correa, 1935), pp. 252-255. Clouard, Henri, "Le poète féerique, Supervielle" in Histoire de la Littérature Française du Symbolisme à Nos Jours, Vol. 2 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1950). Combat (May 13, 1954): Hommage to Jules Supervielle. Cremieux, Benjamin, Inquiétude et Reconstruction (Paris: Correa, 1931), pp. 56, 174. Ehrsam, Kurt, "Die Novelle Jules Supervielles" doctoral thesis for the University of Zurich, 1956. Eigeldinger, Marc, L'Evolution Dynamique de l'Image dans la Poésie Française du Romantisme à Nos Jours (Neuchâtel: André Seiler et Fils, 1943), pp. 244, 280-286. Estang, Lug., "Supervielle du Dimanche et des Autres Jours", Le Figaro Littéraire (August 10, 1957). Etiemble, René, "Supervielle et le Sens de la Nuit", Lettres Françaises, Buenos-Ayres, 5 (July, 1942), pp. 18-26. (New -, "Supervielle", in Columbia Dictionary of Modem European Literature York: Columbia University Press, 1947). -, "Il Faut de Tout Pour Faire une Fable du Monde", Temps Modernes, 31 (April, 1948), pp. 1880- 1897. - , Supervielle (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque Idéale, 1960). Fluchère, Henry, "Jules Supervielle", French Studies, IV, 4 (October, 1950), pp. 345-353. Fowlie, Wallace, Mid-Century French Poets (New York: Grove Press, 1955). Gants du Ciel (Montreal, March, 1945): Hommage to Jules Supervielle. Gérard, Monique, "L'Oeuvre Poétique de Jules Supervielle", Mémoire de Licence Philologie Romane, University of Brussels, October, 1952. Gros, Leon-Gabriel, "Morale et Poésie", Cahiers du Sud, 121 (May, 1930). -, Review of L'Enfant de la Haute Mer, Cahiers du Sud, 121 (May, 1930). Hiddleston, James, L'Univers de Jules Supervielle (Paris: Corti, 1965). Holmes, Henry Alfred, "Supervielle, a Superrealist", The French Review, 6 and 7 (May-June and October, 1937). Hubert, Renée R., "Le Theatre Poetique du Jules Supervielle", Io, (July-Sept., 1965). -, Review of Hiddleston, L'Univers de Jules Supervielle, MLQ, 27 (June, 1966), pp. 233-235.

80

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Jane, Adrien, Jules Supervielle (= Les Cahiers du Journal des Poètes, no. 79) (Brussels, 1940). Lalou, René, "Jules Supervielle, Poète de l'Accueil", La Revue des Vivants, 7 (July, 1934), pp. 1071-1076. - , Histoire de la Littérature Française, Vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1940), pp. 427-432. LeDantec, Yves-Gérard, "Le Mouvement Poétique", Revue des Deux Mondes (April 1, 1935), pp. 699-701. Lehnet, Frederick, "Jules Supervielle", French Review, 5 (March, 1946). Lot, Fernard, "Jules Supervielle, Poète de l'Etrange", Revue Politique et Littéraire, Revue Bleue, 16 (1931), pp. 500-504. -, "Tentatives Modernes de Poésie Cosmique", La Grande Revue, 12 (December, 1932), pp. 276-286. Mallet, Robert, "Jules Supervielle ou le Merveilleux Serrurier", Cahiers RensudBarrault, 14 (December, 1955), pp. 52-58. Monteiro, Adolfe Casais, La Poesia de Jules Supervielle, Estudo e Antologia (Lisbon: Editorial Confluencia, 1944). Nadal, Octave, "Conversation avec Supervielle" and "Rêve Surveille", in A Mesure Haute (Paris: Mercure de France, 1964), pp. 257-275. NRF, 20: Hommage to Supervielle (August 1, 1954). Orr, John, Forword and Introduction to Jules Supervielle, Contes et Poèmes (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1950), pp. xi-xxi. Picon, Gaétan, Panorama de la Nouvelle Littérature Française (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 154-156. Portes, Antoinette, "Jules Supervielle, Auteur Dramatique et Conteur", MA thesis, Columbia, 1946. Raymond, Marcel, De Baudelaire au Surréalisme (Paris: Corti, 1947), pp. 327-333. Regains, 21: Reconnaissance à Supervielle (Summer-autumn, 1938). Rogers, Gabrielle, "La Vision Cosmique de Jules Supervielle", MA thesis, Syracuse University. Rolland de Renéville, A., "L'Expérience de Jules Supervielle", Monde Nouveau, 1848, 89-90 (June, 1955), pp. 169-171. Rousseaux, André, "Jules Supervielle, Poète de la Nostalgie", in Portraits Littéraires Choisis (Geneva: Skira, 1947), pp. 325-334. Roy, Claude, "Jules Supervielle", 'm Descriptions Critiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). - , Jules Supervielle (Paris: Seghers, Collection "Poètes d'Aujourd'hui", 1949). Saurat, Denis, Modem French Literature 1810-1940 (London: Duet and Sons, 1946), pp. 120-123. Senechal, Christian, Jules Supervielle, Poète de l'Univers Intérieur (Paris: Joan Flory "Les Presses du Hibou", 1939). Specker, Lotte, Jules Supervielle , eine Stilstudie (Zurich: Ruegg, 1942). Stiibel, Elizabeth, "Einführung in die Novellen von Jules Supervielle", Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, LXV, 5-6, pp. 311-336. Supervielle, Jules, "Eléments d'une poétiquç", Valeurs, 5 (Alexandria, April, 1946). -, "Chercher sa Pensée", NRF (May 1, 1958 and April 1, 1959). Thomas, Henri, "Michaux, Supervielle", Cahiers delà Pléiade (Spring, 1950), pp. 35-41. Weibel-Richard, R., "Notas sobre el universo de Supervielle", Sur, 23 (August, 1936), pp. 38-51.

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81

GENERAL Balakian, Anna, The Literary Origins of Surrealism (New York: NYU Press, 1947). - , The Symbolist Movement (New York: Random House, 1967). Barthes, Roland Degré Zéro de l'Ecriture (Paris: Seuil, 1964). - , Genette, and Metz, "L'Analyse Structurale du Récit", Communications, 8 (1967). Booth, Wayne, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Bonnefoy, Yves, Rome 1630 (Paris: Flammarion, 1970). Breton, André, Manifestes du Surréalisme (Paris: Pauvert, 1962). - , Les Vases Communicants (Paris, NRF, 1970). Buber, Martin, La Vie en Dialogue (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1959). Butor, Michel, Répertoire (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1960 and 1964). Caillois, Roger, Images, Images. . . Essai sur le Rôle et les Pouvoirs de l'Imagination (Paris: Corti, 1966). Caminade, P., Image et Métaphore (Paris: Bordas, 1970). Cassirer, Ernst, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne Langer (New York: Dover, 1953). Castex, Pierre, Le Conte Fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (Paris: J. Corti, 1951). Champigny, Robert, Le Genre Romanesque (Monte Carlo: Editions Regains, 1960). Change, 3, "Le Cercle de Prague" (Paris: Seuil, 1969). Chomsky, Noam, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, (Cambridge: MIT, 1965). —, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968). Cohen, Jean, Structure du Language Poétique (Paris: Flammarion, 1966). Cormeau, Nelly, La Physiologie du Roman (Brussels, La Renaissance du Livre, 1947). Dale, Robert C., The Poetics of Prosper Mérimée (The Hague: Mouton, 1966). Eluard, Paul, Donner à Voir (Paris: Gallimard, 1925) Foucalt, Michel, Histoire de la Folie (Paris: 10:18, 1961). Freud, Sigmund, Le Mot d'Esprit et ses Rapports avec l'Inconscient (Paris: Gallimard, 1930). - , Le Rêve et Son Interprétation (Paris: Gallimard, 1925). Freedman, R., The Lyrical Novel (Princeton, 1956). Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1967). Garvin, Paul ed., A Prague School Reader (Georgetown, 1964). Gasking, Douglas, "Causation and Recipes", Human Understanding: Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume, Sesanski and Fleming, eds. (Belmont, California: Wadsworth), pp. 60-68. Genette, Gérard, Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966). Ionesco, Eugène, Notes et Contre-Notes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Jakobson, Roman, "Linguistics and Poetics: A Closing Statement", Style in Language, ed. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT, 1959). Lerner, David, "On Cause and Effect", and Nagel, Ernest, "Types of Causal Expianation in Science", Cause and Effect, ed. D.Lerner (New York: The Free Press, 1965), pp. 1-10 and pp. 11-32. Magny, C.E., Histoire du Roman Français Depuis 1918 (Paris: Seuil, 1950). Ponge, Francis, Proémes (Paris: NRF, 1948). Pouillon, Jean, Temps et Roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). Reverdy, Pierre, Le Gant de Crin (Paris: Pion, 1926). Ricardou, Jean, Problèmes du Nouveau Roman (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Richard, J.P., Onze Etudes de la Poésie Moderne (Paris: Seuil, 1964). Robbe-Grillet, Alain, Pour un Nouveau Roman (Paris: NRF, 1963). Sachs, Sheldon, Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley: UCP, 1967).

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Sarraute, Nathalie, L'Ere du Soupçon (Paris: NRF, 1959). Schneider, Marcel, La Littérature Fantastique en France (Paris: Fayard, 1964). Scholes, Robert, ed., Approaches to the Novel (San Francisco: Chandler, 1966). Thomas, Owen, Metaphor and Related Subjects (New York: Random House, 1969). Todorov, Tzvetan, Littérature et Signification (Paris: Larousse, 1967). - , Introduction à La Littérature Fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970). -, ed., Théorie de la Littérature (Paris: Seuil, 1965). Troy, William, "Virginia Woolf: The Novel of Sensibility", Literary Opinion in America, ed. M.D. Zabel, Vol. 1, (New York: Harper, 1962). "Valeur Psychologique et Artistique du Fantastique", Revue des Vivants, 8 (August, 1934), pp. 1274-1302. Vax, Louis, La Séduction de l'Etrange (Paris: PUF, 1965).

83

INDEX

Apollinaire, Guillaume, 19 Aymé, Marcel, 22, 30, 55, 75 Balzac, Honoré de, 36 Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules, 76 Baudelaire, Charles, 8, 9, 35, 50, 54 Beckett, Samuel, 36, 61 Breton, André, 9, 10, 14-15, 33, 36,61, 74 Camus, Marcel, 73, 74 Céline (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches), 49,50,57,58,61,74 Chateaubriand, René de, 49 Constant, Benjamin, 49 contes fantastique, 8, 13, 26, 34, 49, 53-54,56, 7 4 , 7 5 , 7 7 Devaulx, Noël, 34 Dhôtel, André, 34 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 61 France, Anatole, 71 Freud, Sigmund, 61 Gide, André, 32, 49, 54, 71, 72 Giraudoux, Jean, 72 Green, Julien, 49 Hugo, Victor, 4, 66 Ionesco, Eugene, 33, 35, 36, 61, 71 Jacob, Max, 33 Kafka, Franz, 61 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 8

Mallarmé, Stephane, 61 Maupassânt, Guy de, 49, 74 Mérimée, Prosper, 53 Michaux, Henri, 18, 57, 73, 74 myth, 23, 29, 30 Nerval, Gérard de, 49 new novel, 7, 32, 34, 74, 75, 76, 77 Péret, Benjamin, 33 Ponge, Francis, 17, 48, 63, 74 Prévert, Jacques, 23, 66 Proust, Marcel, 48, 49, 72, 73 ßueneau, Raymond, 32, 50, 65 Reverdy, Pierre, 9, 72, 76 Rimbaud, Arthur, 9, 14, 33 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 7, 19, 54, 74, 75 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 49 Sarraute, Nathalie, 36, 71 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 50 Supervielle, Jules,, short stories: L'Adolescente, 24-25, 31, 39, 50 Antoine du Désert, 16, 57 L'Arche du Noé, 20-22, 27-28, 30-31,42,56,62 Les B.B.V., 56 Le Boeuf et l'Ane de la Crèche, 16, 20, 22, 29,42-44,46, 5 0 , 6 2 Les Boiteux du Ciel, 23, 31 Le Bol de Lait, 31, 44 Les Bonshommes du Cire, 57-60, 63 Castor et Pollux, 63, 64 Cerbère, 62 La Création des Animaux, 55

84 L'Enfant de la Haute Mer, 22, 23, 31 4 2 , 4 5 , 5 0 , 56 Une Enfant, 16-17, 22, 4 6 ^ 8 L'Enlèvement d'Europe, 38-39, 40-43 La Fausse Amazone, 57 La Femme Retrouvée, 23, 65 La Fuite en Egypte, 29, 55, 56 La Géante, 33, 6 2 L'Inconnue de la Seine, 15, 23 Le Modèle des Epoux, 32-33 Le Minotaur, 28, 29, 31-32, 4 0 ^ 2 , 56,59,62,63,74 Les Nymphes, 47 Orphée, 67-71 Le Petit Bois, 17 La Piste et la Mare, 29 Rani, 57 Sir Rufus Flox, 29, 39, 5 6 Tobie Père et Fils, 55 La Vache, 4 6 La Veuve aux Trois Mouton, 6 4

Vulcan, 50 poetry: A La Nuit, 5 0 Les Amis Inconnus, 55n La Fable du Monde, 23 Oublieuse Mémoir, 2 1 , 3 6 - 3 7 , 72 novels: L'Homme de la Pampa, 50 Le Jeune Homme du Dimanche et des Autres Jours, 18, 76 plays: Robinson, 51 Schéhérazade, 51 surrealism 36, 6 1 , 72, 73, 76 Valéry Paul, 5 6 , 72 Verlaine, Paul, 9 Vian, Boris, 66 Vigny, Alfred de, 5 0 Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Auguste de, 14, 18,49,57 Voltaire,30