Yves Bonnefoy

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Poetry Taking Place

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Place is a key concept in the work of Yves Bonnefoy. The "true place" is real yet ideal, specific yet transfigured, embedded in the world yet overflowing the limits of ordiinary perception: "Hic est locus patriae." Nonetheless, Bonnefoy's place is not simply location, a richly symbolic landscape with coordinates on both geographic and metaphysical maps. It is also an activity that takes place within poetry, and this active sense comes to define the way place itself is described. After the original act of knowing and naming objects before us, creating in that manner a true place, there comes a stylistic dynamism of exchange, openness and multiple awareness that structures the work as the very site of consciousness….

Place and act [in Bonnefoy] are two complementary and inextricable terms. The poetic place implies a special activity—a naming of things as they are—and the poetic activity is located firmly on this earth, in an experience interpreted by the text. Actual descriptions of place emphasize one or another of these complementary poles but tend gradually to incorporate structures of activity, interrogating and fragmenting the outlines of the given scene. The four walls of the emblematic orangery in Du mouvement et de l'immobilite de Douve and of L'ordalie do not remain intact in Dans le leurre du seuil, but break apart before the invasions of nature…. Finally, the act of naming (with its subjective and even prophetic overtones in "L'acte et le lieu") is transformed into a multiplicty of voices, a faire parler: not so much a temple with a hidden god as a vault of echo, a diverse and decentered utterance. What happens is that the "act" comes more and more to define the "place" and structures of exchange to dominate the way in which place is described. (p. 411)

Physical place—whether it be the gravestones of Pierre écrite, the torn leaf of "L'acte et le lieu," the baroque chair in a Belgian church … or the television and church inscriptions of Dans le leurre de seuil—grounds infinity and serves as check and balance to the poet's subjectivity. However purified and fragmentary, these material points of departure give substance to the poetic image and keep it from being locked into a utopian imagination. (pp. 411-12)

Scenes throughout Bonnefoy's poetry and criticism evoke the interrelationship of different places that all seem to be levels of the same place, transparent layers fusing inextricably the quest beyond with an acute physical awareness of life and death on this earth. References to an arriere-pays, an intuited ideal country that Bonnefoy has called a constant demonic fantasy, and descriptions of thresholds before some unattainable other region persist throughout his work…. [The elements of Bonnefoy's typically spare] landscape are always clearly outlined, even if isolated and often fragmentary: a shoulder, face, or arm, water surfaces, a barge pole, branch, or cloud, foliage and a windowpane. There is no blurring or vagueness in Bonnefoy's vision but sharply perceived fragments of a total framework whose proportions remain to be determined. The poet sketches a landscape of reference points in reality, pictures esthetically complete in themselves but retaining—like sketches—an openness between their parts that leaves room for continued metamorphosis and potential fulfillment.

The literary work itself is a place, a landscape or inscape of signs. Such signs evoke the volume and color of the three-dimensional world, but they also run the risk of being merely signs and retreating to their own private domain. At its worst, says Bonnefoy, this semiotic landscape exists as a lifeless "text" that mechanically imitates the examples of other texts and other perceptions…. To some extent this alienation is inevitable: the writer is exiled by his profession into the "place of signs" … where his complex historical self crystallizes into the set form of selected words. Yet there is always the hope that signs can be explored and transformed and that the place of signs will become one with the true place….

Words and world fuse. Earth itself—and the sky—provide momentary glimpses of the signs linking physical reality to human experience and imagination. The clouds that trace for Bonnefoy a fleeting hieroglyph in the sky,… the cracks in a ruined fresco that seem "irradiating, a writing inside writing"…, reverse the usual notion of speech evoking another world and show us the world taking on—for an instant—the power of ecriture. Such an exchange of roles is important if sign is to become, or truly inhabit, place….

Bonnefoy's place … is defined in active terms, and … its "here and now" absorbs both the past and the future. Often referring to a former time and a "lost place" he also repeatedly evokes a future time that is to be pulled into the present, linked to it by anticipated union…. (p. 412)

Exchange, openness, choice: although change and metamorphosis, "imperfection" and the refusal of essences have always been basic to Bonnefoy's poetry, recent works seem to incorporate these ideas even more as rhetorical strategies. Place is increasingly described in terms of exchange, and the inhabitants of place live on a rhythm of alternation. The exchanged smiles in a fresco of "Rome, les flèches" … grow into thousands of shimmering reflections. The series of reflecting images in Dans le leurre du seuil, the depersonalized, decentered dialogue of the same work and the poet's growing willingness to yield speech to matter all use structures of exchange to direct poetry away from a single, subjective impression., It is a movement away from a sense of personal uniqueness, of overriding difference …, and thus a movement toward anonymity and objectivity, toward the ideal embodied in Rimbaud's "Je est un autre" (I is another). Not that the poetry does become impersonal: no one could mistake Bonnefoy's style for that of anyone else, and his je is still the foundation for a particular world of the imagination. The world that he projects, however, presents as part of itself that other, impersonal dimension we all experience as what is outside ourselves: a dimension that must, according to Bonnefoy, be incorporated into our consciousness if we are to live fully our mortal lives. Although this notion is consistent throughout Bonnefoy's work, the shape that it takes—particularly in descriptions of place and voice—evolves toward an increasingly open form.

One of the most striking images of Bonnefoy's early writing is that of the orangerie, the greenhouse of seventeenth-century France whose transparency to light and dark makes it a consummate image for both sides of experience: life and death, presence and absence, absolute order and sacrificial blood…. In the fine "Lieu de la salamandre" from "Vrai lieu" the tactic of allegorical scenes continues. An emblematic salamander … freezes into silence when startled on the wall…. This salamander embodies the dual nature of the true place, or true poetry, for it is attuned to both heaven and earth…. The scene itself, however, is neither split nor dual. It appears in a single perspective, viewed from outside by a speaker who makes the connections in his own mind and explains them directly to the reader.

Such a perspective has a great deal of power, especially when it is backed by the urgency of Bonnefoy's personal quest for presence—for transcendence rooted in the world. (p. 413)

Descriptions of place seem a natural way for Bonnefoy to express himself, as though it were important that every attempt to "make sense" be rooted in physical experience. An earthly scene is no sooner names, however—be it threshold, graveyard, river or field—than it become subject to the strong pull of the idealizing imagination. Bonnefoy has recognized the temptation held out to him by an arrière-pays and has worked to counter or incorporate its sway by opening up the notion of earthly place instead of seeking to make it reflect a utopian vision. Recently this attempt to leave poetic room for the invasion of another presence has emphasized patterns of otherness, of futurity and of exchange. The depersonalization of the speaker, multiplied and yielding voice to inert matter, is part of an opening toward materiality where the subjective consciousness adopts the forms of a larger impersonal universe. The poem also opens out to the future—to an immeasurable, potential reality—by a movement of confiance that absorbs all forms of possibility into a present consent. Certainly both attempts at openness take place within subjective speech—worse, within words that freeze a state of being as soon as it is named. Thus there is a third rhetorical attempt to incorporate openness: the dynamism of reflection and exchange, of analogies and the continuous evolution of appearances. Here presence is not so much named as evoked throughout a series of namings. Beyond all specific images and landscapes, the place of poetry is defined by the activity that takes place within it: not so much the act and the place of poetry as poetry, taking place. (p. 416)

Sarah N. Lawall, "Poetry Taking Place," in World Literature Today (copyright 1979 by the University of Oklahoma Press), Vol. 53, No. 3, Summer, 1979, pp. 411-17.

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The Search for Transcendence in Yves Bonnefoy's 'Un feu va devant nous'

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