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Death and the Problematics of Representation in Bonnefoy's Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve

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SOURCE: Kargiotis, Dimitrios. “Death and the Problematics of Representation in Bonnefoy's Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve.Neophilologus 85, no. 1 (January 2001): 53-69.

[In the following essay, Kargiotis analyzes the various modalities and functions of death in On the Motion and Immobility of Douve.]

“L'esprit […],” says Yves Bonnefoy in “Les tombeaux de Ravenne,” “s'interroge sur l'être, mais rarement sur la pierre” (11). Neglecting the value of experience, humans struggle to master concepts, but we forget that concepts cannot embrace the totality of the real: “[y] a-t-il un concept d'un pas venant dans la nuit, d'un cri, de l'éboulement d'une pierre dans les broussailles? De l'impression que fait une maison vide?” (13). The endeavor to conceptualize stems, for Bonnefoy, from the desire for permanence and identity, a naive hope that life can overcome death. Such a desire, nevertheless, disregards that death is organically tied to life: “it provides that very point of anchorage, that totally irreversible attachment to the earth […],” that allows for “continuity and cyclicalness” (Bishop 197). This paper will attempt to outline the problematics of representation of death in Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve. The double character such a representation exhibits is particularly interesting, since there is a shift in the semantic field of death from a referential to a metalinguistic level. Accordingly, what the represented object that points to death will have accomplished is the transference of its reference to something extratextual: from images of death to the death of the image, the annulment of representation in order to capture the real.

Let us start, then, by attempting to outline Bonnefoy's understanding of images and concepts. “Il y a une vérité du concept […],” Bonnefoy claims, “[m]ais il y a un mensonge […] en général, qui donne à la pensée pour quitter la maison des choses le vaste pouvoir des mots” (Tombeaux 13). “Words put distance between [men] and things” (Image and Presence 168) because words are representations of things. For Saussure, for instance, “a linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern [image acoustique]” (66); the sign is constituted of the interweaving of a representation of a conceptual image and an acoustic im-pression of an articulation which takes place in the mind. Rather than a particular referent, such a sign has a broad semantic field: to use the Saussurian example, the sign “tree” does not refer to any specific tree. Focusing his investigation on the signs themselves rather than examining how they relate to the world—the referents—, Saussure draws a distinction between “[…] la langue, which is to say the ensemble of linguistic possibilities or potentialities at any given moment, and la parole, or the individual act of speech, the individual and partial actualization of some of those potentialities” (Jameson 22). Attempting to analyze the way the former operates, Saussure does “[…] not so much describe how language works as wonder what, in language, guarantees that it will work” (Avni, Reference 40). The Saussurian langue is accordingly defined in a negative way: “[I]n the language itself, there are only differences” (118). If there is something that the sign signifies, it is solely what is not signified by the totality of all other signs different from it.

Bonnefoy's emphasis on objects (Interview 146), however, entails a much more essentialist understanding. He is interested in the referent, in the thing itself rather than abstract representations of it. It is only inevitable, then, that in the beginning of his career he becomes associated with the Surrealists who proclaim another relation to things, a “more real” one. A “more real” understanding and, subsequently, creation, of reality takes place, among other ways, through a new conception of the notion of image. According to Breton's incorporation in the Manifeste du Surréalisme (324) of Reverdy's definition of an image,

L'image est une création pure de l'esprit.
          Elle ne peut naître d'une comparaison mais du rapprochement de deux réalités plus
ou moins éloignées.
          Plus les rapports des deux réalités rapprochées seront lointains et justes, plus l'image
sera forte—plus elle aura de puissance émotive et de réalité poétique … etc.

Such a new perception involves, above all, a certain revolutionary magic. Indeed, Bonnefoy admits, “[…] the Surrealist image, especially when it is most arbitrary and most gratuitously provoking, never strikes me, not even now, without stirring up the beginnings of fascination; it is as though some mysteriously rooted hope were suddenly making itself known through a sign intended less to present me with some good than to call me to battle […] The greatness of this movement—it is the only genuine poetic movement this century has had—was its effort to reanimate in secular times, and necessarily outside the perimeter of religion because of the times that are ours, the feeling of transcendancy” (Transcendancy 135, 137).

This “feeling of trancendancy” is enough for Bonnefoy to make him accept the Surrealist image, “[…] even if it is in fact a denial of coherent representation” (Interview 143). For within a conceptual framework that explicitly rejects concepts, it is not “even if,” but rather “because of” the fact that such a denial takes place that an interest in Surrealism emerges: Bonnefoy sees in it a new force in accordance with many of his beliefs.

Breton's definition, however, is not unquestionably valid, despite the fact that, provocative as it is, it provides a new, revolutionary conception of the image. Its problematic nature was implicitly perceived even by Breton himself, (when talking, i.e., of “an aesthetics a posteriori” (324), or when examining the degree of intentionality (337-340)), and has been put into question1 by scholars as well. Indeed, such a definition can be said to disregard the referential, cognitive and metalingual functions of language such as Jakobson defined them in “Linguistics and Poetics,” and ignore the dimension of motivation in the image. Motivation is a crucial factor in the poetic process, because it plays a chief role regarding the way syntagms and paradigms (or else, word combinations and substitutions) will be not only understood, but, in the first place, constructed in the text. The concept of construction, on the other hand, implies a self-conscious process, and it would be unfair to criticize on such a basis a poetics that insists on the automatic character of creation. Post-surrealist poetry, however (and by this is meant poetry that creatively assimilates surrealist heritage, such as the poetry of Bonnefoy), does emphasize intentionality in the creative process. Consequently, the poem is no longer approached in terms of an addressor/addressee dialectic; a third term, that of the message, comes into play, a message that now requires decoding. And precisely in such poetry is the role of the image central.

The centrality of the image, on the one hand, but also the limitations of its surrealist definition, make the later Bonnefoy adopt a different position. For, in the end, even the surrealist image does not escape representability; on the contrary, it is susceptible to a double bind. Surrealist representations, so to speak, are “twice removed from truth,” to use a vocabulary that Bonnefoy detests: on the one hand, they are images, which means that they are distanced from the world, since they represent it; on the other hand, these images are “surreal:” they represent a world which cannot objectively exist, to which there is no objective reference.

Bonnefoy, then, is caught in a dilemma. As John T. Naughton puts it, “[t]he paradoxical reality of images is that they give us our world […]; but through providing us with an approach to the world, images do not, in themselves, have any being” (14). Or, to use Bonnefoy's new definition: “this impression of a reality at last fully incarnate, which comes to us, paradoxically, through words which have turned away from incarnation, I shall call image” (Image and Presence 164). The binary opposition incarnation/excarnation, central to Bonnefoy's poetics, reproduces the binaries we have mentioned and refers to the opposition between a seizure of materiality, a capturing of reality on the one hand, and its representation through the mediation of words, concepts or images on the other; in other words, the tension between what philosophy calls le sensible and l'intelligible,2 codifying the paradigms of feeling, affectivity, passibility, on the one hand, and cognition, on the other. Considered within the framework of Lyotard's theory of phrases3 according to which “phrases from heterogeneous regimens cannot be translated from one into the other” (xii), Bonnefoy's task may be described as an attempt to answer the question: how is it possible to translate (literally: transpose) an incarnate (sensible) phrase into excarnate (intelligible) words without creating an excarnate image? How is it possible to reconcile phrases which, since they belong to the sensible, have no referent, with phrases which, cognitive as they are, since they use language, are characterized by reference? Or, to put the question in its most elementary formulation, how do we re-present the unrepresentable?

To present means, above all, to make present. Bonnefoy is against “the substitution of an image for the world—in favor of presence” (Image and Presence 171). His attempt is directed towards the domain of things, of the world, of le sensible, the domain of what Husserl calls Gegenwärtigung or Präsentation (which Derrida renders as perception or présentation originaire), while images partake of the world of concepts, l'intelligible, and, therefore, all they can do is only create an impression of presence, of Vergegenwärtigung (of re-présentation or re-production représentative or présentification) (Derrida 50).4 Thus Bonnefoy now comes to define his poetry as a “war against the Image” (Image and Presence 170). From the surrealist quest to consider an imaginary, non-existent, hyper-real representation/image of an object as real, Bonnefoy now arrives at a poetics of an image of an object that questions its representational real-ness. A poetics of death is Bonnefoy's way of attaining such an image. Death is a major category in Bonnefoy for two reasons. On the one hand, because he explicitly, as we have seen, insists on the “idea” of death as a major parameter of incarnation; this insistence becomes poetically realized in representations (“images”) of death. On a second plane, Bonnefoy's ingenuity consists in a masterful depiction of the death of language: death is presented as the annihilation of imagery and linguistic representability themselves. Consequently, Bonnefoy, in an indicative way, proclaims the death of representation by representing death in this double aspect.

Images of death are abundant throughout Douve, and they appear in a variety of ways:

a. As a dialectic play with life. Death and life are not to be understood as opposite or complementary, but rather as two faces of a being, of an existence that always is, in which death and life are only phases. Douve will always be alive and dead, continuously questioning the boundaries between the two: “… à chaque instant je te vois naître, Douve, / A chaque instant mourir” (48).5

A poem that expresses more obviously the problematics of such a dialectic, is no. IV from “Derniers gestes” (70):

Es-tu vraiment morte ou joues-tu
Encore à simuler la pâleur et le sang,
O toi passionnément au sommeil qui te livres
Comme on ne sait que mourir?
Es-tu vraiment morte ou joues-tu
Encore en tout miroir
A perdre ton reflet, ta chaleur et ton sang
Dans l'obscurcissement d'un visage immobile?

This life/death play is constructed on two planes; first, the very way of questioning (“vraiment,” “ou joues-tu”) shows that the poetic subject is ignorant of the truth, or might be suspicious: “are you dead or alive?” At the same time the poetic device of semantic inversions is functioning: complementary to the question “es-tu vraiment morte” we would expect “dissimuler le sang” and not “simuler,” since if Douve were dead, she would not have any blood; the same way, in the second stanza, we do not expect her to “perdre son reflet dans l'obscurcissement,” but rather to find it. These inversions undermine the conventional semantic fields of “life” and “death” and lead to their new understanding.

b. Death also appears in relation to the poetic subject, as a situ-ation that the poetic subject discovers, reveals or simply sees. For instance:

O plus noire et déserte! Enfin je te vis morte,
Inapaisable éclair que le néant supporte,
Vitre sitôt éteinte, et d'obscure maison.

(72)

Or the following:

[…] Présence ressaisie dans la torche du froid,
O guetteuse toujours je te découvre morte […]

(53)

—here the play on vision is double: the “guetteuse” who sees and the poetic subject who sees her (“je te decouvre”).

Images of death are operative on both rhetorical and semantic levels. Let us consider, for instance, the powerful description in “Vrai Corps:”

Close la bouche et lavé le visage,
Purifié le corps, enseveli
Ce destin éclairant dans la terre du verbe,
Et le mariage le plus bas s'est accompli.

(77)

Here, the three participles (“close,” “lavé,” “purifié”) function on three planes: first, they refer to “Douve,” whose “vrai corps” the reader is expecting to see; at the same time, the participles have their own subjects. This creates an impression of fragmentariness: the dead body, deprived of life, ceases to be an organic unity and is perceived as a sum-total of limbs. Nevertheless, the inability to tell whether the “destin” of line 3 is the grammatical subject or the object of “enseveli,” along with the abstract signified of the subject/object signifier, resulting at an image of significant abstraction (“enseveli ce destin éclairant dans la terre du verbe”), function in such a way as to provide a perception or impression of death, one which might not be fully understood at first, but which the reader comes to contact with despite the incapacity of language to express it.

But the very opening of the poem constitutes an image of death:

Je te voyais courir sur des terraces,
Je te voyais lutter contre le vent,
Le froid saignait sur tes lèvres.
Et je t'ai vue te rompre et jouir d'être morte ô plus belle
Que la foudre, quand elle tache les vitres blanches de ton sang.

We are to discern two temporal moments in the poem: a past time of continuity and repetition versus a momentary, instant past. Life is, then, represented by three imperfects; the first two are verbs of energy, of power: “courir,” “lutter.” The third, “saigner,” through a poetic inversion, (instead of “les lèvres,” it is “le froid” that “saignait”) connects the first part of the poem to the second: the image of red faces because of the cold is an indication of health; nevertheless it is blood, associated with death, that gives this color. Death, moreover, does not signify a negative moment: she (for we know that the “tu” is a “she” from line 4) enjoys (“jouir”) death, being prettier than “le foudre …”.

The imagery of the text is powerful. Not only is the poem itself constructed through images ending in a simile, but there is also a play on the actual reception of images: the poetic subject watches the “tu” rendering to the reader, through words, those images of “tu” in a section intitulated “théâtre,” whose Greek root contains the meaning of “watching” or “vision.” But this vision ultimately leads to the vision of death, which, in this first poem, annuls temporality (the instant “passé composé”). To annul temporality is, of course, to cancel a fundamental linguistic operation and, create, therefore, a context of “incarnation” from the beginning.

c. Finally, death is also represented in the poem through a powerful textual voice. This voice can appear through the simple narration of an omniscient poetic subject. Douve is full of such descriptions: “Et des liasses de mort pavoisent ton sourire …” (63), or even more explicitly in “Le seul témoin.” There the poetic subject sees Douve die, provides a description of the process and makes an authorial comment: “je fus … le seul témoin, la seul bête prise / dans ces rets de ta mort …” (67). In other words, the reader that sees this “theatre” is urged to accept those images that the only witness is able to provide. Thus, the act of vision provides death. “Regarde, diras-tu, cette pierre: / Elle porte la présence de la mort” (93).

This textual voice sometimes appears very authoritative, and this occurs when the power of the text gains authority even over that of the poetic subject. A central example of this constitutes the poem “Hic est locus patriae” (94). Here death is implied rather than explicitly described, the image of death is evoked for the reader of a text which is an account of the poetic subject “seeing” a place of death. The landscape (sky, trees) evokes the romantic topos of nature, and the use of the imperfect intensifies such an impression. But then, Cassandra appears, a silent figure associated with death. We will examine in a moment the figure whose silence is in accord with the silence of the place. The presence of silence becomes thus overwhelming, literally monumental; along with the sky, the trees, the marble and, of course, the latin inscription, an image of a place of death, of a cemetery, is made present. The ingenuity of the inscription/title is that the emphasis can be put on any word, not only without altering, but rather making more prominent the image of death: “Hic (here, in the cemetery) est locus partiae” or “hic est (in present/is present) locus patriae” or “hic est locus (“le lieu”) patriae” or “hic est locus patriae” (our real country, our father-land).

To represent death, or better, to provide images of death, is only one way in which the text is structured. On the one hand, we have simultaneous images of life and death, images where life and death are either directly represented or implicitly expressed, juxtaposed or combined together; or we have a vision of images of death provided either through an omniscient narrator or through the text itself. We have seen such examples above. Finally, on another level of representation, it is metaphors or metonymies—double representations—, that take precedence: Douve being Phoenix/Salamander being death.

Douve is metonymically identified with Phoenix and the Salamander. Phoenix, a bird which, dying, at the same time “refuse toute mort,” (“Phénix,” 75), whose “chevelure” is at the same time its “cendre,” (“Une autre voix,” 81), always “se recompose” (“Voix basses et Phénix,” 90). The poem where the dialectical images of life/death and all their paradigms are more evident in their understanding not as opposite but as complementary, is “Une voix” (87):

Souviens-toi de cette île où l'on bâtit le feu
De tout olivier vif au flanc des crêtes,
Et c'est pour que la nuit soit plus haute et qu'à l'aube
Il n'y ait plus de vent que de stérilité.
Tant de chemins noircis feront bien un royaume
Où rétablir l'orgueil que nous avons été,
Car rien ne peut grandir une éternelle force
Qu'une éternelle flamme et que tout soit défait.
Pour moi je rejoindrai cette terre cendreuse,
Je coucherai mon coeur sur son corps dévasté.
Ne suis-je pas ta vie aux profondes alarmes,
Qui n'a de monument que Phénix au bûcher?

“Feu” as destructive is opposed to “vif olivier,” but as a “non-tangible object” is combined with the constructive “bâtir;” then from the oppositions “nuit”/“aube” and “vent”/“stérilité” we pass to the subtlety of the indirect opposition “chemins noircis” (negative)/“royaume” (positive) that will “reestablish” (and we expect something concrete)/“l'orgueil” (an abstract notion). Also, the “éternelle force” will be “grandie” through a “flamme,” which is normally a destructive (or purifying/destructive) image, but also by a destruction proper: “que tout soit défait.” The second appearance of the poetic subject is to declare that it will join the “terre” which is, however, “cendreuse;” but is it the ashes-remains of a destructive fire, or the ashes of the Phoenix which are about to be reborn? The same play takes place in the opposition “coeur”/“corps dévasté.” Finally, the dialectic of the oppositions ends up in a triumphant way, when, at the end of the poem, both the rhetorical and semantic aspects of the line are together at play: on the one hand, “monument” (concreteness, stability, presence) is not only contrasted to “Phénix au bûcher” (in-concreteness, instability, destruction, annihilation of temporality/ presence), but rather is this Phoenix itself; the monument is nothingness, but one which is about to stop being one, which will again annihilate itself, and so on. On the other hand, to the rhetorical question “am I not your life …” the implied answer “yes, you are” is latent; but “yes, you are” means “you are nothing but a monument of nothingness,” a present monument of absence.

The Salamander operates in a similar way. Its figure reconciles images of earth and spirit, life and death, presence and absence, purity and impurity, happiness and sadness. “Lieu de la salamandre” is one of the “salamander poems” where it is somewhat more transparent to discern the dialectic of this image:

La salamandre surprise s'immobilise
Et feint la mort.
Tel est le premier pas de la conscience dans le pierres,
Le mythe le plus pur,
Un grand feu traversé, qui est esprit.

O ma complice et ma pensée, allégorie
De tout ce qui est pur,
Que j'aime qui resserre ainsi dans son silence
La seule force de joie.

(111)

Here the dialectic death/life is presented through the characteristics of the reptile. The salamander is able to stay so still as to appear dead because the temperature of its blood is very low; in fact, the mythological tradition presents the salamander with the power to put out fires with the coldness of its body. This simultaneous aspect of life and death is presented as the “first step” (movement) of “consciousness” (the extreme manifestation of life), in contrast to the image of death (immobility and death of consciousness). The play on such oppositions continues structured around the centrality of “pierres:” indeed, “pierres” as a concrete object is juxtaposed to “mythe” (abstract idea), to “feu” (“intangible” object which nevertheless exists, which nevertheless the salamander can annihilate) and finally to “esprit” (“spiritual” object). Like in the Phoenix poem above, the rhetorical and semantic aspects of the lines function harmoniously: on the one hand, “le premier pas” is an expression denoting beginning, but at the same time it contains “pas,” actual movement, which is what the salamander annuls; on the other hand, the salamander is an “allegory of everything pure,” a characteristic attributed to the animal, but at the same time an explicit depoetization of a literary device, allegory. Finally the characteristic of the salamander mentioned in the very first line of the poem, alludes to the title of the collection: “[la salamandre] est, en un mot, ‘le mouvement’ et ‘l'immobilité’ de Douve réunis” (Jackson 263).

Except for Phoenix and Salamander, there is a third figure that represents death in the poem: Cassandra. Cassandra's function is double. On the one hand, she operates in a direction similar to that of Phoenix and the Salamander in that she is a living presence who nevertheless carries in itself the message of death and perdition. On the other hand, Cassandra constitutes a third way in the representation of death we have insofar seen. Indeed, either as strict images of death, or as metonymies of a dialectic life/death, death is represented through images, that is, through signs. It is Cassandra who marks a passage from narrative to non-linguistic representation. A mythological figure who either does not speak, or, when she does, is not believed, Cassandra invalidates the function of speech as bearer of truth and presence. Her figure, above all, symbolizes the death of language and death as language.

Lisse-moi, farde-moi. Colore mon absence.
Désoeuvre ce regard qui méconnaît la nuit.
Couche sur moi les plis d'un durable silence,
Éteins avec la lampe une terre d'oubli.

(101)

This third double presence of death (death of language/death as language) is more evident in the poems where the “image” of “Ménade” comes into being. It is not by chance that the first poem where Douve appears as a Maenad is “Le seul témoin,” a poem where death is present in a very direct way, as we have already observed. A multidimensional play on vision is the means of this presentation, and the figure of Maenad follows this direction. Maenad as a dionysiac figure refers to an archaic conception of the primordial drama: the act of worship. There representation (l'intelligible) is constituted through an extreme favoring of divine delirium (le sensible) that posits even death as its telos (as becomes the case in later representations, i.e., Greek theater). In a similar way, Maenad, a figure who, through an act of extreme incarnation, love, nevertheless kills her victims in the end, appears in the poem “consumée” herself. In part III of the same poem, we have another appearance of her death and her reconciliation with nothingness, with an “ombre.”

But more than a simple metonymy for death, the image of Maenad has an implication of another dimension. Her dionysiac character can also be seen as a return to a prelinguistic state of things, where pure presence was available since no language existed that could “put distance between men and things.” As has been put, “le dionysisme est interprétable comme une lutte contre l'“aveuglement” du concept et comme un refus de l'autonomie du signe linguistique” (McAllister, Ménadisme 223). The only way that Douve herself, as Maenad, can be presented is through an expression of sublimity, of non-representability, an exclamation that means nothing because, at the same time, it comprises everything: “ô.” We are reminded of the Kantian typology of the sublime, where pleasure and pain arise in the subject as a result of the violence done to the imagination by the unboundedness of the referent which awakens the desire for its representation (Kant 114-115). The Maenad is, accordingly, always introduced with the sublime “ô.” And it seems that for Bonnefoy there is only one way that the unrepresentable can be represented:

          Art poétique
Visage séparé de ses branches premières
Beauté toute d'alarme par ciel bas,
En quel âtre dresser le feu de ton visage
O Ménade saisie jetée la tête en bas?

(78)

Where are beauty and sublimity to be housed? The question is rhetorical, of course, since the title provides the answer: this “âtre” is poetry, in the shift in the status of representation the latter enacts. What is at stake here is the difference between poetic language and ordinary language: “[l]e langage poétique n'est pas la relation d'un signifié et d'un signifiant, mais l'acte qui fait passer du non-être qui précède l'oeuvre à l'être qu'elle sera” (qtd. in Fauskevåg 241). If “[the language of concepts] leads to the fragmentation of demonstration, the divisions and reifications of structure and reason, [the language of presence, on the other hand,] offers a totality, an identity, a destiny that eschew all sectioning and reduction” (Bishop 203). It is within the framework of a language of presence that “Ménade” is simultaneously what has created the poem and what is created by it. But precisely because of that every attempt to approach this figure in terms of language is doomed to fail, since ordinary language annuls presence. We cannot “explain” what the Maenad is, because she “is” herself the death of language but “she” also is death insofar as she is language.

Death, therefore, becomes “a category in this poem which involves not only inevitable physical decomposition but also the inertia and lifelessness of established representation, that paralysis of la langue and the ever renewed struggle of la parole to pass beyond, to resurrect from the ashes of a spiritless ‘letter’” (Naughton 46). The undermining of “established representation” seems to be Bonnefoy's constant task throughout Douve: indeed, strange, unusual images can be found throughout the poem. But if the image of the Maenad symbolizes the death of language, there are poems where the death of image is also proclaimed. It is now a specific poetics which is the target, the poetics of image as conventional sign. It is not that various figures, for instance, are presented as whichever symbols, as is the case of Phoenix or the Salamander, but rather the specific annulment of the idea of the image itself, the death of the image, so to speak, and the laying bare of a poetic device.

Ton visage ce soir éclairé par la terre,
Mais je vois tes yeux se corrompre
Et le mot visage n'a plus de sens.
La mer intérieure éclairée d'aigles tournants,
Ceci est une image.
Je te détiens froide à une profondeur où les images ne prennent plus.

(57)

Here Douve's face, through a poetic inversion, will be illuminated by earth (instead of sun, for instance); but before the image becomes complete, the poetic subject sees her eyes fall apart and comments that the word “face” does not mean anything anymore. The poetic subject itself annuls the very image it has created, somewhat recognizing the impossibility of description. The description started in the second stanza is annulled in a similar way. After its beginning, the narrator intervenes to inform the reader that “this is an image.” Finally, in the last line of the poem, we have an explicit invalidation of the idea of the image itself. As James McAllister puts it, the image “slip[s] away from the fixity of the trace, broken before it attains a monolithic association of signifier and signified, as successive detours inscribe their variant Douve figures in a complex network of reprises. […] This unrepresented pretextual Douve is the icon that the text gradually elaborates as orientation, beyond the sign, toward an ineffable experience of being” (Image 100).

Another side of this second level of the representation of death as the “death of the image,” is the annihilation of the “metrical image,” of the “metrical frame” itself. If we adopt John Hollander's differentiation between “rhythm” and “meter,” according to which “rhythm” characterizes the series of actual effects upon our consciousness of a line or passage of verse,” while “meter […] appl[ies] to whatever it was that might constitute the framing, the isolating” (135-136), then Bonnefoy very often annuls the “image” of rhythm imprinted upon the reader's mind as a result of the poem's perfect alexandrins, for instance, by introducing a metrically disruptive line. This results in the defamiliarization of the reader who is following the path of the rhythm, and is inscribed into the same device of rendering poetics itself a literary device. Such a treatment of the “rhythmical image” is repeated throughout the poem.

To intermingle poetic material (in our case, various sorts and “levels” of images) with devices of poetics proper, or, in other words, to render the process of poetic creation into poetic myth itself, can only take place through the cancellation of conventional imagery. The poem that best captures the impossibility of images as an image itself is one from “Derniers Gestes:”

Que saisir sinon qui s'échappe,
Que voir sinon qui s'obscurcit,
Que désirer sinon qui meurt,
Sinon qui parle et se déchire?
Parole proche de moi
Que chercher sinon ton silence,
Quelle lueur sinon profonde
Ta conscience ensevelie,
Parole jetée matérielle
Sur l'origine et la nuit.

(66)

This new image tries to realize the impossible in a seemingly contradictory and paradoxical endeavor. It seeks to represent the unrepresentable, by attempting to capture what cannot be captured, see the unseeable, desire the annulment of desire, look for the silence of speech. The “sinon” reveals the imperative of this attempt. Another poem that perhaps illustrates better this effort is the following:

La lumière profonde a besoin pour paraître
D'une terre rouée et craquante de la nuit.
C'est d'un bois ténébreux que la flamme s'exalte.
Il faut à la parole même une matière,
Un inerte rivage au delà de tout chant.
Il te faudra franchir la mort pour que tu vives,
La plus pure présence est un sang répandu.

(74)

What is explicitly at stake here is not only how to capture le sensible, but also the necessity of such an attempt (Naughton 59). To the difficulty of such a task, only faith can provide the force: “[o]n ne doit jamais abandonner tout espoir” (Bonnefoy, Fonction 273). “When words revealed death to men, when conceptual notions put distance between them and things […] something in fact like faith was needed for us to carry on with words; and everything indicates that it is also in words themselves—but this time understood as names, cried or called out in the midst of absence—that this faith has sought its way” (Bonnefoy, Image and Presence 168) (emphasis added). Faith in words, accordingly, is the first step in capturing le sensible. And this operation will not take place in an abstract, conceptual way: “[j]e ne poserai pas de quelque façon philosophique le problème du sensible. Affirmer, tel est mon souci” (Tombeaux 24). The affirmation is realized through a poetic device: the creation of Douve, a sign which is, at the same time, a name, a referent, an image and a metonymy.

Carrie Jaurès Noland has codified the various levels of approaching this cryptic name. We would like to focus on Douve's double aspect. On the one hand, the word “douve” exists in French, and the image of its signification inevitably comes to mind: “douve” is a moat around a castle.

Douve sera ton nom au loin parmi les pierres,
Douve profonde et noire,
Eau basse irréductible où l'effort se perdra.

(104)

The castle is thus protected by the moat; the moat guarantees its safety through the perdition of the trespassers. In this aspect, the linguistic sign “douve” is itself an image of death. But what is this castle that the moat surrounds to protect?

Je nommerai désert ce château que tu fus,
Nuit cette voix, absence ton visage,
Et quand tu tomberas dans la terre stérile
Je nommerai néant l'éclair qui t'a porté.

(73)

From death as an image (“douve”), we pass to the death of imagery as we saw it above. Things are renamed and a double image is at play, that of the previous referent and that of the new one. Thus “château” becomes “désert,” “voix” becomes “nuit,” “visage” becomes “absence,” “éclair” becomes “néant.” This is why the poem is called “vrai nom.” Douve as a name, as a proper name, is inscribed in the same problematics. The poetic voice gives to the “castle” which Douve as moat is supposed to protect the name “désert.” What is surrounded by the moat is nothingness; the very existence of the castle is undermined. But the disappearance of the castle entails a shift in emphasis. When both the moat and the castle are there, what is at stake is the safety of the castle; but if the castle does not exist, the focus is shifted from the surrounded to the surrounding, the moat itself.

The only thing we know about this moat is its name, Douve. But who or what is Douve? Bonnefoy talks about her: “[e]t si j'ai éprouvé si intensément pour ma part l'attrait d'un vocable qu'un moment de mon écriture avait vidé de tout sens, c'était certes d'abord parce que sa syncope dans l'énoncé avait incité, comme je l'ai dit, à la décoagulation, à l'espoir, mais aussi parce que “Douve”, c'était déjà un nom, un nom propre, ce qui suggère sous son énigme une veille, qui nous concerne, et non un en-soi, une indifférence. Un visage, non une essence. En poésie il n'y a jamais que de noms propres” (Entretiens 141). Thus, what is functioning here is the double aspect of the sign “Douve.” Douve the noun has a particular referent, but Douve the name comprises all the characteristics of proper names. As Lyotard puts it, “[n]ames transform now into a date, here into a place, I, you, he into Jean, Pierre, Louis. […] Names grouped into calendars, cartographical systems, genealogies and civil statutes are indicators of possible reality (emphasis added). They present their referents, dates, places, and human beings as givens. A phrase, otherwise deprived of deictic marks, presents Rome instead of over-there. The name Rome acts like a deictic: the referent, the addressor, and the addressee are situated in relation to an “as-if right here [comme-si ici]” (Lyotard 39). “Reality is not expressed therefore by a phrase like: x is such, but by one like: x is such and not such” (45). Whereas the common name can have universal reference, the proper name refers, on the contrary, exclusively to one reality to whose uniqueness it responds.

To give a unique proper name means to baptize; to baptize alludes to a divine power, since, by naming, one creates a being. For Benjamin, for instance, “[t]he absolute relationship of name to knowledge exists only in God, only there is a name, because it is inwardly identical with the creative word, the pure medium of knowledge” (323). God/the poetic subject has brought Douve into existence in a process similar to the biblical “in the beginning was the Word.” Douve comes into being because she is named.

The divine character of naming is evident in the implications of the “breath:”

A peine si je sens ce souffle qui me nomme.

(79)

In Genesis, chapter 2, we read: “then the Lord formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.” In a similar operation, it is now Douve who, through a poetic breath, has acquired life. Once a living being, to question “who is Douve” is irrelevant. Douve is Douve, in a similar way that God is God: “I am the being” (or “I am the one who is”) God replies when asked who he is. To a question of knowledge (intelligible) God answers with a verb of presence (sensible), in an apparently tautological sentence. In a similar way, then, “[…] Douve is absolutely nothing beyond the long and taunting place called Douve” (Argyros 263):

[…] je t'enserre
Dans l'acte de connaître et de nommer.

(77)

What thus realizes a passage to incarnation is the name. Its unique referentiality captures the real, and is explicitly contrasted to the universal referentiality of the noun which creates distance from it. Since it is by nature an intelligible form, the common noun can be approached in terms of language; it can answer the question “what is it.” But any attempt to explicate a name in intelligible terms is not simply doomed to fail; it is irrelevant altogether. This is why Bonnefoy insists: “je ne prétends que nommer. Voici le monde sensible. Il faut que la parole, ce sixième et ce plus haut sens, se porte à sa rencontre et en déchiffre les signes” (Tombeaux 25).

Thus “l' acte de saisie et de nomination de Douve se confond avec un acte de saisie et de nomination du réel” (Jackson 253). And this has to presuppose and proclaim the death of re-presentation in favor of presentation. The literary history of the poetics of such an impossibility comprises significant figures, and this paper has attempted to analyze one of the ways Bonnefoy is inscribed in it.

Notes

  1. See Ora Avni, “Breton et l'idéologie …”.

  2. I shall henceforth be using the French term sensible, since the English “sensible” has different connotations.

  3. Expressed at its best in The Differend, Phrases in Dispute, according to which a phrase is the only thing that is “indubitable […], because it is immediately presupposed” (xi). There are phrases, therefore, there are to be understood in its most existential meaning. “There is no non-phrase” (xii). As opposed to “language,” which is an articulate form of expression, “phrase” can be any semantic unit, articulate or not. There is neither a first nor a last phrase: silence and death are also phrases. Each phrase involves an addressor, an addressee and a meaning; whether there is a reference or not depends on whether the phrase is articulate or not. “A phrase, even the most ordinary one, is constituted according to a set of rules (its regimen)” (xii).

  4. The etymology of the German words elucidates from another angle than that of Derrida's translation the poetics of Bonnefoy: “Gegen-wärtigung,” literally “against waiting” explains this notion of im-mediate, atemporal, incarnate, sensible present, as opposed to the notion of “making it (as if) against waiting” of “Ver-gegen-wärtigung.”

  5. All page numbers refer to the Gallimard edition.

Works Cited

Argyros, Alex. “The Topography of Presence: Bonnefoy and the Spatialization of Poetry.” Orbis Litterarum 41.3 (1986): 244-264.

Avni, Ora. “Breton et l'idéologie machine à coudre—parapluie.” Littérature 51 (1983): 15-27.

Avni, Ora. The Resistance of Reference. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.

Benjamin, Walter. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” Reflections. Tr. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1978, 314-332.

Bishop, Michael. “An Infinity of Flashing Briefness: The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy.” Neophilologus LXX. 2 (1986): 194-207.

Bonnefoy, Yves. “Les tombeaux de Ravenne.” L'improbable. Paris: Mercure de France, 1959, 9-34.

Bonnefoy, Yves. “The Feeling of Transcendancy.” Yale French Studies 31 (1964): 135-137.

Bonnefoy, Yves. “The Origins and Development of my Concept of Poetry: An Interview with John E. Jackson (1976).” The Act … 143-155.

Bonnefoy, Yves. “Sur la fonction du poème.” Nuage rouge. Paris: Mercure de France, 1977, 267-283.

Bonnefoy, Yves. Entretiens sur la poésie, Neuchâtel, Suisse: Éd. de la Baconnière, 1981.

Bonnefoy, Yves. Poèmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1982.

Bonnefoy, Yves. “‘Image and Presence’: Inaugural Address at the Collège de France.” The Act and the Place of Poetry, Selected Essays. Ed John T. Naughton. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989, 156-172.

Breton, André. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Pléiade, 1988.

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Fauskevåg, Svein Eirik. “Yves Bonnefoy et le réalisme poétique.” Orbis Litterarum 41.3 (1986): 229-243.

Hollander, John. Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.

Jackson, John E. La question du sujet, un aspect de la modernité poétique européenne. Neuchâtel, Suisse: Éd. de la Baconnière, 1978.

Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics ans Poetics.” Language in Literature. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska, Stephen Rudy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987, 62-94.

Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Tr. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.

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McAllister, James. “The Image and the Furrow: Yves Bonnefoy, Claude Garache.” Symposium XLV. 2 (1991): 97-108.

Naughton, John T. The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Noland, Carrie Jaurès. “What's in a Name? Yves Bonnefoy and the Creation of ‘Douve’.” French Forum. 17.3 (1992): 311-328.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Tr. Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1983.

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The Valsaintes Poems of Yves Bonnefoy

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