Yves Bonnefoy

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The Topography of Presence: Bonnefoy and the Spatialization of Poetry

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SOURCE: Argyros, Alex. “The Topography of Presence: Bonnefoy and the Spatialization of Poetry.” Orbis Litterarum 41, no. 3 (1986): 244-64.

[In the following essay, Argyros considers the complex relationship between critical interpretations of Bonnefoy's verse, his own theoretical writings, and his long poem, On the Motion and Immobility of Douve.]

For the most part, the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy has been read as an expression or application of Bonnefoy's numerous theoretical statements concerning the function of poetry. In other words, Bonnefoy's poetry has been understood as the practical materialization of his esthetic speculations. Critical work on Bonnefoy, consequently, has operated within the horizon of one of the fundamental binary oppositions of Western esthetics: pure idea/its reification. A variant of the mind/body dichotomy, the theory/application couplet is not a neutral concept, but participates in specific ways in the historical development of Western philosophy. As Derrida has frequently argued, the Western metaphysical tradition has tended to create its edifice by deploying a series of privileged binary oppositions. Specifically, the theory/application couplet makes a number of implicit assumptions. It assumes the possibility of a clear demarcation between two identifiable realms: the realm of theoretical prose and that of its realization in verse. Furthermore, it assumes that poetry can incarnate a content which is not essentially poetic. If it is possible to conceive of a transference of sense from prose to poetry, then sense must be in principle independent of the medium of its expression. Even in the extreme case where poetry is not understood as a vehicle for the conveyance of a message, but as the creation of a content, if that content is legitimized by its mimetic relation to a preexisting canon, then even its self-actualizing performance is derivative of a conceptual apparatus that has ontological precedence.

Such, then, is the broad theoretical structure underpinning much of the critical work on Bonnefoy. My contribution to that corpus, this paper, has two goals. Firstly, to analyze certain dominant interpretations of Bonnefoy's poetry (including his own); and secondly, to related this analysis to a specific poetical work of Bonnefoy, Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (henceforth to be designated as Douve). I will seek to focus neither on Bonnefoy criticism, nor on Douve, but on the complex interaction between them. Ultimately, I think, the relation between theory and praxis will both help to illuminate the encounter among Bonnefoy's theoretical work, his poetry, and the analyses of certain powerful critics, and to suggest that it is precisely the difficult burden of this enormously idealistic dialectic that has prevented another kind of reading of Bonnefoy to emerge.

I. PRESENCE AND CONTINGENCY

Most critics have understood Bonnefoy's esthetic position as the impassioned championing of material presence.1 Before proceeding to an investigation of what, according to Bonnefoy, presence is, let us begin by asking what it is not. In a relatively recent text, “Sur La Fonction Du Poème,” originally a paper read to the Académie de Belgique in 1972, Bonnefoy defends his notion of poetry against what he perceives to be the dominant critical perspective of the day:

Evoquez-vous un homme, une pierre, un arbre, ou même tel être bien précis, tel fait de la société ou de la culture connus de tous, et voici qu'aussitôt ces références sont prises dans la continuité de l'écrit, modifiées par les apports du contexte, suspendues par son devenir—, et donc arrachées à toute authenticité d'échange au niveau du simple et dans l'instant. L'écrit transpose l'intention, défait la voix transitive.2

According to Bonnefoy, because writing resists the possibility of immediacy it is inimical to the production of effects of presence. And, inasmuch as poetry is a linguistic act, it must paradoxically buy its authenticity at the cost of abandoning writing:

De la trace que laisse en moi le texte que j'ai refusé de poursuivre, une intimation me vient donc, de toute façon, déjà, qui n'est pas de recommencer à écrire, sur de nouvelles bases métaphoriques, mais de quitter l'écriture, pour pratiquer, hors texte, les situations de la vie: un dehors où se reforme, en somme, la dimension d'expérience et de vérité qui manquent aux langues, quand elles s'enchantent de soi.3

Bonnefoy would be the poet of the hors texte, a writer whose language is endlessly engaged in self-annihilation and self transcendence towards unmediated experience. Clearly, the conceptual framework at work here is massively Hegelian, so it is not surprising that Bonnefoy suggests that it is only in a dialectical movement that writing and presence might coexist:

Mais que, par une décision de la même sorte, soit dénoncée cette primauté du poème, et l'écriture pourra se révéler le creuset où, par une dialectique de l'exister et du livre—l'action et le rêve réconciliés!—la présence va, non seulement advenir, mais approfondir son rapport à soi.4

Poetry, then, is the site of the “vrai lieu,” wherein presence is reconciled with its opposite—writing. And yet, those who reject the possibility of such a resolution obsess Bonnefoy: “En fait, si j'ai évoqué d'emblée ceux qui dénoncent dans le poème ce qu'on pourrait appeler l'effet de présence, simple mirage, c'est que leur pensée m'obsède.”5

Why do the thinkers of the logic of writing (can the name Jacques Derrida be avoided here?) impose themselves on Bonnefoy's vision of presence? Can writing, in fact, allow itself to be recruited into the service of presence by the expedient of passing it through the sieve of poetry? The answer to these questions, beyond any doubt the central ones as far as Bonnefoy's esthetics are concerned, requires a twofold consideration. We must interrogate the status of writing and presence in Bonnefoy's dialectical conceptual schema. In doing so, moreover, we must be sensitive to the powerful and unavoidable marks recent French critical theory (especially Deconstruction) has etched on these seminal concepts.

Bonnefoy clearly understands writing literally, as speech transcribed into a permanent form through the agency of conventional signs. Derrida, on the contrary, does not intend to limit his concept of writing to its phenomenal face: “Il s'agit de produire un nouveau concept d'écriture. On peut l'appeler gramme ou différance.6 Writing is not simply institutionalized marks on a page, but that fabric of spacing, differentiation and deferment which first produces the possibility of conceptualizing the writing/speech opposition:

Le gramme comme différance, c'est alors une structure et un mouvement qui ne se laissent plus penser à partir de l'opposition présence/absence. La différance, c'est le jeu systématique des différences, des traces de différences, de l'espacement par lequel les éléments se rapportent les uns aux autres. Cet espacement est la production, à la fois active et passive (le a de la différance indique cette indécision par rapport à l'activité et à la passivité, ce qui ne se laisse pas encore commander et distribuer par cette opposition), des intervalles sans lesquels les termes “pleins” ne signifieraient pas, ne fonctionneraient pas.7

In other words, writing is the constitution of an opening which, because it is internally articulated, is separated from itself by the distance of the space it both creates and is created by. Only after the temporal and spatial movement of “espacement” has hewn an opening for writing/speech to appear can the phenomenal form of writing be decried as inimical to presence.

For Derrida, presence is that product of différance that has come to function as the structuring concept of Western Metaphysics. Simply, following Husserl, and his famous principle of principles,8 Derrida defines the meaning of Being as the temporal and spatial immediacy of evidence unveiling itself in the present. Presence is the possibility of integrity, of propriety (the proper, property—a “vrai lieu”—etc.) and of access which allows for the erection of truth as a normative principle. And, regardless of the modality of its constitution, that is, whether presence announces itself as such or after a detour through its other, presence has functioned as the ground for thought in the Western philosophical tradition.

Things are no different for Bonnefoy. Describing “l'acte de la présence,” he says:

S'il est vrai que la question reste entière de savoir ce que serait un salut, si nous avons eu à douter dans la mesure même, presque dans l'instant même où nous avons eu à croire, nous avons reçu malgré tout le bien d'une certitude, nous savons quelle est l'origine, au-delà d'une révision des fins humaines, qu'il nous restera pour fonder. Désormais nous avons une raison d'être, qui est cet acte soudain. Et un devoir et une morale, au moins par provision, qui sera de le retrouver.9

Presence is an origin and it is a destination. Poetry, for Bonnefoy, participates in a circular teleological movement which will be completed when language expends itself in the face of presence. Presence, therefore, funds poetry inasmuch as it both precedes it and serves as its goal. Presence is a here and now to which a poem points while remaining exterior to it: “Et Baudelaire va chercher à faire dire au poème cet extérieur absolu, ce grand vent aux vitres de la parole, l'ici et le maintenant qu'a sacralisés toute mort.”10 Poetry, then, is a means, a bridge to the pre- or post-linguistic bed of presence. Furthermore, since this bed is constituted by its contingent character, it would seem to be essentially finite. And yet, during certain privileged moments, in certain “actes de présence,” the here and now sheds its veil of contingency to reveal its infinite and eternal essence: “Ici—c'est toujours le même ici—et dans cet instant, toujours le même, nous avons quitté tout espace, nous avons glissé hors du temps.11

How can a here and now be stripped of the particularity of a specific context? In other words, what conceptual presuppositions are at play in Bonnefoy's desire to postulate the possibility of a universal experience of the contingent? Let us turn to one of Bonnefoy's favorite images, the salamander. In “La poésie française et le principe d'identité,” Bonnefoy subjects a remembered or imagined perception to a phenomenological interrogation: “Et j'imaginerai, ou me rappellerai—on verra peut-être plus tard que les deux notions s'équivalent—que j'entre un jour d'été dans une maison en ruine et vois soudain, sur le mur, une salamandre.”12 Having “encountered” the salamander, Bonnefoy wonders what options are available to him. One is to classify it:

Eh bien, plusieurs chemins se sont ouverts devant moi. Je puis analyser ce que m'apporte ma perception, et ainsi, profitant de l'expérience des autres hommes, séparer en esprit cette petite vie des autres données du monde, et la classer, comme ferait le mot de la prose, et me dire: “Une salamandre”, puis poursuivre ma promenade, toujours distrait, demeuré comme à la surface de la rencontre.13

However, another approach is possible:

Mais d'autres mouvements, plus en profondeur, sont possibles. Car, par exemple, je puis garder les yeux sur la salamandre, m'attacher aux détails qui m'avaient suffi pour la reconnaître, croire continuer l'analyse qui en fait de plus en plus une salamandre, c'est-à-dire un objet de science, une réalité structurée par ma raison et pénétrée de langage—mais tout cela, soudain, pour ne plus rien percevoir, dans ces aspects brusquement comme dissociés l'un de l'autre, dans ce contour d'une patte absolu, irréfutable, désert, qu'un faisceau effrayant d'énigmes. Ces choses ont un nom, mais se sont faites soudain comme étrangères au nom.14

In a moment of felicity, the surface incrustations of logic and language are transcended, and the depth (“plus en profondeur” not “à la surface de la recontre”) of the salamander reveals itself. Freed from the limitations of language's conceptual structure, the salamander unveils itself as pure presence. So striking is this moment of epiphany, that it is impossible to distinguish the salamander from other objects: “Ce que j'ai essayé de montrer, en somme, c'est que dans l'unité, ou en tout cas sous son signe, il n'y a plus une salamandre par opposition à un âtre ou deux ou cent hirondelles, mais la salamandre présente au coeur des autres présences.”15 The salamander gives way to a salamander, a thing which exists in much the same way that all other things exist. The thing-in-itself is, for Bonnefoy, no longer a particular thing, since the experience which yields access to it moves through the conceptual distinctions of language to a realm of absolutely undifferentiated existence: “L'idée d'un être, sur ce plan—illusion ou non, peu importe—implique son existence, et cela détruit le concept, qui divise pour signifier. Dans l'espérance de la venue, on ne signifie pas, on laisse une lumière se désenchevêtrer des significations qui l'occulte.”16 If writing is not simply marks on paper, but the ontologically primordial movement of spacing and differentiation, then Bonnefoy's desire for presence, or for one of its synonyms, light, can be understood as the desire to erase writing. In fact, Bonnefoy's entire project is perhaps best situated within what Derrida describes as the dominant thrust of the Western philosophical tradition—the desire to eradicate, or at least obscure, the immemorial filiation between perception and articulation.

Presence, then, has two components for Bonnefoy. Firstly, it is the experience of what lies beneath the surface of a thing. And secondly, it is the experience of homogeneity. In other words, for Bonnefoy, the eternity promised by the revelatory act of presence is defined by two fundamental hierarchical binary relations: surface/depth and articulation/undifferentiation. Beneath surface articulations—the world of appearances, and significantly, the world of language—lies a depth which, because it is foreign to the difference essential to identity,17 is fundamentally unqualifiable.18 Bonnefoy's goal, then, is a glimpse into a world without difference. Ultimately, the destination of his textual trajectory is identical to its imagined origin: the world before the Fall. That is why his text would be a “théologie négative,” an instant of presence, an eternal instant, an instance of fusion between the subject and the world (“Ici la réalité muette ou distante et mon existence se rejoignent, se convertissent, s'exaltent dans la suffisance de l'être.”19), ultimately, a kind of salvation. Bonnefoy's notion of the sensible is in principle little else than inverted Hegelianism or inverted Christianity.20 It may be negative, but Bonnefoy's theology is nevertheless in the service of the divine:

C'est que, dans la difficulté de notre approche, il y a ce pressentiment que, nous retournant par un impossible mouvement pour voir face à face ce que nous ne sommes autorisés à regarder qu'en nous en détournant, ce que nous verrons, ce qu'en vérité toujours déjà nous avons vu, c'est—l'appellerions-nous le sensible ou le corps terrestre,—c'est le divin même, ce que toujours les hommes ont visé indistinctement par ce nom.21

What has always been called the divine, what salvation has always offered, is existence prior to the fall into difference. Difference, as Derrida has argued so powerfully, is the taboo of Onto-theology because it suggests the absence of an integral and homogeneous origin. For Bonnefoy, who rejects the primacy of writing, even though he is haunted by it, such an origin is precisely that which guarantees the correct use of poetry as an avenue in the circular trajectory back to the beginning. I emphasize “correct” because, as Bonnefoy often suggests, poetry is constantly threatened with disintegration into an auto-referential sign system.

In order for it to fulfill its mission, poetry must struggle against writing's obstinate refusal to negate itself in the name of transitivity: “L'écrit transpose l'intention, défait la voix transitive.”22 Poetry is authentic only to the extent that it enters into a dialectical relation with presence thereby becoming a place receptive to the unveiling of being: “J'ai retrouvé ce point où, par grâce de l'avenir, réalité et langage ont rassemblé leurs pouvoirs. Et je dis que le désir du vrai lieu est le serment de la poésie.”23 A negative dialectic will make writing into a crucible in which presence can appear. Otherwise, poetry is in danger of reassuming the intransitive function its status as linguistic artifact invites: “La parole est déjà l'oubli, il se peut bien qu'elle ait été notre chute, la voici en tout cas privée de la rencontre de l'être, ne faut-il pas condamner, une fois de plus, la prétention de la poésie?”24 Although Bonnefoy will answer his rhetorical question with a qualified “no,” it is only if poetry recognizes the imperative that it be a vehicle and not a goal, that is, if it is ready to annihilate itself, that it is salvageable. If poetry will not (or can not) be its own disappearance, then the logic of Bonnefoy's conceptual system compels him to make a de jure equation between the untranscendable materiality of language and the notion of a fall.

Poetry is a site, a “vrai lieu,” only to the extent that it does not fall by announcing itself as matter. To do so would be to suggest the possibility that articulation is not a provisional incarnation of presence in language, but the essential pre-condition for presence. The difference between a “vrai lieu” and the poem as text, what Bonnefoy calls a “poème achevé,” is that while the former is a window to absolute plenitude, the latter does not serve as a sign announcing the extra-linguistic; it simply is: “le poème achevé, ne parle pas, il est …”25 The autonomy of its formal structure vitiates both the purity of the presence it should represent and the presence of the author who would inscribe himself in his work so that, in the wake of dialectical mediation, he may remain face to face with the universal concrete:

Je sais, d'expérience dûment et bien des fois vérifiée, que le poème achevé—j'insiste sur ce mot—a le caractère d'une forme, qui a son autonomie, et non seulement par rapprt à beaucoup d'intentions qu'elle méconnaît chex les autres hommes, mais même par rapport à moi, qui ai décidé de chacun des mots. Suisje “présent” dans le livre que je publie?26

If the poem is a “vrai lieu” it is a sign system whose function is to insure the integrity of the undifferentiated by the promise it makes to limit its own articulated incarnation to a provisional and erasable moment in a speculative development. If the poem is a “poème achevé,” it is another kind of site, a site resistant to that bracketing of materiality that has made of theology and idealism historical allies.

I return, therefore, to the problem that opened this essay. How does Bonnefoy's theoretical position on the function of poetry affect the reader's critical reaction to his poetry? As I have already suggested, and as I will shortly attempt to demonstrate, critics of Bonnefoy have tended to read his poetry as the successful application of his esthetics. In the light of the preceding analysis of Bonnefoy's conceptual system, I think it is possible to begin to re-evaluate this relation between theory and practice. The desire to see Bonnefoy's poetry as the materialization of the views expressed in his essays is composed of two other wishes: the wish to salvage a nucleus of sense able to survive the passage from prose to poetry and the wish to see poetry as the bearer of the message of its own disposability. Both of these desires, I would argue, are versions of the historically determined desire to dissociate sense from the body which is purported to be the medium of its transmission. As long as poetry can dissolve before the radically a-textual depth of presence, then its necessity is at best strategic and provisional. And as long as Bonnefoy's poetry is interpreted as the performance of such an act of self-transcendence, then criticism can continue to represent itself as the defender of what it assumes to be both its source and its destination—the truth of a pre-predicative place.

II. THE SITE OF POETRY

For the most part, critics have read Douve as a long invocation to presence. In other words, they have assumed the success of Bonnefoy's project. Whether, as does Mary Ann Caws, Douve is read as a moment in a dialectic composed of Bonnefoy's entire corpus: “In the final act, a sense of individual presence (‘this tree’) is perceived as one with the universal, in a place at once interior and exterior, where all elements reveal a unique coincidence of essence and existence: ‘true name,’ ‘true place,’ ‘true body.’”;27 or whether it is read in the manner of John E. Jackson, for whom Douve is capable of its own dialectical accomplishment: “Ce n'est qu'avec ‘Vrai lieu’ que s'accomplira l'intégration, une intégration qu'il faut comprendre au sens hegelien de la ‘Aufhebung’, du dépassement qui maintient.”;28 the ultimate result is the same: Douve is a poem bearing the message of its own transcendence.

Although I do not deny that there is clear evidence in the poem of Bonnefoy's desire to incorporate his esthetic views in verse, I will attempt to approach Douve from a different perspective. My goal is not to disprove the traditional readings of the poem, nor to suggest that I am offering a more correct one. In fact, it is the notion of a correct reading, of an interpretation founded on evidence which is itself not already interpreted, that I will be contesting. My analysis of Douve will simply seek to argue that the dialectical approach to the poem is not exhaustive, but on the contrary leaves out a margin that is perhaps resistant to that kind of critical husbandry fundamental to negative theology.

Of the many critics who have read Douve from Bonnefoy's dialectical perspective, I think that Jean-Pierre Richard offers the most nuanced and supple analysis.29 For example, despite his desire to see Bonnefoy's work as a series of syntheses, Richard is nevertheless sensitive to junctures in Douve where that totalizing tendency is disrupted. Commenting on the poem “Aux Arbres,” Richard says:

D'insignificants, de totalement imperméables à la pensée, voici donc les éléments devenus médiateurs: en eux nous atteindrons désormais à autre chose qu'eux; leur ascétisme même développe et trahit une qualité de l'être; tout en restant pure matière, ils sont devenus langage.30

There are at least two ways to understand Richard's statement. The traditional interpretation would maintain that the trees function as an image of matter transcending its frustratingly material impermeability towards a final revelation of the unity of being. It is possible, however, to adopt a different posture towards Richard's reading. It is possible to take him literally. That is, when he observes that the trees function as matter which has been made to signify, as matter behaving semiotically, we are in a position to interrogate the referential nature of matter, and, perhaps more importantly, the materiality of language. By taking Richard at his word, the dialectical progression of Douve can be disrupted precisely at the moment when an intriguing affiliation between language and matter is announced.

It is, of course, insufficient to merely claim that matter signifies in Douve. As I suggested earlier, for Bonnefoy presence is never the simple experience of unadorned matter, but the recruitment of that experience into the service of the revelation of a concrete universal. Even in Bonnefoy's teleological historical synthesis, things signify, if only their own potential eclipse. What is lost, however, in matter's dash towards universality, is its particularity. In other words, although it is perfectly congruent with Bonnefoy's teleological ontology to conceive of matter as semiotic, it is far less manageable to posit the possibility that it is precisely the irrefragable finitude of both language and matter which makes them irremediably polysemous.

At the same time that Douve is a poem invoking its own annihilation in the face of unarticulated presence, it is a poem playing out the drama of the materiality of its own inscription. By far the dominant trope in the poem is that of place. From “Théâtre,” to the various “vrai lieu,”'s to “Orangerie,” to “Chapelle Brancacci,” to “His Est Locus Patriae,” the poems which comprise Douve are repeatedly concerned with the question of a finite location. As with the case of language, it is possible to interpret Bonnefoy's use of space dialectically. Richard, for example, argues that the spatial metaphors strewn throughout Douve are a poly, a kind of trap to capture and unveil being:

Au lieu de crever éperdument l'écran des choses, il s'agira, un peu comme un Mallarmé renonçant à l'azur pour s'enfermer entre les parois nocturnes d'une chambre, de construire soi-même cet écran, d'aménager au sein du paysage un creux sensible, d'édifier en somme une sorte de piège naturel où viendrait, littéralement, se prendre l'être.31

Richard contrasts those spatial tropes that are of human origin with those that are presumably natural, although, in the end, the dialectical machine is capable of negating and incorporating even this difference:

instrument d'évidement et de clôture, le décor est en somme au paysage vrai ce que le concept est à la réalité, mais son mensonge se destine désormais non à éluder, bien plutôt à capter le vrai; il est comme un concept qui se condamnerait lui-même à l'illusion, qui s'affirmerait ouvertement tricheur afin de permettre en lui un possible dévoilement de l'être.32

Structures of human origin (Orangerie, Théâtre, etc.) offer, for Richard, access to the true space (“le paysage vrai,” “le vrai lieu”, etc.) where presence is unveiled. Consequently, space, understood as the institution of finite differences, disappears. All that remains is the indefinite revelation of the oxymoron, pure space. For things to be otherwise, for the procession of interiorization and sublation to be disrupted, the poem must be subjected to another kind of reading. Specifically, the relation between language and space needs to be examined in a way that does not presuppose the eventual transcendence of matter.

To this end, I propose to analyze the representation of the materiality of both space and language in Douve. Let us begin with the poem described by Richard as suggesting a filiation between language and matter—“Aux Arbres.” The poem does not immediately suggest space as such. Except for that space which trees must be presumed to occupy, the trope of site or location is not thematized by the poem. Instead, it describes the self-effacing materiality of trees: “Vous qui vous êtres effacés sur son passage,” and “Vous fibreuse matière et densité”.33 The trees erase themselves because they are mediators, yet their essence is to be fibrous and dense. If, as Richard claims, the trees are a kind of language, they are language as excipient, as the conveyor of a message in principle separable from it:

Le tonnerre profond qui roule sur vos branches,
Les fêtes qu'il enflamme au sommet de l'été
Signifient qu'elle lie sa fortune à la mienne
Dans la médiation de votre austérité.

(33)

Such, at any rate, is the conventional reading of the poem. And, indeed, it is a correct one as long as the poem is assumed to be referential in nature. In other words, to the extent that the signifier trees is read as a poetic representation of the referent tree, the poem does in fact fit into the dialectic mold. But such is not the case, at least not simply.

Richard asserts that the trees are language. What, then, is language in the poem? How is the linguistic sign represented in a poem which is ostensibly a paean to presence? Although language can take many forms in Douve, it is possible to isolate a crucial quality of language, of the sign in general, that informs the various modalities of its appearance in the poem. In the only poem in which writing is mentioned, “Une Voix,” the narrator describes his fear of signs as the fear of exile from density: “J'ai reculé longtemps devant tes signes, / Tu m'as chassée de toute densité.” (50) A sign, therefore, is threatening because it is somehow inimical to the kind of fibrous density associated with matter. To the extent that, as Derrida argues, a sign is constituted by arbitrariness and iterability, a sign is not a thing because it cannot be dismembered to reveal presence.34 Not a thing in the conventional sense, a sign is nevertheless a place: “Quelle maison veux-tu dresser pour moi, / Quelle écriture noire quand vient le feu?” (50) “Une Voix” identifies the process of writing (or the production of signs) with the erection of a house. Writing is a house, but a hollow one. Resistant to the rebirth promised by fire, foreign to the density of matter, the network writing-sign-house is out of place in a poem ruled by the logic of dialectical teleology. If we add the trees of “Aux Arbres” to the equation, a series of terms is beginning to emerge whose dynamic structure is incompatible with the kind of reading of Douve that extols presence.

In fact, along with the familiar set of images associated with the poetry of Bonnefoy (fire, cries, wind, stone, blood, etc.), it is possible to adduce a second type of imagistic web revolving around the relation between the various incarnations of the sign and the numerous metaphoric resonances of house or abode. The poem is studded with references to things or figures that signify (parler, parole, nommer, le verbe, écriture, signe, mots, chant, etc.) and to structures that create space by demarcating it from what it isn't (site, âtre, maison, cathédrale, théâtre, lieu, locus patriae, orangerie, Chapelle Brancacci, etc.). It would appear, at first sight, that the connection between these two series of images is easily established. Both involve culturally determined structures and can therefore be contrasted to those phenomena of nature which are presumed to be alien to culture. Furthermore, both language and architecture function by articulation. It is only by assuming the ontological priority of difference (between one sign and another, between signifier and signified, between signified and referent, between one space and another, etc.) that it is possible to even posit the identity of a sign or house. As opposed to the supposed natural homogeneity of presence, signs and buildings are conventional, hence constituted by difference. And yet, there is one element in Douve that refuses to fit into either side of this formula. How are we to insert the trees of “Aux Arbres,” with which, after all, this part of our analysis began, into our two series of images? If, as Richard suggests, trees are a kind of language, they are signs. But they are not conventional. And if their organization suggests structure, its texture is radically different from the culturally determined division of space implied by the notion of architecture.

Is it possible, then, to understand this aporia without resorting to dialectical legerdemain? As I suggested earlier, it would be impossible to extricate “Aux Arbres” from the teleological perspective if the signifier arbres is read in a mimetic fashion. Instead, I will argue that although it is impossible to divorce a signifier from its stock of usual signifieds, it is equally impossible to limit it to them. Specifically, although arbres certainly does refer to trees, it would be myopic to restrict its semiotic resources to one kind of meaning. In fact, I will attempt to demonstrate that the standard signified of arbres is troped in Douve in such a way as to disrupt the sublation of the signifier that the poem is presumed to effect.

Let us first return to a poem whose title suggests the centrality of site: “His Est Locus Patriae.” The poem begins with a description of trees as an invading force: “Le ciel trop bas pour toi se déchirait, les arbres / Envahissaient l'espace de ton sang.” (66) Of course, it is possible to interpret this invasion of the body's space by vegetal matter in much the same way that Roquentin interprets the chestnut tree in La Nausée. Such is Richard's approach:

Quand Yves Bonnefoy entreprend, à l'inverse de l'ordre regroupé que nous impose le concept, d'imaginer l'infinie dispersion où nous jette toute saisie un peu sincère de l'objet, sa pensée s'arrête de préférence dans l'ordre où la rupture semble se faire naturellement proliférante: l'ordre brut mais vivant du végétal.35

This tack, however, becomes impossible in the light of the poem's second quatrain, which begins: “Un vase décorait le seuil. Contre son marbre / Celui qui revenait sourit en s'appuyant.” (66) A vase decorated the threshold (the imperfect tense is significant. I will consider the importance of verbal tenses in Douve presently.) Leaning against a vase, a returning figure smiled. The image of someone approaching or returning recurs frequently in the poem, especially towards the end. Usually, the figure of a wanderer in Douve is associated with the notion of homelessness. For example, the first verse of “Voix basses et Phénix” is: “Tu fus sage d'ouvrir, il vint à la nuit,” (60) and an unnamed poem, the first one in “Vrai Lieu,” begins: “Qu'une place soit faite à celui qui approche, / Personnage ayant froid et privé de maison.” (81) A wanderer was returning, then, to a threshold adorned with a vase. Although he did not enter, the threshold was clearly promising access to a seminal site. The poem's title, loosely translated as “Here is the location of the fatherland,” implies that the “here” it designates is one of the poem's organizing centers. The site of the father, it is the locus of a stable and founding base. One expects this to be the “vrai lieu,” the clearing in which presence is unveiled. It is nothing of the kind.

The here (hic), the source to which a homeless wayfarer was returning, is nothing other than a poem: “Ainsi le jour baissait sur le lieudit Aux Arbres. / C'était jour de parole et ce fut nuit de vent.” (66) The site of ancestral authority is not an image of material density or even of vegetal proliferation. The “locus patriae” to which one who has been exiled returns is radically devoid of the kind of presence extolled by both Bonnefoy and his sympathetic readers. It is to an earlier poem, to the poem which Richard claims makes matter into language, that the exiled figure returns.

In Douve, therefore, a later poem refers to an earlier poem as a place. “Aux Arbres” is not simply a set of signs expending themselves in the service of a the pre- or post-semiotic, it is also, and perhaps foremost, a destination. In other words, we are in a position to do two things. Firstly, the role of “Aux Arbres” in Bonnefoy's catalog of artificial structures has been clarified. We are conjoined by the poem “Hic Est Locus Patriae” to think of trees not as natural objects beyond the sway of convention, but as images of the poem within the poem. Secondly, Richard's analysis of the poem “Aux Arbres” can now be read in the strongest possible manner. Trees are language, yes, but they are not language in search of a non-linguistic foundation. Trees are language inasmuch as trees are a poem. Ultimately, it is impossible to distinguish clearly between “les arbres” and “Aux Arbres.” The trees invading Douve's blood are both trees as a natural image and trees as a metaphor for the semiotic resources inherent in the poetic act. In the end, even the classic opposition between image and metaphor, or between writing as a transitive act and writing as an intransitive act, is rendered indistinct by Douve's retranscription of the notion of place.

The central concern in Douve is the constitution of a site in which poetry can house itself. The images of articulated space abounding in the poem, consequently, are in fact metaphors for the poem itself. However, even if we shift our focus from the revelation of an extra-poetic presence to the creation of a seam capable of housing poetry, one major problem remains. In a poem about poetry, “Art Poétique,” Bonnefoy asks the perhaps rhetorical question: “En quel âtre dresser le feu de ton visage / O Ménade saisie jetée la tête en bas?” (46) The art of poetry is to incorporate. However, even if the locus of a poem's concern is actually an image of the poem as place, it is still possible, especially in the light of a poem such as “Art Poétique,” to conceive of the poem's architecture as a body housing a non-poetic core of meaning. It appears that although much has been gained, I am in fact not far from the dialectical style of interpretation I am seeking to disturb. For although I am claiming that Douve is an investigation into the various modalities of its own spatialization, my reading seems to allow for the possibility of an extrasemiotic existence. The very notion of incorporation, or of return, implies the conceivability of an un-articulated site, of what Bonnefoy calls presence. “His Est Locus Patriae” does end, after all, with a reference to the wind, to that wind described in “III” of “Théâtre” as stronger than memory: “Il s'agissait d'un vent plus fort que nos mémoires.” (13) It can be demonstrated, in fact, that in general the necessity of a site is described in Douve in past tenses, while the possibility of rupture and transgression is described in the present or future (for example, “Demande pour tes yeux que les rompe la nuit, / Rien ne commencera qu'au delà de ce voile,” [58]). Consequently, the “nuit de vent” closing “His Est Locus Patriae” must be read as an allusion to a cleansing wind, a harbinger of transcendence towards regenerated presence.

We must therefore not evade the possibility that, despite Douve's inscription of its own articulated texture as the site wherein presence is smitten with finitude in order that it may announce itself, it may still be possible to think of the poem's architecture as the provisional incarnation of a content which can, in principle, exist without a body. During those moments in the poem when a site is understood as a stopover (for example, “L'orangerie, / Nécessaire repos qu'il rejoignait,” [67]), Douve appears to make the classic metaphysical assumption that it is possible to distinguish between two realms—pure presence and the location it sometimes adopts. If I am to offer a genuinely un-Hegelian reading of Douve, it is essential to engage the poem at precisely those junctures where a radically un-poetic experience appears to be suggested. To this end, I will consider certain of those metaphors for the meta-poetic that for many critics of Douve (and arguably for Bonnefoy himself) have come to characterize the poem's ultimate message.

In order to overcome the fundamental contradiction of attempting to say the unsayable, Bonnefoy resorts to what Richard would call a trap or subterfuge—a number of images of that ineffable presence presumed to lie outside the poem. There is the salamander. And, of course, there is Douve. First, however, let us consider the stag. Although critics often designate “Lieu de la salamandre” as the climax of Douve, it is interesting to note that the next poem, the last titled poem in the collection, is “Vrai lieu du cerf.” As such, the reader is led to expect that this poem will in some way designate the “true place” for which he assumes Douve has all the while been searching. The stag is distinguished from the salamander by its affinity for the forest. Whereas the salamander tends to merge with the rock upon which it crawls, the stag is more likely to lose itself among trees. And, since we have established a connection between trees and “Aux Arbres,” that is, between the tree as a symbol of nature and the tree as a metaphor for the sparse, articulated space of the poem, the stag is somehow implicated in the poem's self-representation. And yet, the stag is not the poem, at least not simply.

Let us begin with “Le seul témoin,” the next titled poem after “Aux Arbres.” To the extent that it describes the redemptive potential of death by fire, “Le seul témoin” is a typical Bonnefoy poem. It is, however, far more complex than just a mere hymn to resurrection. Towards the end of the poem, the narrator addresses the Douve-Phoenix figure:

                                                                                                              ô je fus,
Ménade consumée, dure joie mais perfide,
Le seul témoin, la seule bête prise
Dans ces rets de ta mort que furent sables
Ou rochers ou chaleur, ton signe disais-tu.

(35)

The poetic persona who speaks in the first person refers to himself as a witness and a sign. A witness is one who describes an event he observed in the past, or who observes an event so that he may describe it in the future. In either case, the notion of a witness is essentially wed to a futural representation of a past experience. In other words, a witness is one for whom the future is constituted by the potential recreation of the past. Consequently, rather than perceiving the future as the possible revelation of undifferentiated presence, the future exists for a witness as a story to be retold.

The sole witness, the narrator, is also a sign. He is a sign for Douve. Or perhaps he is Douve's sign, a sign belonging to Douve. In any case, as both sign and witness, the voice which says “I” is structured by flatness, articulation and representation. It is therefore not surprising that the next poem, “II,” has Douve fleeing into trees that are endowed with the potential for simulation: “Elle fuit vers les saules; le sourire / Des arbres l'enveloppe, simulant / La joie simple d'un jeu.” (36), and that “IV” suggests that Douve herself might be capable of deception: “Est-tu vraiment morte ou joues-tu / Encore à simuler la paleur et le sang, … Es-tu vraiment morte ou joues-tu / Encore en tout miroir” (38). To be a sign for something else, to be a witness remembering the future, or to be a tree whose branches are the mark of an immemorial fissure is also, and perhaps primarily, to be impregnated with the instability of the simulacrum. The narrator, while looking for a way to sublate his essentially intersubjective relation with Douve, discovers that he is a witness to a possible act of deception. And, to the extent that Douve is also a tree, insofar as both are capable of presenting themselves as other than they are, the witness who says “I” is ultimately deprived of a fixed standard by which to distinguish between presence and representation.

The stag returns in the next poem, “V.” With tree-like antlers on its head, the decidedly male stag is one of a host of masculine figures in the poem (le Phénix, le chevalier de deuil, various unnamed “il”s, the narrator, etc.) contrasting with the feminine Douve and salamander. The stag is missing. Furthermore, the missing stag is the one who gave testimony (in the passé simple) concerning Douve's death and silence:

Où maintenant est le cerf qui témoigna
Sous ces arbres de justice,
Qu'une route de sang par elle fut ouverte,
Un silence nouveau par elle inventé.

(39)

Like the “je,” who is also a witness, the stag is a male observer of a feminine artifact. In addition, the stag and the narrator both speak in the place of Douve, who for the part remains silent (except, perhaps, in the section named “Douve Parle,” and even there Douve's central concern is to be named). If Douve is, as the poem certainly suggests, a metaphor for the experience of presence, then that experience appears to exist only as the result, not as the cause, of an essentially belated testimony. Underneath the trees of justice, the stag reported that Douve blazed a new path of silence. The stag itself is absent in the present of the narration, and Douve, the object of his testimony, can, like the site of his testimony (the trees), prove to be a fruitless detour. Far from a simple metaphor for the annihilation and regeneration of something like a “concrete universal,” Douve appears to be strangely similar to the house that bears her.

Much later in Douve, in “Lieu de la salamandre,” the salamander, previously described as a kind of future promised land (“Le pays le plus beau longtemps cherché / S'étendra devant nous terre des salamandres.” (65), returns to its proper site. The sluggish, stone-like salamander, which Mary Ann Caws, following Bonnefoy's own analysis, characterizes as the dialectical resolution of the binary opposition between the particular and the universal: “the specific image in its universal essence (“la salamandre”) includes at once the salamander on this wall and all others.”36, is clearly intended to be a symbol of universal material presence: “Que j'aime qui s'accorde aux astres par l'inerte / Masse de tout son corps,” (85). As such, it is reminiscent of Douve, who is, among other things, a river and a heath. And, like Douve, it is capable of subterfuge: “La salamandre surprise s'immobilise / Et feint la mort” (85). Of course, the salamander's dissimulation is intended as a provisional gesture (“Tel est le premier pas de la conscience dans les pierres,” [85]), yet the fact that the voice which refers to itself as “I” can even think the possibility of deception implies that, like Douve, the salamander may be a kind of particular staunchly resistant to assimilation into the universal homogeneity of presence.

Just as the salamander can merge with stone, the stag is capable of becoming a forest. “Vrai lieu du Cerf” begins:

Un dernier cerf se perdant
Parmi les arbres,
Le sable retentira
Du pas d'obscurs arrivants.

(86)

With the verb a present participle, a last stag is losing itself among the trees. While he is entering into their texture, the auditory trace of dark arriving figures (can writing—“quelle écriture noire”—be far away?) echoes in the sand. A stag, then, who earlier testified under the trees, is now escaping into them just as unknown wanderers return to a house reminiscent of the Chapelle Brancacci (if only because of the repetition of “dalles”). The stag escapes into the sound of obscure footsteps, into the house that he carries on his head, ultimately into that dark writing that is the fabric of the poem:

Dans la maison traversée
Du bruit des voix,
L'alcool du jour déclinant
Se répandra sur les dalles.
Le cerf qu'on a cru retrait
Soudain s'évade.
Je pressens que ce jour a fait
Votre poursuite inutile.

(86)

The chase is futile because the threshold which constitutes the stag's space leads to no clearing. Dashing into that forest that Richard sees as bridge to presence, the stag finds himself in his true place, in the poem that produced him, in the trees. Ultimately, critics of Douve are correct. Douve is the salamander, and both are the stuff about which the stag testifies. However, the poem does not choreograph a rhythmic retreat into something like a “universal concrete.” There is no salvation here. There is just Douve.

In “XIII” of “Théâtre,” the first person narrator addresses Douve:

Ton visage ce soir éclairé par la terre
Mais je vois tes yeux se corrompre
Et le mot visage n'a plus de sens.

(23)

In the presence of Douve's face, the word face loses its meaning. This seminal metaphysical opposition, contrasting sign and referent, is the condition of possibility of the thinkability of the desire to escape into a depth beyond poetry. And yet, like the stag whose true place is the frustratingly flat “lieudit Aux Arbres,” the “je” cannot extricate himself from his role as witness:

La mer intérieure éclairée d'aigles tournants,
Ceci est une image.
Je te détiens froide à une profondeur où les images
                                        ne prennent plus.

(23)

“La mer intérieure” is an image, certainly. And the narrator desires to tear it apart so as to descend into a depth whose very density is a hostile environment for poetry. But it is not only “la mer intérieure” that is an image. The verse “Ceci est une image” is itself an image. In fact, to the extent that the signifier image is a catachresis (an essentially metaphoric term, since the object it would designate lacks a proper name), the verse is an infinitely regressive abyss. Despite the narrator's desire to transcend the poetic image, the word ceci cannot help but testify to the flat intransitivity of his language. If he knew where to look, the narrator imagines he could see beyond the realm of images into the heart of things. Using ceci as a pointer, he would designate the depth of presence and then cast his tool aside. Unfortunately, as he knows when he is the stag, the place to which he aspires has never existed as such; it only exists as the product of the vehicle he would use to reach it. Throw that away, and there is nothing. Even the “profondeur où les images ne prennent plus” is an image.

In the end, all the narrator's efforts to break through poetry into presence are frustrated not simply because the language he must adopt as an instrument with which to effect his transgression is itself haunted by the memory of its own semiotic dispersion; it is not simply that he constantly finds himself in a flat house trying to peer into what is not a house; the ultimate failure to attain a depth beyond poetry is that the depth is itself profoundly poetic. Like the stag who can only escape into the poem that created him, the narrator seeks to find in Douve the solace of pure presence only to discover that Douve is absolutely nothing beyond the long and taunting place called Douve.

Notes

  1. See, for example, Jackson, John E., La question du moi (Neuchatel: Baconnière, 1978); Richard, Jean-Pierre, Onze études sur la poésie moderne (Paris; Seuil, 1964); Winspur, Steven, “The Poetic Significance of the Thing-in-Itself” (Sub Stance, Vol. XII, No. 4, 1983); Arndt, Beatrice, La quête poétique d'Yves Bonnefoy (Zurich: Juris Druck et Verlag Zurich, 1970); and Caws, Mary Ann, The Inner Theatre of Recent French Poetry (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972).

  2. Bonnefoy, “Sur la fonction du poème,” in Le nuage rouge (Paris: Mercure de France, 1977), p. 268.

  3. “Sur la fonction du poème,” p. 278.

  4. “Sur la fonction du poème,” p. 280.

  5. “Sur la fonction du poème,” p. 270.

  6. Derrida, Jacques, Positions (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972), p. 37.

  7. Positions, pp. 38-9.

  8. “But enough of such topsy-turvy theories: No theory we can conceive can mislead us in regard to the principle of all principles: that the very primordial dator Intuition is a source of authority (Rechtsquelle) for knowledge, that whatever presents itself in ‘intuition’ in primordial form (as it were in its bodily reality), is simply to be accepted as it gives itself to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself.” (Husserl, Edmund, Ideas [New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1931], no. 24.

  9. Bonnefoy, “L'acte et le lieu de la poésie,” reprinted in Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 204-5.

  10. “L'acte et le lieu de la poésie,” p. 195.

  11. “L'acte et le lieu de la poésie,” p. 204.

  12. Bonnefoy, “La poésie française et le principe d'identité,”in Un rêve fait à Mantou (Paris: Mercure de France, 1968), p. 95.

  13. “La poésie française et le principe d'identité,” pp. 95-6.

  14. “La poésie française et le principe d'identité,” p. 96.

  15. “La poésie française et le principe d'identité,” p. 98.

  16. “La poésie française et le principe d'identité,” p. 98-9.

  17. According to Heidegger, identify is the product of difference. See Identity and Difference (New York, Harper and Row, 1974).

  18. Cf. Roquentin's experience of the chestnut tree in La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938): “Ou plutôt la racine, les grilles du jardin, le banc, le gazon rare de la pelouse, tout ça s'était évanoui; la diversité des choses, leur individualité n'était qu'une apparence, un verni. Ce verni avait fondu, il restait des masses monstrueuses et molles, en désordre—nues, d'une effrayante et obscène nudité.” (p. 180).

  19. Bonnefoy, L'Improbable (Paris: Mercure de France, 1959), p. 23.

  20. For the relation between the negative forms of Hegelianism and Christianity, as it pertains to the work of Bonnefoy, see Blanchot, Maurice, “Le Grand Refus,” (La Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 82, October, 1959).

  21. “Le Grand Refus,” p. 685.

  22. “Sur la fonction du poème,” p. 268.

  23. “L'acte et le lieu de la poésie,” p. 211.

  24. “L'acte et le lieu de la poésie,” p. 206.

  25. “Sur la fonction du poème,” p. 271.

  26. “Sur la fonction du poème,” p. 270.

  27. The Inner Theatre of Recent French Poetry, p. 150.

  28. La question du moi, p. 251.

  29. In Onze études sur la poésie moderne.

  30. Onze études sur la poésie moderne, p. 227.

  31. Onze études sur la poésie moderne, p. 229.

  32. Onze études sur la poésie moderne, p. 229.

  33. Bonnefoy, Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (Paris: Mercure de France, 1967), p. 33. All future references to Douve will be to this edition and will be indicated by a page reference following a citation.

  34. See Derrida, “Signature Evénement Contexte,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972).

  35. “Onze études sur la poésie moderne,” p. 217.

  36. The Inner Theatre of Recent French Poetry, p. 143.

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