Stances on Love
[In the following review, Mus provides a stylistic analysis of Dans le leurre du seuil, asserting that Bonnefoy's verse is grandiloquent and difficult for English-speaking readers.]
“Je veux que la fréquentation d'un maître me rende à moi-même; toutes les fois que je sors de chez Poussin, je sais mieux qui je suis.” I would love to apply this mot of Cézanne's to my reading of Yves Bonnefoy's new book [Dans le leurre du seuil]. If only I knew more about myself, or about him for that matter, as I put it down … But the élan with which I enter the experience is broken page by page. I am put off, simply, by the grand language—by the persistent abstractions, the rarefied metaphorical cast, the lofty tone and the difficulty of knowing, in such staginess, what at any moment is going on. In short, very much the difficulties I experience before one of those passionately rhetorical paintings of Poussin, apropos of which after all Cézanne was speaking. Painting, poem—it is all about something else than him and me; it deals resolutely with what I have to guess at, of which “we” are scarcely even aspects.
The rest of Cézanne's judgment gives me a way out: “Imaginez Poussin refait entièrement sur nature, voilà le classique que j'entends. Ce que je n'admets pas, c'est le classique qui vous borne. Je veux que la fréquentation d'un maître … etc.” Should I in order to make contact with this artist imagine him “refait entièrement sur nature”? Will it only be at the price of this distortion that I enter his work? The poet is not limiting me by interposing rhetoric between me and his experience, rather I feel borné as it is, my limits are being, from the first words—“Mais non”, already a rhetorical gesture—both challenged and confirmed. What I come to know better through this rendezvous manqué, however I take it, is not what I think I am but what I might become through the poem if only I could get past its language. Maybe that is just what Cézanne meant?
This experience, of being routed into a poem through an elaborately contrived defeat of immediacy, has a flavor of déjà vu. Have I ever read a French poem which did not produce it? Not to draw you in at once with the communication of an experience, but to circle off into weighty words and constructions, wheel and posture as in a tedious gavotte—a certain grandiloquence is the hallmark of la poésie, its claim to fame or at the least to a mystique.
Mais non, toujours
D'un déploiement de l'aile de l'impossible
Tu t'éveilles, avec un cri,
Du lieu, qui n'est qu'un rêve …
My reaction to such prancing is equally familiar: we are all, we moderns, leery of what we call with a grimace “rhetoric” because it smacks of posturing and calculation. We wince before statements of general truth in starched language as surely as we shrink from a touch of simple sentiment. We are nervous in fact about saying anything, hearing anything, about life, or truth, or the world, or ourselves, that does not spring from someone's irrefutable experience. Whatever you say about me without knowing me reeks of arrogance, parental, pedagogical, or patrician. Individual experience—le vécu—must guarantee all plausible speech: that is, as we cogently put it, our “outlook”.
There are good reasons why such views should prevail. “Poetry” sounded at the beginning of this century much more like “poésie”; the two terms carried a similar prestige. There are equally good reasons why la poésie should have retained its highfalutin cast, despite valiant tries at making it racy, direct, and concrete. Usually we allege the advent of Malherbe, as it was put even then (poor old bogeyman, always cited, never read). But Malherbe's was a conservative intelligence; medieval French poetry, even at its most pithy and spare, even Rutebeuf, even Villon, is steeped in rhetoric and bound to a stringently erudite versification. La poésie française remains today an abstruse craft to a degree we English-speakers can hardly conceive.
I am deliberately blurring distinctions drawn by words like “grandiloquent”, “rhetorical”, “classical”, “erudite”, “craft”, so as to point out the one direction we have to face when we read French poetry, any French poetry, even that which has strained for something else. Does the picture we get, which can so easily put us off, only confirm the lapalissade that French is French and English, English? No, these languages are today not only versions of their own past, forging ahead, but great partners and rivals, dialectical views of the virtualities of language itself. The relation has been explicit in the law courts since 1066; and in poetry, since Chaucer and Deschamps made the bond one of friendship. French had much to give us then, and notably abstractions in their relation to substance. If a pig was stuck in the barnyard, pork was served at table. Written French has never stopped cultivating its classy side, drawing steadily away from the wide-ranging, tolerant, popular bent of English as well as from its own colloquial temptations.
Take the words of the title before us. “Leurre” has no remote connection with the bit of bright red leather tossed in the air to lure the falcon down. I even doubt if we can catch in the word a hint of the glittering fly arching into the trout stream. The word cannot be used metaphorically, it has withered to an abstraction, and yet … and yet from its fastness in the mind, the word can be made as here to turn back into the out-of-doors, through its power to name the ineffable yet deeply familiar force which draws us out to hunt and fish. Similarly, what we cross, rod in hand, is not this stone slab under door-posts, worn smooth and hollow, solid and homely beyond thought; but a threshold hung as by magic somewhere in the world of Being. Like “le leurre”, “le seuil” brings us back to the specific and concrete through its links with art and artifacts, with images and substance, perfectly matched by the spell the word itself casts as sight and sound.
When we say “threshold”, this stone is here. We move past its hard and fast singular densities, reach towards its specialized figured uses and arrive, if ever, at pure meaning. English looks out along the myriad aspects of a foreground into the distant prospect of significance. French has long since retired to its room with its bag of choice meanings to pore over them into the wee hours. Such vignettes are our way of putting it; a Frenchman would talk of mirrors and spheres, of acceptance and exclusion, of presence and purity and the sacred. In what other language could the theater of essences be the work of a man named Racine? or the founder of theatrical eloquence bear the name Corneille? These are differences in metaphysical bias; they have fascinated us from the start. To the question, Why read French poetry? we could answer, Because we always have; which solves a great deal, but not the more urgent problem, What have I to learn from French? and more pointedly, Why should I read or try to read Yves Bonnefoy?
All the more trying in that M. Bonnefoy has not made things easy for his English-speaking friends. He has not taken in his new book, the first in ten years, any of the currently favored avenues of escape from eloquence. He has found rather an old entry into the place where the search for “one's own voice” lights on that of language and exults. This exultation, the tone of the explorer and adventurer of an ancien régime, is what we hear as grandiloquence. Its resemblance to the traditional edifice of rhetoric, or to our own version of the high-flown (the far-fetched) is only apparent, though the appearance counts. Grandiloquence seems to us superadded, fulsome, dispensable—scaffolding you clear away, Latin magnificence you edit out in order to get down to bedrock, the simple telling Anglo-Saxon roots, the way people really speak. There is not such an alternative for French. True, siroter moves no one while boire is busy making its point. Yet the decision to be made line by line is not at all stylistic, between plain words simply arranged and the recherché terms welded into complex constructions. Rather the French poet has the choice between words and word-orders which convey a notion, or else those which carry conviction. An impersonal conviction: words like fleur, mur, vin, épaule—or énigme, présence, absolu, for that matter—can be made to clang like a buoy when lifted by the swell of verse. This magisterial clamor is like that of the sea: not always joyous, never without grandeur. It is a grandiloquence at the heart of a language, which one reaches by a sedulous, a strenuous attending to the power of words to mean more than they either name or suggest, and by setting aside both the sensual and the conceptual with their claim to a monopoly of valid signification. The word fleur brings us into the presence of something which noting the delightful aspects of a hollyhock can blind us to, and which vanishes without a trace when we set on it with a pack of concepts. The “place” of presence and of conviction, ce lieu, can open to us before any object; it is the unmistakably meaningful clearing this poetry invites us into.
We imagine rhetorical language to be justified only by the other acts of language it permits—the way we used to think Metaphysical poetry was saved from its rhetorical character by its sensuous imagery—the way we assume a course of purposeful action is only redeemed from insincerity by specific acts of purpose. The concentration on meaningfulness alone may seem to reduce much poetry in English to catalogues, anecdotes, legal briefs, chiding and rapture. But to speak such lofty speech, pursuing as a purpose an intensely articulated, restricted vision, is already to have meaning, is someone meaning, meaning towards, thrusting out, vers, “plus avant”. The hard-headed English stylist may only hear from across the water l'art pour l'art or else that intellectualizing pretension known, after its unwitting American parent, as la Poësie. The fact remains, putting meaningfulness before meaning, mindfulness before concepts: these thrusts define a poetic which side-steps critical categories and contemporary viewpoints. Hence the peculiarly patrician tone of its authority, the elusive nature of its claim on our attention, the anachronistic not to say archaic bent of its shameless eloquence.
What is it then, this poetry, about?—not, What does it mean? since le sens is subordinated to a purpose, but, What is it up to? What I called the rarefied metaphorical cast of Yves Bonnefoy's language makes it hard to say, yet gives us a clue. In French poetry there is no such thing as literalism, not even the fiction of literalism which even the most sustained directness, in Spenser or in Whitman, comes down to. Instead French has an immediacy of figure and a complication of mediating voice which English cannot match. All naming in a French poem stands for the act of naming. To say “une fleur” is to say “Je dis: ‘une fleur’”. There have been voices which broke on the silence where literalism lives, unappeased by eloquence; we hear no authentically broken, inelegant voices … At the same time, placed on a page the word flowers into metaphorical bloom, into essential significance, le sens, arch-traitor to the cause of immediacy. Between the “Je dis” and the outrageous blossoming of meaning, this pink hollyhock, here and now, mine and yours, is effaced—in the worst of cases is vanished, as the magicians say, by an astonishing and sometimes irresponsible legerdemain. This middle kingdom of the hic et nunc Yves Bonnefoy has set out to explore and conquer for poetry.
For French poetry, because he writes not just in French but in that high dialect called la parole poétique. Inescapably, in such a self-conscious medium, an affirmation of the here and now takes the form of a “Je dis” and becomes matter for a meaning. An old dialectic reaffirms itself. The art of Yves Bonnefoy in his new book is to have let it do so, within his own focus and intent, while respecting the build and bearing of the ancient French poetical act—while making what we recognize as a true French poem. In it, words come to have all they can of the literal: the immediacy of grand scenes made of close-knit, humble things, la table, l'éponge, l'enfant—a cuisine of representative items having abundant meaningfulness but no single reference, something like the Passion instruments, borne by angels in thin air. Up until five or six years ago, each day placed a stunning example of such language before every generation of French poets: the Latin liturgy, an ancestral accomplice as telling, as immediate as the famous Anglo-Saxon roots. Yves Bonnefoy's poetry means to recreate, réinventer, a secular liturgy. What is celebrates is not just the here and now, but le lieu, l'heure, the substance of the substantif, which the French definite article keeps indicating; not the, nor yet this here and now, but—how should I say?—“the this here”, “the this now”.
Substance, presence, the here and now: these realities are always on the tip of our tongue. If we cannot quite speak them, it is because of the dead space, the dark flaw, unutterable, which the thing itself opposes to the light of speech. Can we somehow celebrate that too? Celebration is a mystery; the word pain names not this bread I break, but the humble thing dignified by its otherness, by its inscrutable reserve. The word takes me into the secret of the loaf, which is not its essence, elsewhere, but the reason why this or any such thing has value, “value” to which both concepts and objects are to be referred in weighing their truth, “truth” which is not primarily an attribute either of postulates (“Je dis”) or of things (“une fleur”). Extend this vision of their strength to all words, not just to the venerable dignitaries of the language but also to upstart parvenus like la télévision or la fourgonnette, and the whole language wheels round, brings us back toward objects on a new slant. In the same way the generalizing of the trope “une fleur = ‘Je dis: “une fleur”’” makes over the page of poetry, which becomes itself a metaphor for speech, “feuillage”, an allegory or extended metaphor condoning each failure of literalism and charging with the significance of the act of utterance everything on it.
If in this poetry the language gives us the meaningfulness and value of particular objects; if the page gives us in advance the act of utterance—where then should we find the poet and his experience? the story, the history, of his encounter with what is not himself? Someone is there, rising before dawn with a cry from his dream, leaving a rumpled bed, going to the window, getting a glass of water, tepid in the heat, grappling with first words, first sights and sounds, on the very edge of language … But his person is dissolved in the consciousness of the terrifying, austere conditions of even these simplest acts. This intimate mise en scène is itself a mock-up, a tableau vivant; the person is a figure, who can only speak of himself, precisely, in the second person:
Et tu te lèves une éternelle fois
Dans cet été qui t'obsède …
Such a figure questions the objects which insist on seeming to surround and include him, he gathers their message and speaks for them: not “Je dis” like himself, but “Je consens”. Their consent is not to a beneficent order, merely to a living totality of which his language gives the image, to an appertaining of each to each and to the conditions of being there—appartenance, tutoiement which are those of the articulate questioner as well.
Question and answer are always rhetorical, what the objects say standing for what this object might have said if as in English the poet had, at a particular moment, met it within a mood, interrogated it through his senses, then let it speak as if for itself on the page. L'eau, this tepid water in the cracked jelly-glass this morning, is also l'eau the elemental, one of the four ancients, worthy to be interviewed on the great questions, noble enough to reply through our voice. As for the object itself, it never has to appear in court: French poetry has for long been burdened by that vaguely patronizing wonder, when “objects” or the out-of-doors come into view, which we associate with the classically-educated intellectual and the inveterate city-dweller. As for the poet's own experience, it goes without saying: hence that authority, that sureness of touch and mastery of purpose—that high hand, so often galling—which we associate with the artist who never leaves his studio to work sur le motif. Both these sumptuous contributions to eloquence should be seen as the outcome of the Frenchman's experience of his own experience: a most poignant pudeur.
In English, for a long time—perhaps since Sir Thomas Wyatt, the first whose experience matters to us even at all?—any particular has been able to act as a figure for our experience of it. To place the word “daffodils” on a bare page would be to say, Here are daffodils, or, I saw daffodils, while recalling the poem which sums up for us the encounter of the roaming mind with anchored particulars. This is still the way our poetry works. One thinks for example of Richard Eberhart's remarkable meeting with a dead groundhog … Take though a similarly remarkable passage from Dans le leurre du seuil, where the poet recounts the death of a dear friend, the musicologist Boris de Schloezer. It is an achievement of his art, not a failure, that you do not know finally whether the poet was present. The language does not give us his experience and is not meant to. It moves us rather from its own realm, an exalted ouï-dire, a surmise, towards what might be experienced. The language, that is to say, is tendentious; the words have a dynamism, a direction, they exert a pressure. To find common ground, the translator has to push an equal distance the opposite way:
Aujourd'hui le passeur
N'a d'autre rive que bruyante, noire
Et Boris de Schloezer, quand il est mort
Entendant sur l'appontement une musique
Dont ses proches ne savaient rien (était-elle, déjà,
La flûte de la délivrance révélée
Ou un ultime bien de la terre perdue,
“Oeuvre”, transfigurée?)—derrière soi
N'a laissé que ces eaux brûlées d'énigme.
Ô terre,
Étoiles plus violentes n'ont jamais
Scellé l'orée du ciel de feux plus fixes,
Appel plus dévorant de berger dans l'arbre
N'a jamais ravagé été plus obscur.
…
Terre,
Qu'avait-il aperçu, que comprenait-il,
Qu'accepta-t-il?
Il écouta, longtemps,
Puis il se redressa, le feu
De cette oeuvre qui atteignait,
Qui sait, à une cime
De déliements, de retrouvailles, de joie
Illumina son visage.
Bruit, clos,
De la perche qui heurte le flot boueux,
Nuit
De la chaîne qui glisse au fond du fleuve.
Ailleurs,
Là où j'ignorais tout, où j'écrivais,
Un chien peut-être empoisonné griffait
L'amère terre nocturne.
Nowadays the ferryman
Must ply a dark, and chattering shore …
And Boris de Schloezer, as he was dying,
Hearing from the jetty music
Those who loved him best could not make out (was it,
So soon, a piping from across the waters?
Or a last gift from the departed shores,
Life-work transfigured?)—behind him left
His passage, these waters charred inscrutable.
Oh earth—
Never has a crueller race of stars
Sealed heaven's lid with flames more fixed;
No all-consuming cry of shepherd from his tree
Has ever ravaged summer so obscure.
…
Earth, what had he glimpsed, what grasped
And what accepted?
He listened, for a long time,
Then he drew himself up, the flame
Of that work reaching to
A summit, who can say,
Of deliverance, reconciliation, joy,
Lit up his face.
Brief sound, blind;
Pole striking into the muddy stream,
Night
Of that chain which drags along the bottom.
Elsewhere,
Where I knew nothing of it, where I wrote,
A dog, perhaps he was poisoned, clawed
At the bitter, benighted earth.
What, or where, is the common ground? The poet is not alienated from what we call “his own” experience—“Je consens” is his watchword—neither cut off nor brutally present as the modern poet in English is likely to be; but eternally detached, at a precise distance, un écart; eternally elsewhere, ailleurs, in a world of images which are not appearance nor illusion nor mere dream, rather the substance of all three. A language of images which precede and determine experience, where things and their meaning maintain an easy commerce, where “rhetoric” is a natural employment of logic: such a language is familiar to us through the tradition of thought and writing which modern (romantic) poetry renounced, that of the Elizabethans. A language determined to come to grips, from its stronghold in the universals, with the starkly or the joyously singular; a language of place, where the grievances which rule our lives can play themselves out dialectically: this is the language of the theater. Yves Bonnefoy has translated half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays and written of the translator's problems. His new book, like his last, bears an epigraph from The Winter's Tale, in which we watch the two aging kings discover the miracle of Perdita's rebirth: “They look'd as if they had heard of a world ransom'd, or one destroyed”. Dans le leurre du seuil is written as an homage to this play, to its author, and to its promise of a possible, a here-and-now redemption.
The faces of the royal friends confronting this unmerited, unexpected, unbelievably joyous new lease on life, as acutely seen by the anonymous courtier, express an equivocation: “A notable passion of wonder appeared in them. But the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say if the importance were joy or sorrow …” What do we know in the theater that redeems seeing from equivocation? We know, beyond the speeches of any one character, the set of the whole play's imagery, which sustains its dialectic. Lunacy and reason, cruel jealousy and burning love—these can be arbitrated by a single language which affirms them all. It does so by composing once for all with the grief and hazard of unreasonable circumstance, disorder, bafflement, surprise, and death. A love of the creature world, in its place among over-mastering stars, has staged our crazy tale.
This love, this eagerness of our language to conjure with broken and imperfect destinies, gives today's poet in French an example, with paradigmatic value, of one thing which can be done. Shakespeare to the French has never been a fait accompli as in the famous German translations, but a renewed discovery, an élan of the whole sensibility of the language. Voltaire, Stendhal, Mallarmé each tried to make this thrust explicit; Victor Hugo and Claudel tried to reproduce it in the theater, from the distance of their own tradition. Such is this distance in time, in life, and in art, that the approach to Shakespeare could never be other than an attitude. Yet such is the central place of attitudes in French literary life that to take one up—even to strike one—is to commit yourself on principle to a way of life and to defending your choice with statements about what is fitting. To take up Shakespeare, thus, is to commit yourself, intellectually, to his affirmation of love and to its language.
One might put it, for Yves Bonnefoy, that l'amour des êtres passe par une prise de position, c'est-à-dire par une image. The yearning thrust into life is a movement of art, words and their patterns, a projet, a recherche, an expérience; in sum, an oeuvre. While in English we think no art truly important which does not proceed from that thrust and affirm it! That in French the image itself should precede the affirmation, an image through which consciousness enters the world, this further complication of awareness and intent gives its intellectualizing twist to what familiars of art know as l'art. That the élan towards living particulars—broken, imperfect, ephemeral—should require statement to goad it on and complete its geste—apostrophe, prosopopoeia, tableaux vivants, all the rhetorical finery of an appeal, un appel, self-addressed first of all—this most unhappy bind is now, openly, in this volume, the poet's drama.
The poet takes a stance on love: this is the awkward posture of those who feel the weight of an inheritance, that of a literary language, as a responsibility to take up, an opportunity to seize and a debt to pay. This paradox, which the notion “a literary language” already embodies, has been for the most responsible a living dialectic, as best expounded by that most aware of French poets in poems he called Les Fleurs du mal. Since, the emphasis but not the burden has shifted, as the titles indicate, from the person to the place where pain is transcended. (Dans le leurre du seuil rings as an affectionate echo of, and reply to, André du Bouchet's Dans la chaleur vacante.) The page has become an opening before which one stands, that pre-dawn window through which, in the early parts of the book, the poet can peer past the walls of his dark image-haunted house. For this stance on love does not go without saying. There are other attitudes to acknowledge, or to combat, and first of all in oneself. There is coldness, amour-propre, fear; further on, here come denials, refusals, aloofness; and even further, lying in ambush, the whole troop of previous commitments, and ambition, disdain, indifference. Each of these must be given its place and its voice in the total drama to which the poet has said “Oui!” and “Je consens!” The grand language which stymied us at first is not thus oratory; but an authentic theatrical eloquence.
It takes an expert reader to know at any point who is speaking and in what voice. Beneath the dialogue, however, within the imagery, a dialectic unfolds which most of us are better equipped to follow. The opposing thrusts of English and French, for example: The Winter's Tale deals differently with the theme of redemption which is also Poussin's in his three versions of Moïse sauvé des eaux, whose imagery the poem also studies and expands. Thus our century, when the 17th asks it to stand and deliver, distinguishes, compares, synthesizes in its own untrained but generous fashion. Thus too, within what has come to be known as l'écriture, a dialectic of modes: the word, le verbe, saying itself, la parole flogging itself on towards an acceptance of experience—this painful spectacle of wanderings, survivals, and recognitions vies as illumination with the hieratic simplicities, with the composure, the bright elegance of the pastoral and the pictorial. Writing as a continuing discovery, a progressive revelation; l'oeuvre as it becomes itself and then le livre, an organic whole built on growth and whole parts—these indulgences of process war with an Apollonian temptation to conceive it all in advance, make it perfect, impose a polished conceptual order on inert materials which can't talk back, achieve l'Oeuvre in le Livre, the complete world-grammar or book of spells, grimoire supposedly so dear to Mallarmé.
We take it for granted that the page of poetry should reconcile conflicting strains in a new music. Black and white harmonize there without exciting the wonder with which the gourmet discovers Port and Stilton, or should I say chambolle-musigny and brie? Connoisseurs will find in Yves Bonnefoy's versification delight enough and wonder, page by page, to smooth down any number of feathers ruffled by his grandeur. He is a conscientious craftsman, the prosody of his new book flows from the dialectical situations we have just been examining. They can in fact only be disjoined by a critical artifice, drama and imagery owing their existence to arrangements on a printed page. This page, in this book, has become the formal unit of poetry. We take it for granted also that some kind of mediating form should stand on the page between it and the verse—even if only a form of regularity or consistent irregularity—subtly controlling our attention. Here the disorder of the lines, like the seemingly haphazard leafage of a tree, alternately masks and reveals the framework on which it has grown. This framework, which we divine before we see it, evinces on close scrutiny the functional intelligence of a system without a system's rigidity.
Nothing more modern than to set aside the classic mediations; nothing more contemporary than to pretend to eliminate formal mediation itself. Nothing more artful than to have picked up the discarded fragments and rearranged them in a mocking collage or a deceitful appliqué—but the arch and the cunning are not, mercifully, elements of this very earnest book. The traditional versification has been shattered, yes; but only to permit a reassessment of its strengths and a rehabilitation, not of its appearance but of its original bias. There is, the poet is telling us, no such thing as a “personal” versification, for this would be a conscientious failure to versify. Verse means belonging to a tradition—in one's own way, yet this way is authenticated by the rites of belonging, is no more “mine” than the language I speak. That language has its rules. To use it is to respect them freely, not to kowtow. Yves Bonnefoy has rethought syllabic versification, the French rules, even the perfectly traditional breaking of them.
The basic unit here is the broken alexandrin, the hemistich of six syllables (the title is a good example) which can become the old lofty line when occasion demands a lofty emphasis; which more often, with four syllables added, turns into a reversed or else a disjointed decasyllable; and which sometimes takes on five syllables more to make up the rare hendecasyllable, the verse of the Absolute, of the One. Each of these lines, even the incompleted gesture towards them, even their perversions, permutations and approximations, has its rôle in the dramatic pattern of the page. Each contributes a tone, largely traditional; each also comments in its own voice on what is being said by the dramatic voice which uses it and the kind of imagery it supports. For number, the poet is telling us, lives everywhere in our world, in all its forms, to which as to all else we may cry “Je consens!” Like the past, like redemption, like perfection and eternity, number does not vanish from our horizon merely because we have ceased to believe in it. Rather it endures, curiously strengthened, as an image, un leurre, called still to play its part in the drama of the human mind. Number is everywhere: on each different page of virtually 26 lines; in the pagination, so carefully arranged, the prime numbers insistent; even down to the 19 points which mark the gaps between speech and silence.
Number as presence, then, on the page; number also as image of what is absent, as leurre: this dialectic takes us into the most important dimension of the prosody. The tradition of syllabic verse, I have said, is one of rules kept and of rules broken. There is no adhering to a tradition except from outside, just as there is no breaking with it until its rules and their spirit have been so exteriorized as to seem no longer yourself, but something a self can renounce. The “number” that is everywhere is not the same “number” that those knew, in Poussin's time, say, who belonged to it. That number—those syllables or those proportions, like the other classic mediations, ode, altar-piece, architected nave—defined a community of belief. What is the number that remains with us—a mocking sign of our community of unbelief? Or something more? To use an alexandrin now is both to raise and to answer this question. Shakespeare, Poussin, Malherbe: the past has come and gone leaving on the mind's retina a burning image. And not just “an image” nor yet “the image”, but l'image. The page as a form of consciousness stands over number as presence, number as absence, and creates from their deadlock, from the desuetude of their promise of order and community, a new promise, un seuil. The leurre may be only a mirage; it can also be a “nuée”—a radiant elemental form, imaginative entry into the meaningful. The image may be a cruel reiterating deception; or else a revenant with news from the past or the beyond. And our belief that we have a say in where such figures lead us may illustrate our credulousness, or else the ultimate bad faith of art. These dilemmas, at any event, define the place where we stand; our good faith will sanction no other.
The tradition has been there. We are released now even from the choice of adhering to it or renouncing it from outside. To use its terms is to name literally our consciousness of this freedom—or else the unaccountable ways we have yet to find we are still part of it. Le leurre is that of which l'art now gives a literal rendering, expounding its grammar, researching its provenance, guiding its growth, highlighting its truth. Poetry having been essentially a use of language, then a form of language, then for long a quality of language, looks now, in these pages, like a responsibility of speech to its better self: the conscience of language. Not, I should say, a responsibility to one's better self, at least not oneself as we know it, the individual, personal experience hedging our approach to knowledge. “Self”, “individual”, “personal”, “experience”, even “knowledge”, even “tradition”—these are the old terms. They provide us with an image, not of what we have lost—vain nostalgia—but of what we might become if only we could get past their grandiloquence. Faced with the claims of scientific discourse to deal with generalizable fact, poetry takes responsibility for universalizable insight, what we used to identify with knowledge of truths, or with the moral sense, or, more baldly, with wisdom. These are long-accepted commonplaces, yet they locate in our current prose the far more precise and interesting imperative to which the poem alone can bring us. Here is no wisdom—thank heaven! sighs modern taste—but the struggle of a man to make his peace with the claim on him of his own inmost speech. He does it by adding to poetic language a new layer of consciousness.
Yet another layer … Is such a thing possible after the work of Paul Valéry? Eliot thought not, and claimed in his essay From Poe to Valéry that a return to some form of naïvety was more likely. Yet naïvety in another sense may be just what we have yet to transcend. The possible degrees of heightened awareness are after all infinite; there is no reason why, like the individual, poetry may not keep on climbing and cultivating them. All it risks is a further narrowing of its audience, a risk to be taken with full knowledge of poetry's powers to educate and persuade. The natural capacities of a language may be no more natural than the artful uses we put them to. The recent advances in the recording of personal experience, in the capturing of precise sense impressions, in the skilled use of the Anglo-Saxon roots, may be leading us to the end of the era when such choices had meaning. “In general terms, we may have reached that point in Western history when the major languages have to emerge from their naïvety and break with their instinctive assumptions, so as to establish themselves in a different kind of truth, with all its contradictions and difficulties.” (This is from Yves Bonnefoy's essay, Shakespeare et le poète français, which I quote in the curiously Englished version published by Encounter, June 1962.)
Yet another layer? It may look as if Yves Bonnefoy were trying instead, not quite single-handed, to turn the French language around, to face it out towards experience and the source of experience; away from intellect and its props and its narcissism, back towards that tense enigmatic life among objects whence words ultimately draw their power. Imaginez la langue française refaite entièrement sur nature … Can French seize that otherness and account for it, move out from behind its own wise abstractions and, armed with a few elemental terms, approach those singular experiences of what there is, that can perfectly well do without words, if not without us, altogether? Is such a project outré? its formulation arrogant? the summons to it an unacceptable didacticism?
Certainly nothing, unless it be grandiloquence, makes us bristle quicker than didacticism. And there are dramatic passages on this theme in this new book whose fervor reaches into the hortatory and the polemical. Since the poet's consciousness is of that rare practical turn which makes over every anguished question of, What is to be done? into another, What is to be done next? his fervor speaks for an attitude unleashed, optimism becoming the self-conscious power to move. The question remains, is this parti pris what we would call an axe to grind? Is the capacity for profound mutation, and for this particular mutation, a genuine gift of the language that the author has seen and brings us to acknowledge? Or else a quirk of his own mind and style, even a delusion, like Leontes' jealous lunacy in Le Conte d'hiver? If the odds at the end, as at the end of the play, are on the side of a genuine intuition, that is because the voice which gives it most cogency is not, by gum! the one which proclaims, expounds and defends it. This fervor speaks equally for despair and defeat, “le mauvais désir de l'infini”, for mere meaning, abstraction, and aloofness, speaks from that winter of the heart where this conte d'été was written. It speaks within a dramatic poem where voices and attitudes balance and strain: “a world ransom'd, or one destroyed”. Conversely, to address oneself to the problems of the hour is another way of affirming one's presence in a world of ephemera. The stance on love, in other words, remains a stance, and a stance taken also on the matter of taking stances. The dialectic is intact. It includes the urge to persuade and instruct within another kind of persuasion. The poem and its attitudes imply each other mutually.
What we are called to by this very drama is not a partial betrayal of language in lieu of an impossible affirmation; but a heightened awareness of all it offers, a more complex relation even to the classic notions of self and experience. The poet sets the example: he and his experience are not here, as we have seen, and the ailleurs of the images where we find him is our place as well:
Tu fus jeté sanglant
Dans la lumière,
Tu as ouvert les yeux, criant,
Pour nommer le jour,
Mais le jour n'est pas dit
Que déjà retombe
La draperie du sang, à grand bruit sourd,
Sur la lumière.
The “draperie du sang” is authentically Shakespearian, precise yet polyvalent, telling, irreplacable. Yet the rest, the “grand bruit sourd” carries toward the figure that peculiarly sonorous, disert eloquence which makes the “draperie” a plush proscenium curtain and the image an unmistakably French one—unmistakably Yves Bonnefoy's meld of innocence and experience, of loftiness and stern perspicuity, recalling the early-Baroque achievement of disciplined compassion. The foibles of this poet, or any other who speaks with such authority and such moving restraint, are not mere accident. They make and then become the history of the language.
The summons, in fine, sounds a challenge. Whose stance on love? Whose love? Can this poet yet know? “Who's there!” cries the sentry twice on the opening page of Hamlet, peering into the ghost-ridden, pre-dawn dark, on the high stone parapet. In his translation Yves Bonnefoy renders this desperate appeal with both of the possible French versions. At first, “Qui va là?” a simple question of presence; but then, in the other, the grand direction, subjunctive, the question of allegiance: “Qui vive?”
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Yves Bonnefoy: First Existentialist Poet
The Search for Transcendence in Yves Bonnefoy's Un feu va devant nous.