Yves Bonnefoy's poetry incorporates the risk of silence. Not silence itself, for unlike Rimbaud he continues to write, but a systematic disbelief in the efficacy of words. Words that would "name" never reach their objects, and the writer merely inflicts "ces coups sourds contre la paroi de la parole" ("dull blows on the wall of speech" …). (p. 194)

The risk is real, not hypothetical: Bonnefoy's latest poems have been published as "fragments" and "other fragments" in an apparent unwillingness to give even the impression of a deceptively finished text. The poet does continue to write, however, and it is possible that he is in fact experimenting with ways to express—perhaps resolve—this very notion of linguistic promise and inadequacy. Such a development would be consistent with the change in Bonnefoy's artistic tastes from the finished, idealistic products of the Italian Renaissance to a baroque style that, reaching out into surrounding nothingness, becomes a "negative rhetoric" and a "passageway to the invisible."… (p. 195)

Bonnefoy's poet can name things exactly because he sees into their presence as possibility of life and death. By naming them, he calls into existence their full identity. In terms of the legend of the Grail, he asks the question that Parsifal does not: he asks the meaning of the unearthly procession and thus forces the Holy Grail to enter an earthly incarnation. Poetic images synthesize the death and life, presence and absence, of their objects….

The empty structures of language must continue to work against the constant murmur of subterranean waters, so as to end not with an illusion or with an answer, but with a repetitive, all-embracing question…. Poetry avoids illusion only by maintaining a quality of randomness, of drifting on a liquid surface that cannot be plumbed and whose voice—although it must be heard—cannot be understood. (p. 196)

Poetry is parole, not langue: it is a special speech act that goes beyond any mechanical combinations of impersonal words. If poetry relies on langue alone, and reproduces mere patterns of language …, it arrives at impersonality and death—the "wrong kind of death." Such a wrong kind of death is all the more dangerous because it is already present in the art work, insofar as the latter congeals and fixes the living exchanges of reality. The highest value Bonnefoy finds in art is in fact exchange, a sort of communion with others and with other things that takes place through poetry's transcendent example. Poetry is not the supreme value, but rather the "ultimate resource" for reaching that value. (p. 197)

How does Bonnefoy combine openness and meaning, these two apparently contradictory qualities? "Meaning," for the poet, does not imply a predetermined absolute significance that is transferred from writer to reader. It is an exchange in and through the ambiguity of language—a kind of "ontological refraction" that takes place in words…. Art aims towards an unwordly perfection, says Bonnefoy, and is thus essentially untrue. This untruth jeopardizes communion, which cannot take place in an unreal dimension. Artistic illusion should therefore not be too perfect. Bonnefoy's task is to retain, in the form and vision of his poetry, the ontological refraction originally perceived and through which the human imagination seeks its unity…. Dans le leurre du seuil expresses just such an attempt. (pp. 197-98)

There are three ways in which this … collection seems to me different from those that precede: it extends and fragments syntactic patterns, it questions the whole idea of passing to an absolute presence, and it develops a far-reaching, more fluid system of images than the somewhat static, miraculous glimpses given in previous poems. (p. 199)

The communion or exchange Bonnefoy seeks is a potential form of dialogue, and dialogue is also sought, rejected, and reinterpreted in Dans le leurre du seuil. The speaker at the beginning knocks at a closed door, invokes blind matter and empty language, and calls for a tranquility and reassurance that do not come. (p. 204)

[There] may be no answer if the voice proceeds from himself, an echo and vibration of his own questions: "Est-ce 'un autre' la voix qui me répond/Ou moi encore …" ("Is the voice that answers me 'an other'/Or is it still myself …"…. This multiple voice rejects naming, answering, or conclusive transcendental images; it sends us back to the exploratory act of writing as a perennial knocking at the gates of a nonexistent paradise….

This unstable dialogue is resolved in a manner somewhat like the impersonal "communion" of matter and consciousness…. The poet has conquered the idealistic temptation of passage over a threshold by recomposing a broken, active, and truer vision out of the refracted fragments of reality. A throb of insistent questioning pervades the entire poem. (p. 205)

This is not to say that Bonnefoy's ideas have changed essentially since Du Mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve; rather, he seems to have come full circle, and accepted his basic metaphor on the level of verbal patterns. What is different in Dans le leurre du seuil is that he has tried to incorporate silence into the forms of his text. An increased role is given to the self-conscious use of language, and to negative images or ones that cancel each other out. Constructions are deconstructed; the rooms, cathedrals, high walls, and vaults of earlier works become now stones torn out of a wall at night, a wall which crumbles, blasted stones, a destroyed vault, or the mere beginnings of an arch. The threshold is no passageway. The communion sought through a Grail has been recreated as a purely earthly, ephemeral event—attainable only in poetic language. At the end of the poem, the "sponge" of nothingness wipes up the debris of bread and wine, and returns the celebration to the emptiness in which it was born. This emptiness is real, and thus it adds a certain poignancy to the celebration in which man becomes conscious of his mortal existence. (pp. 205-06)

At the end of the quest, then, it is not "naming" but the word as sign that takes the place of the Grail, becoming both passage and true place….