The Allegory of Loss and Exile in the Poetry of Yves Bonnefoy
[Yves Bonnefoy's] is a poetry that refuses to close its eyes to those experiences of loss that identify temporal existence. Death, absence, nothingness, ruin, dispersion and errancy are events that his poems uncover in the common realities of a drifting cloud, a bird's cry,… and the reflected light of a setting sun. To the myopia which keeps us from seeing and understanding the lessons of the past, this poetry gives corrective vision, reminding us that time is fatal, death ever-present and exile inescapable.
The major concern of poetry, Yves Bonnefoy writes, is to "name what has been lost."… Poetry, he suggests, must meditate on death and loss. The poet cannot plunge into the dreamy waters of a transcendental reality in order to escape mortality. Such a poet, a seeker of essences, fears loss. Whenever confronted by le néant (nothingness), he is compelled to disguise its reality through the use of sublimating fictions, ornamentalizing art or idealizing concepts. But the modern poet is of a different kind. He deals not with essences but with presences; he is a traveler not in a spiritual world but in the desert world of the hic et nunc; he is not a dreamer envisioning eternal Ideas but a homeless wanderer searching for a momentary vision of le vrai lieu; he is, finally, not a symbolist but a realist, a man in passage who, colliding with the emptiness of existence, fights back….
Poetry is as much a celebration of being as it is a cry of loss…. Bonnefoy's poetry, not unlike Baudelaire's in this respect, forces an encounter between the "corps blessé" of existence and the "langage immortel" of poetic tradition…. Death, absence, exile and loss are never very distant from the poetic text. In fact, the poem searches for them…. (p. 421)
Yves Bonnefoy's poetry and criticism reflect … what might be called a "problematics of loss," that is, a constellation of images, themes and figures that represent experiences of death, exile, absence, errancy and otherness. An amer savoir or bitter knowledge informs his work, a knowledge derived from the understanding that in all human encounters a tension exists between two fundamental phenomena: between "the quality that is lost and the attentive meaning that remains."… That tense relationship and the way it is dramatically represented through allegory in his work are the subjects of this essay…. [Allegory, here, will be used in the non-traditional] sense given to that term by the German critic-philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his study of seventeenth-century German baroque drama. "Allegory," Benjamin writes, "means something different from what it is. It means precisely the nonexistence of what it presents." (p. 422)
It is the goal of this essay to show first that Yves Bonnefoy's poetic representation of loss is fundamentally allegorical (in the sense of Benjamin's definition), and second that a poetry of loss such as Bonnefoy's must reflect an allegorical vision of existence if the poet is to internalize loss and death in his poetry. The use of allegory is the principal means by which the poet can bring his poetic language into a closer relation to the dialectical reality of being. Baudelaire, the creator of modern allegory, attempted to accomplish this linking of death and poetry…. Following Baudelaire's steps, Bonnefoy attempts to internalize death in his poetry and to allegorize the presence of loss.
Loss is a ubiquitous phenomenon in Yves Bonnefoy's work; the signs of its presence are everywhere: in the "secret lack" at the center of old paintings; in the poet's sudden realization of something dark and opaque forming within a passage he is writing …; and finally, in the affirmation of a "finite writing,"… open to the mortal rhythms of life.
As a crest of a wave gathers its strength from an evergrowing hollow, out of which water is continuously being pulled and then pushed up toward the crest, so the poem in similar fashion contains at its center an ever-growing emptiness, which suddenly gives rise to the tentative appearance of a meaning. All the things the poet is not saying at the moment he is writing—the images or mental associations he cannot formulate, the imaginary paths he refuses to follow because he cannot leave the road he is on, the desires he does not have the time to express or that he is unaware of—all of these constitute the hollow or absence residing at the center of the text. There is always something other that could be said than what has just been said…. It is this otherness staring out at him from inside the poem or the painting, or the fresco, or the landscape, which haunts Bonnefoy. Again and again in his writings he refers to an "autre terre," and "autre lieu," an "autre pays" or similarly to a "terre seconde" or a "simplicité second." He is fascinated with locating a sense of otherness that has escaped him, a lost, hypothetical reality that could have been his to experience had its appearance not been blocked by some other dominant reality…. (pp. 422-23)
Bonnefoy's preoccupation with lost otherness testifies to the allegorical mode in which he perceives being, for allegory is the literary structure most expressive of otherness. Allegory signifies, as already mentioned, the nonbeing or the loss of what it represents. By pointing to the unique otherness and inaccessibility of its referent, allegory paradoxically shows how unable its signs are to join with the referent…. The distance between form and meaning in allegory implies a writing that is in exile and founded on a self-conscious awareness of the reality of loss. It designates and represents an otherness which, at the same time, it reveals to be unattainable.
Since in Bonnefoy's dialectical vision absence does not exist without presence, nor life without death, the nonbeing which allegory represents must be considered from two contrary yet interdependent points of view. On the one hand, it refers to the nonexistence in the present moment of some irretrievably lost reality. But since for Bonnefoy loss is predicated on the promise of a future repossession—the poem is the hopeful sign of such a recovery—the nonbeing affirmed by allegory refers as well to the nonexistence of something as yet to come. The Janus-head of allegory faces the past and the future at once, representing the nonbeing of what has been lost and the nonbeing of what is as yet potential. (p. 423)
Given the need for Bonnefoy's poetry to be in contact with the finite realities of existence, allegory is sufficiently self-denying, as a mode of expression and as a structure for generating meaning, to conform to the poet's conviction that poetry is powerless to transfigure the world. (pp. 423-24)
The attraction of otherness for Yves Bonnefoy is the drawing near to a hypothetically possible reality, which, because it is different, holds the greatest chance of revealing an experience of la présence [Bonnefoy's term for the experience of the absolute]. The absolute comes into being on the other side of what already tenuously exists. A threshold, characterized by hesitation, uncertainty and loss, separates the poet from this remotely possible experience of otherness…. Although the "other" can refer either to a lost reality in the past or to a desired reality in the future, it cannot truly materialize in the present moment of the text; or if it does, it can only exist there as an absence…. [The] allegorical poem incarnates a lost and absent reality. For this reason, allegory, which, as we have seen, signifies the nonbeing of what it represents, is the mode by which the experience of otherness, and of loss, can be represented most meaningfully and tangibly. (p. 424)
Many of Yves Bonnefoy's poems and prose writings reflect an allegorical way of seeing the world. Most often these are dialectical allegories involving the conjunction of life and death, the coexistence of day and night and the encounter of "things dying" with "things new born."… By posing contradictions in this dialectical way Bonnefoy's texts attempt to represent allegorically the possibility of la présence; or more precisely, since presence cannot be expressed in poetry, his works celebrate its possible return. The allegorical sign denotes an experience—namely that of la présence—from which it is exiled. Allegory, because of the distance separating its form from its meaning, is well suited to the representation of the poet's loss of presence, since allegory, structurally speaking, submits to a similar kind of loss….
[Allegory] in Bonnefoy—the allegory of presence—is dialectically motivated, running along negating and affirming axes that enable it to signify in two contrary ways simultaneously, as the images of flame and ash from Dans le leurre du seuil make so very clear: … (Oh flame / Which celebrates as it consumes, / Ash / Which gathers as it disperses …).
The poem that best illustrates the presence of allegory—and the allegory of presence—in Bonnefoy's work concerns … an animal transformed into an allegorical sign. The poem is the famous "Lieu de la salamandre" (Place of the Salamander), which appears near the end of Douve. (p. 427)
Beginning with a dispassionate, almost neutral tone …, Bonnefoy's poem becomes progressively more personal and passionate, until it declares the poet's intimate identification with the salamander…. In this change from impersonality and distance to an ecstatic union with the animal Bonnefoy moves from an awareness of the salamander's universal mythic reality ("le mythe le plus pur") to the recognition that the animal has become allegory. This is true because Bonnefoy conceives allegory as a mode of expression that confronts the presence of death…. Only allegory possesses sufficient expressiveness, the necessary "vérité de parole," to represent the paradoxical conjunction of living and dying which the animal embodies.
Through allegory Bonnefoy moves from the objective perception of the salamander to a union with it. He is drawn to what the salamander incarnates: namely, an experience of presence…. (p. 428)
Although both Baudelaire [in "Le cygne"] and Bonnefoy make a distinction between myth and allegory in their representations of the swan and the salamander …, and although both poets accept allegory as the form best suited to the expression of death and finitude, nevertheless they do differ in their use and conception of the form. Bonnefoy's allegory is more purely dialectical and is expressive of a greater sense of poetic limitation than Baudelaire's, which tends more to the preservation of experiences and thus reveals a slightly conservative, if not "essentialist" spirit. The faith that Baudelaire places in the power of poetic imagination to create an enduring poetry, which Bonnefoy does not appear to share, accounts perhaps for the difference. Bonnefoy believes that poetry should try to show the signs of erosion and decay that are found in the world; the poem should be torn apart like a cloud…. Baudelaire, however, poeticizes the fragments he discovers in the real world and thus seems to give them a form more essential and permanent than they had in that world…. Bonnefoy, however, does not seek to reverse nature's violent work. Rather, he would prefer the "sketch" to remain in its unfinished state; he would accomplish this through a dialectical form of writing—affirming and negating, creating and destroying, at the same time—which he identifies as "a dialectical sketching out." "To write, certainly," he remarks, "but to unwrite as well by means of an experience complementary to the poem."… The world corrects the poem, not the other way round. The poem is open to existence, and the poet shuttles back and forth between them: "at every moment, to take leave of the work as much as to create it."… Bonnefoy's "sketch" will always be "slow in coming," and his word will have being's incompleteness. A contemporary poet like Yves Bonnefoy, believing as he does in the need to simultaneously make and remake his poems so that they will correspond to the ontological reality of existence, could not share completely Baudelaire's nineteenth-century belief in the power and magic of the poetic imagination…. (pp. 428-29)
Although allegory permits the interiorization of death and nothingness in the poem, it is an expression of loss that never will replace an experience of loss. Despite the opening up of the poem to the world, words still live in a state of exile. The poem wanders like a nomad searching for an invisible presence, which words cannot express. Renouncing a poetry of essences for a poetry of traces, Bonnefoy casts his lot with those ephemeral signs inscribed on desert sands. Yet from the sense of loss and errancy which the poem reflects, something lives on; loss has its own kind of presence…. The something that resides after everything is gone is the poem; but it endures only a moment. The water which the poet raises in cupped hands to his mouth slips away through his fingers, leaving a trace of wetness. Yves Bonnefoy's poetry celebrates traces, signs, flashes, fragments, vestiges: the residua of loss. His poems are written in a language of absence whose syntax speaks mysteriously of presence. Can we, who must experience "l'extrême joie et l'extrême douleur" (the extreme joy and the extreme suffering …) of existence, who must confront both the fullness and the vacuity of being, can we possibly ask for a richer, more joyous, more real poetry than this? "Look," writes Yves Bonnefoy, to whom the last words of this essay (words borrowed from Dans le leurre du seuil) must belong: "Regarde, / Ici fleurit le rien" (Look, / Here flowers the nothing)…. (p. 429)
Richard Stamelman, "The Allegory of Loss and Exile in the Poetry of Yves Bonnefoy," in World Literature Today (copyright 1979 by the University of Oklahoma Press), Vol. 53, No. 3, Summer, 1979, pp. 421-29.
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