Metonymy and Metaphor in Yves Bonnefoy's Poetry
[In the following essay, McAllister contends that Bonnefoy favors metonymy over metaphor in his verse.]
Yves Bonnefoy's conception of writing as un-writing (désécriture) fosters poetic texts in which metonymy intertwines with metaphor so that metonymic processes both extend and subvert analogical associations. Denouncing metaphor as the stuff of esthetic lies, he turns to metonymy to tear through the opaque fabric of analogy for an authentic approach to reality. His comments on the genesis of “A San Francesco le soir” exemplify his antagonistic interpretation of the two rhetorical figures:
Par exemple, j'ai intitulé un poème d'Hier régnant désert, jadis, “A San Francesco le soir,” sans dire qu'il s'agissait là d'une des églises de Ferrare. … Pourquoi cette forclusion, en l'occurence délibérée, d'un élément signifiant? … eussé-je nommé Ferrare, dans le poème, ce nom y eût assumé d'emblée la fonction d'un signifiant dans un texte, autant déterminé par celui-ci, aux dépenses de mon vrai rapport à Ferrare, qu'indicateur de cette expérience: alors qu'à ne pas l'évoquer c'est toute la réalité de Ferrare, avec son sens pour moi encore impénétré, inachevé, foisonnant, qui reste associée, métonymiquement, à l'écrit—et s'y maintient, comme une exigence. … Ces marges du poème sont pour elle [la prose] la dimension métonymique restée ouverte où elle pourra puiser de quoi briser les constructions fermées de la métaphore, qui n'est que la décision d'hier, en somme, la compréhension toujours trop hâtive qui risque de rester du passé et me garder séparé du monde, faisant de mon rapport à sa présence possible une ténèbre, un désert. La “métaphore,” l'interprétation analogique, c'est elle qui nous bâtit une langue, nous voue aux illusions de l'image—il faut en chercher les failles, en sonder les fausses parois, et sans penser, pessimistement, que ce soit en vain.1
This deprecation of metaphor is to be read in the context of Yves Bonnefoy's ontological conception of poetics as a dialectic of inscription and incarnation: of the fixity of the trace as it founds esthetic propositions of permanence, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, “le temps et le lieu où autrui advient,” the world of finitude, where we die.2 If analogical interpretation “builds us a language” and “delivers us to the illusions of the image,” it is because this root of mimesis has facilitated the development of conceptual categorization.3 Based on abstract similarities of aspect, the concept underlies differential sign systems which imitate what is. Bonnefoy reproaches the images and word-worlds that such linguistic systems produce for their Mallarmean abolition of “hasard,” for the closure of their re-presentation, which separates them from the reality of death and our approach to a radically different other in an “open” world of impermanence and change. The equivalences metaphors propose construct an eidetic “unity” which imprisons an ego (a concept of linguistic origin) in the false permanence of inscription, while excluding the enigma of the other. So the “closed constructions of metaphor” are separated from the finite world of interpersonal exchange that their fixed images counterfeit. Thus metaphoric invention cannot attain to the universal acceptance that could found “un réel pour la société”4 and redeem the wasteland of the sign to recreate what Yves Bonnefoy calls “la terre-lieu.”5
If metaphor is implicated in the closure of representation and the illusions of the image, metonymy is seen as breaking through the “faults” in analogical associations. This breakthrough implies a poetic approach to a presence that language obfuscates just as the translation of what is into differential sign systems gives way to the analytical classifications of the concept. Metonymy is based not on analogy but on associations of contiguity or concentricity. In the collaborative rhetorical research carried out in the seventies by the “Groupe μ,” the analysis of metonymy was based on the co-inclusion6 of its terms in a place, on their juxtaposition, as construed spatially, or, by extension, temporally, or logically: to include interdependent relationships of cause and effect, production and product, container and contained, etc. By this analysis, metonymy can be seen to depend not on similarity of terms but on the collocation or interaction of unlike terms. Such a definition corresponds to Yves Bonnefoy's interpretation of the metonymic dimensions of his poetry as they imply a transfer of contiguity into the continuity and simultaneity which correspond to our potential rediscovery of that place that conceptual language and indelible images have lost.7
Ce qui fut sans lumière8 opens with a “memory” which seeks to establish a threshold between inscription and incarnation, between the image's autonomous permanence and the illegible place where we live and die. This “memory” inaugurates the un-writing of Yves Bonnefoy's previous poetic work as it begins unraveling the images which had built up a word-world around the house at Valsaintes. This house, discovered in 1963, and the poet's relation to it, his “dream” of living there, in the “vrai lieu” it seemed potentially to offer, had figured centrally in Dans le leurre du seuil and, already, if less obviously, in Pierre écrite.9Ce qui fut sans lumière reconsiders the locus amoenus the poetic imagery had invented for this country place,10 while in life it slipped further and further out of reach. The poet attempts to free himself from the illusion of the image as he decries its failure in a metonymic context where “memory,” “wind,” and “farewell” conspire to refute the creations of metaphor, as their metonymic dimension opens the poems toward lived experience beyond the closed book. And the house at Valsaintes, as it had lent itself to the constructions of dream and a Gnostic longing for escape from finitude, as it had become the myth of a serene, timeless dwelling in mutual love, undisturbed by outside influences, is now reappraised in the light of its actual dilapidation. So the house as text is confronted with the real house which denies the text.
The remembered wind of “Le Souvenir” tatters a series of textual mises en abyme (analogous reflections of the whole poetic work in its individual images)11 as it is metonymically echoed in the poem:
Ce souvenir me hante, que le vent tourne
D'un coup, là-bas, sur la maison fermée.
C'est un grand bruit de toile par le monde,
On dirait que l'étoffe de la couleur
Vient de se déchirer jusqu'au fond des choses.
Le souvenir s'éloigne mais il revient,
C'est un homme et une femme masqués, on dirait qu'ils tentent
De mettre à flot une barque trop grande.
Le vent rabat la voile sur leurs gestes,
Le feu prend dans la voile, l'eau est noire,
Que faire de tes dons, ô souvenir. …
(SL 11)
The closed house was the center of a fixed image-world. It is now abandoned to the uncontrollable wind of change. The autonomous order of the illusory creation is here revealed as a deceit by the illegible wind, the antithesis of order.12 From the wind turning on the closed house, the poem pivots metonymically to the sound of the wind rending the great canvas (“C'est un grand bruit de toile par le monde …”). The canvas catching the wind to produce the sound is at once the metonymic evidence of the wind that causes the sound and the analogous reflection of the text (L. textus “textile” < texere “to weave”). The coarsely woven fabric of the torn canvas reflects the fabrication of the previous poetic text as its illusory serenity and sufficiency are exposed by the retrospective lucidity of Ce qui fut sans lumière.
The textual mise en abyme develops with “l'étoffe de la couleur,” metonymically associated with the “toile” of the preceding verse to evoke the painter's canvas, while the ambiguous genetive also presents “l'étoffe” (Germ. *stopfôn “stuff,” “tissue,” “material”) as the substance of color. The canvas is now the painted fabric,13 the surface on which the painter paints, and so, the metonymic support of color, while, at the same time, color has substance, it is material. The tearing of “l'étoffe de la couleur” coincides with the rending of the fabric of images that the previous poetic texts have woven as they correspond, ut pictura poesis, to the painted image. And, specifically, prospectively, the relationship between poem and painting is that pictorial intertextuality which Ce qui fut sans lumière will establish between the locus amoenus of Valsaintes in Dans le leurre du seuil and the works of two painters: John Constable's series of variant views of Dedham from Langham14 and Claude Lorrain's Psyche and the Palace of Amor. The wind rips the canvas as the memento mori, the haunting “souvenir” of finitude, recalls the beloved house, around which the imagery of peaceful sufficiency had coagulated—now closed up, abandoned to the wind—“ce bruit d'un ailleurs”: the metonymic, sonorous evidence of an hors-texte, an extralinguistic elsewhere, invisible, violent, ever undermining the autonomy of text. Like Psyche returning to weep before the Palace of Love, lost through her hubris, like John Constable repeatedly coming back to the subject of the distant Dedham, ever revealed as paint by the thick oils of his highly textured landscapes, the poet returns in memory to Valsaintes, to separate the fixity of the poetic image from the real place, now lost.
If the wind tears the stuff of color “to the very heart of things,” it is because color, as the substance of the trace (the black of the ink, the pigment of the paint) constitutes a threshold between the sign and the heterogeneous world of things. As an event of light, color reifies inscription while defying the play of signifiers. Consubstantial with inscription, color brings the trace into the finite reality of fading, tearing. The sonorous interpretation of the memory implies a reality of color beyond mimesis, a presence beyond representation. The tearing of the painting exceeds the linguistic signs which compose it, to affect its “color” beyond the sign. Fissuring the mimetic substance in the world of finite things, the tearing affects both the image and its “real” counterpart. It is as though the torn landscape ruptures the very earth it represents, as though its poetic counterpart, repudiated as such, carries away the house at Valsaintes, now lost also in life.15
The sound of wind in canvas is taken up in a different register with the transformation of the memory. The metonymic wind now prevents the masked figures from raising the sail. Like the house where the dialogic lovers of Dans le leurre du seuil had dwelt in peaceful sufficiency, now abandoned to the wind, like the empty palace Amor and Psyche have gone from, like the torn canvas of the landscape, brought back to the destructive time from which the painted image would remove it, the boat that cannot be rigged is a variant textual mise en abyme implying the failure of the image. The wind hinders the raising of the sail. It fans the fire that burns it. So the “ship of words”16 cannot carry the man and the woman on the dark water. The masks that hide their faces reveal them as actors, personnages (L. persona “rôle” < per + sonare “make sound [speak] through [the mask]”), in a drama, a play on reality, a fiction which is by definition other than “real.” Imprisoned in solipsism, these masked egos are excluded from the face to face encounter that can occur only in life. Their pantomimed struggle cannot overcome the wind to make the wood and canvas object into a functional boat that could save them from the violence of the storm. Their struggle against the wind reflects the poet's abiding concern with the struggle between image and life. The wind impedes the launching of the concept “boat,” since the object cannot attain to the function characteristic of boatness. And the would-be boat that cannot be sailed reflects the poetic image as it fails to be lived, as it falls short of incarnation and so remains unreal, unrealized. Another invention of the “ship of words,” the boat-image corresponds to the image-house as it is overtaken by the tempestuous violence of the lucidity that disperses illusion and decries the failure of the image. The boat founders. The house is abandoned, ruined. The image's veil, impervious to destruction, is torn away.
The torn canvas, the unwieldy sail fulfill the omen of the rattling shutter as the world that Dans le leurre du seuil had “ransom'd” in calm words is “destroyed”17 by the illegible wind that the painting, the sail and the shutter all metonymically attest to:
Et tu te lèves une éternelle fois
Dans cet été qui t'obsède.
A nouveau ce bruit d'un ailleurs, proche, lointain;
Tu vas à ce volet qui vibre. … Dehors, nul vent,
Les choses de la nuit sont immobiles
Comme une avancée d'eau dans la lumière.
(DLS 231)
The intertextual retrospective here mirrors en abyme the hors-texte which refutes text. The textual lie (“Dehors, nul vent”) is revealed from outside the text (Dans le leurre du seuil) in the new text (Ce qui fut sans lumière) which denounces text as darkness. The landscape and the sail are at once metaphorical representations of the poetic image and the metonymic textual manifestations of the extra-textual wind. Torn and buffeted, these causal representatives of the wind are thus metaphors subverted by metonymy. The interplay of the two rhetorical figures reflects the opposition of text and hors-texte, of image and mortality, as the forces of writing and un-writing collide in poetic images in search of their own refutation.
In order to profit from the memory, the poetic voice announces the return to the dream of the image-world:
Que faire de tes dons, ô souvenir,
Sinon recommencer le plus vieux rêve,
Croire que je m'éveille? La nuit est calme,
Sa lumière ruisselle sur les eaux,
La voile des étoiles frémit à peine
Dans la brise qui passe par les mondes.
(SL 11)
Like the dreamer's belief in the reality of dream, the poet-reader's suspension of disbelief leads to the snare of illusion. The wind's violence is calmed as the battered canvas gives way to the “voile des étoiles,” the starry canvas of night reflected on still waters. But the textile metaphor now echoes the metonymic wind. The torn painting and the buffeted sail conspire to undermine the acceptance of the peaceful equilibrium where the delicately trembling, sparkling “voile des étoiles” unfolds. And the “joys” of the image world are now reconsidered in the “light” of the wind waiting to blow them away: “O joies, comme un rameur au loin, qui bouge peu / Sur la nappe brillante …” (SL 12). The boat gliding effortlessly on the shining waters now recalls the other boat that could not be set afloat. The atemporal “joys” of the image-world are now deprived of their inaugural freshness as they are subjected to the corrosive time that memory's repetition implies. The temporal metaphor of the river flowing carries with it the metonymic mud to sully the serenity of fixed images, now remembered and re-considered as “what was dark”: an insufficient, illusory approach to an elusive reality that esthetic images obscure.
Joies, et le temps qui vint au travers, comme un fleuve
En crue, de nuit, débouche dans le rêve,
Et en blesse la rive, et en disperse
Les images les plus sereines dans la boue.
(SL 12)
The dreamer is reluctant to repudiate his dream world: “Je ne veux pas savoir la question qui monte / De cette terre en paix …” (SL 12). The refusal to question the habitable reality of the image-world immobilizes “cette terre en paix” in the darkness of the enduring night: “Et on ne sait, / Seuls à nouveau dans la nuit qui s'achève, / Si même on veut que reparaisse l'aube …” (SL 13). And, like the dawn, the moment of recognition and acquiescence is deferred: “L'heure n'est pas venue de porter la flamme / Dans le miroir qui nous parle dans l'ombre” (SL 13). The mirror in shadow is the metaphoric representative of the “memory” as recognition of what is lost. The deferred lighting of the mirror implies the eventual replication of the image as such, reflected in the mirror which will reduce it to the silent play of refracted light and provide the metonymic equivalent of the wind and the negative response to the rejected question: “is this real?”
But the poet-dreamer comes inevitably to the “adieu” that establishes a metonymic causal relationship with the “souvenir” as it elicits the farewell to what has slipped away. Intertwined with the figure of the companion identified with shadow and with the Earth, a complex series of metaphors is at once built up and torn down by the “adieu” that un-writes each new metaphoric dimension as it introduces it:
Je vais,
Et il me semble que quelqu'un marche près de moi,
Ombre, qui sourirait bien que silencieuse
Comme une jeune fille, pieds nus dans l'herbe,
Accompagne un instant celui qui part.
Et celui-ci s'arrête, il la regarde,
Il prendrait volontiers dans ses mains ce visage
Qui est la terre même. Adieu, dit-il,
Présence qui ne fut que pressentie
Bien que mystérieusement tant d'années si proche,
Adieu, image impénétrable qui nous leurra
D'être la vérité enfin presque dite,
Certitude, là où tout n'a été que doute, et bien que chimère
Parole si ardente que réelle.
(SL 14-15)
The “presentiment of presence” is recognized as “impenetrable image,” at once “threshold” and “lure,” as Dans le leurre du seuil had affirmed. But if the “threshold” had weighed however slightly more in the balance of the previous work, Ce qui fut sans lumière's reassessment tips the balance in favor of the “lure.” So the “adieu,” which is the negative side of memory, relinquishes the locus amoenus, now recognized as the illusion of metaphor. And the “truth finally almost spoken” is given up, however reluctantly, as “almost” takes on the negative connotation: but not quite. Thus the “souvenir” as an obsessive attempt to re-possess gives way to the “adieu” which abnegates possession at the “threshold” of the elusive reality of finitude. Like the wind tearing the canvas, the “adieu” unveils the deceit of appearance. What had seemed to be the truth is decried as lies. Certainty is replaced by doubt.
The object of memory is necessarily image, a glimpse of a former, now vanished presence. If metaphors describe such an image, building up equivalences between face and earth, metonymy dismisses such comparisons, delivers them to the wind, then retrieves them as mere traces of what is lost. So the metonymic presence of the titular “souvenir” joins the wind of destruction and the “adieu” to unravel the textiles of metaphor. Like the metonymic Ferrare of “A San Francesco le soir,” the remembered wind of “Le Souvenir” opens the text to the reality of a specific place, Valsaintes, and to that tragic reality of place in general, which is erosion, ruin, collapse, and that elusiveness that escapes language's attempts to take possession of what slips away.
Yet the poem closes with a refusal of the “adieu”: “Adieu? Non, ce n'est pas le mot que je sais dire” (SL 16). The fascinated poet-dreamer returns again and again to the empty house. And now the place is temporally expanded by the metonymic echo of a former occupant:
Et mes rêves, serrés
L'un contre l'autre et l'autre encore, ainsi
La sortie des brebis dans le premier givre,
Reprennent piétinant leurs plus vieux chemins.
Je m'éveille nuit après nuit dans la maison vide,
Il me semble qu'un pas m'y précède encore.
(SL 16)
The house becomes an historical monument to abandon, to the passing away of its inhabitants, as the dreamer harkens to the hallucinatory traces of a spectral predecessor,18 a shepherd; the vestiges of his time in the house enrich the place with a rhythmic resonance of the coming and going of his sheep, as his footsteps lead the dreamer back to a different time: “the kind of natural, elementary time that is untouched by the degradation of the absolute clocks subject us to.”19 The recurring dreams dawn night after night in a frosty tapestry of white on white as repetition takes on the cyclic value of the sheep's daily going out to pasture along the same old trails. The comparison of the dreams to sheep is based on the metonymic association between path and movement, between the trails the sheep follow and the course of the dreams. The going out of the dream sheep accomplishes a blending of figure and ground, a visual blurring of contiguity into continuity as the flock moves over the frost covered ground. So the dreams are situated in the enduring continuity of place, now lost, that Valsaintes has come to signify.
As the sheep go out to pasture, the dreamer goes out behind the house, following the call of the shepherd of the past:
Je sors
Et m'étonne que l'ampoule soit allumée
Dans ce lieu déserté de tous, devant l'étable.
Je cours derrière la maison, parce que l'appel
Du berger d'autrefois retentit encore.
J'entends l'aboi qui précédait le jour,
Je vois l'étoile boire parmi les bêtes
Qui ne sont plus, à l'aube. Et résonne encore la flûte
Dans la fumée des choses transparentes.
(SL 16)
The perceived descent of the morning star setting low on the horizon coincides with the movement of the beasts leaning down to drink, as all this dream stuff dissipates at dawn. The alternation of the setting star and the rising sun corresponds to the alternation of the dream of what was and waking to what is gone. Thus the star shines in the dream with the light of difference, the harbinger of dawn signaling the end of dream and the disappearance of the illusory beasts as it seems, despite its distance, to come down among them. Opening the dream-text to what is other than dream, exploding the spatial context of “parmi,” the star's incomprehensible distance obviates the image it produces, as the shepherd's call gives way to the flute sounding at the threshold between the disappearing images and the place they approached but could not contain. “par où la terre finit” will give the flute to the child of lost paths, whose playing recreates the world:
Chemins,
Non, ce n'est pas dans vos rumeurs que rien s'achève.
Vous êtes un enfant qui joue de la flûte
Et dont les doigts confiants recréent le monde
De rien qu'un peu de terre où se prend le souffle.
(SL 60)
Here the flute is the final metonymy of an other presence, recalling the sound of the wind in canvas, now transposed for flute, as the light child's20 breath awakens an earthly presence yet to come—elsewhere, tomorrow, beyond the text disintegrating in the wake of becoming. Opening to the light already shining through the dream of language, this presence illuminates its transparent images as they vanish. If metaphors wove the text and its images, veiling Valsaintes in a locus amoenus, metonymy has torn them apart in the name of what is, to save the light of being from the dark of the word, to open the “garden”21 to the wild. And the poem drifts away, trembling between memory and oblivion: “Quelques figures simples, quelques signes / Qui brillent au-delà des mots, indéchiffrables / Dans l'immobilité du souvenir” (SL 69).
Notes
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Yves Bonnefoy, “Entretiens avec Bernard Falciola,” Entretiens sur la poésie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1990) 50-53.
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Inscription refers here to the manipulation of the sign as trace in the production of text and the esthetic image, as defined in “Entretiens avec Bernard Falciola,” Entretiens 12: “le cadre, la page, la fixité du tracé, tout ce qui semble faire de la vision fugitive un fait malgré tout, un fait relevant d'un autre lieu que celui de notre vie, et témoignant même peut-être de l'existence d'un autre monde.” Incarnation refers to an illegible hors-texte, an ineffable domain, heterogeneous to language: that extra-linguistic “time and place where others come to us” (“le temps et le lieu où autrui advient”) (Yves Bonnefoy, Le Nuage rouge [Paris: Mercure de France, 1976] 77).
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See Richard Stamelman, “The Crack in the Mirror: The Subversion of Image and Representation in the Poetry of Yves Bonnefoy,” French Forum 13 (1988) 70: “Bonnefoy observes that, from the Greeks to the beginning of the twentieth century, mimesis has coincided with the development and dominance of conceptual thought and with the formation of language as a system. As a result, the painted and poetic image has arrogated to itself the name and authority of reality (‘Héritier’ 8). But the image cannot authentically represent the world of things. It is a deceit, a lie, an evasion.”
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“Poésie et vérité,” Entretiens 267: “Sous le signe de l'unité … le rapport à autrui renaît, que la pensée conceptuelle brouille, et permet trop aisément de détruire. Et c'est dans cette dimension de l'altérité, aussi bien, que la pensée proprement poétique se développe. Sachant qu'il n'est d'expérience de la présence que si autrui est aussi rencontre pleine, il lui faut par nécessité rechercher les désirs, les biens, les impressions, les valeurs que les habitants de la terre peuvent chacun accepter sans avoir pour autant à se démettre. Pour dire la présence, la poésie doit élaborer un lieu qui vaudra pour tous. Voilà la sorte d'universel que sa vérité recherche. Et voilà ce que l'on peut dire la sorte de réalité qui se diversifie dans son dire, sans désormais se fragmenter, s'extérioriser: non la nature mais une terre; non la matière et ses lois mais un lieu et ses clefs de voûte dans la parole, ce qu'autrefois assuraient les mythes. Un réel pour la société, dont il est désastreux qu'on l'étudie aujourd'hui comme simplement un fait, aux limites de la matière, quand elle est d'abord cette instauration, au degré poétique de la parole. Quand elle n'a de santé possible que par la vérité de la poésie.”
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“Lettre à John E. Jackson,” Entretiens 110: “La terre est l'avenir de l'écriture qui se refuse à l'image—l'image, cette vision qui n'est vraie que quand elle exprime le besoin frustré, la révolte, et ment si elle consent à sa cohérence trop courte, qui n'engendre bientôt que l'orgueil et la tyrannie. Et c'est la terre aussi bien, la terre non la nature, la terre-lieu que je voyais poindre comme présence et finalité ultime dans les transgressions tentées ou rêvées dans le nom de Douve. …”
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See Jacques Dubois et al., Rhétorique générale (Paris: Larousse, 1970), and Rhétorique de la poésie (Brussels: Complexe, 1977). On the analysis of metonymy, see esp. Rhétorique générale 91-144.
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Yves Bonnefoy, La Vérité de parole (Paris: Mercure de France, 1988) 45: “Qu'est-ce qui se perd, quand on a recours à des mots? Le fait que ce que les mots différencient, cet arbre, disons, ce ravin, cette source au fond, cette colline au-delà, ce ciel, choses qu'ils vont entraîner chacune dans leur espace mental, pour un travail de pensée, qui les classera, les séparera—soient ensemble encore, soient dans une relation de contiguïté, de simultanéité, de continuité où nous-mêmes d'ailleurs nous sommes reçus: soient une seule présence. Cette contiguïté, ce donné ensemble de l'arbre, et du rocher près de lui, et de la source plus loin, la source qu'on entend au moment même où on la regarde, voilà bien, en effet, ce que le mot arbre va détruire, puisque le mot n'intervient que par référence à des arbres de toutes sortes, dont l'intrusion nous fait aussitôt quitter notre état premier d'implication pure et simple dans l'expérience du lieu.”
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Yves Bonnefoy, Ce qui fut sans lumière (Paris: Mercure de France, 1987). Subsequent citations from this work will be followed by the abbreviation SL and the appropriate page number.
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References to Yves Bonnefoy's previous poetic works are to the volume Poèmes: Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (Douve), Hier régnant désert (HRD), Pierre écrite (PE), Dans le leurre du seuil (DLS) (Paris: Mercure de France, 1978).
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On the locus amoenus and its vernacular avatar, the loc aizi of the troubadours, as “a hypothetical place-time suggestive of cosmic origins,” see Charlotte Gross, “The Cosmology of Rhetoric in the Early Troubadour Lyric,” Rhetorica 9.1 (1991) 41. On the development of the loc aizi, see Gross, “Studies in Lyric Time-Structure: Dream, Visions, and Reveries,” Tenso 2.1 (1986) 21-36. Cf. Yves Bonnefoy's remarks on the role of his house at Valsaintes in his poetry, in the interview published with John Naughton's translation of Ce qui fut sans lumière, In the Shadow's Light (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991) 163: “I had made the place the material of a great dream, the dream of being able to live there, simply, in its atemporality and quiet transparency. …”
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On the history and development of this term, see Lucien Dällenbach, Le Récit spéculaire (Paris: Seuil, 1977).
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Entretiens 265: “On dira aussi, avec Rimbaud, que le vent est ‘salubre,’ ce qui peut sembler sans rigueur, mais c'est que le vent vient d'ailleurs, invisible autant que violent, et métaphorise ainsi la transgression de ce monde-image que la langue reclôt sur soi.”
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The painted fabric implied by “l'étoffe de la couleur” evokes the “étoffes peintes” and “les étoffes rouges” of Pierre écrite (164, 174, 185, 204), and “le rouge des lourdes / Etoffes peintes / Que lavait l'Egyptienne, l'irrévélée, / De nuit, dans l'eau du fleuve …” (DLS 259). This latter image constitutes another textual mise en abyme, through the reference to Poussin's Moïse sauvé. See Richard Vernier's discussion of Poussin in relation to Dans le leurre du seuil in “From Critical to Poetic Discourse: Bonnefoy and Poussin,” L'Esprit Créateur 22 (1982) 26-36.
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On Yves Bonnefoy's “reading” of John Constable's landscapes in the poem “Dedham, vu de Langham,” see James McAllister, “Yves Bonnefoy and John Constable: ‘la tâche terrestre délivrée,’” Romance Notes 32.3 (1992) 281-89.
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Cf. Richard Stamelman's analysis of “Les Raisins de Zeuxis” in “The Crack in the Mirror” 71: “The representation is reduced to a piece of cloth, a discarded sack, a thing among things, lying wet, trampled and abandoned in a gutter. The painting is returned to the world, to a finite place of death and decomposition and to the substance and matter it never really ceased to be.”
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This boat is a complex and very ambiguous image. Yves Bonnefoy has written about it in response to John Naughton's question about how it is to be understood: “I too seek to know the meaning of that boat that came over from Dans le leurre du seuil, and thus I give movement to it: sometimes it is the barque of the dead of ancient cultures; sometimes it is a little boat stopped in the middle of the river under the sky and so an image of the peacefulness of mind in the sufficiency of the moment. But these are only some aspects among others, aspects I haven't controlled, and in order to know more, I have to write again and search …” (In the Shadow's Light 176). Earlier in the same interview, the poet had mentioned the “ship of words” in the context of certain narrative aspects of his poetry: “There are events, past or virtual, hidden in the depths of a poem, and even if they are not made explicit, many of their elements are nonetheless visible in brief evocations which provide writing with its metaphors, or, through a fleeting metonymy, enrich the great symbols that are in all poetry and already active in the author's mind. And it is very fortunate that this is so, for now the ship of words, which is so apt to go off in any direction, is anchored in things, and facts, that exceed the imaginary” (In the Shadow's Light 170). There is, in fact, a relationship between the “ship of words” and this boat and the house at Valsaintes—and the “tempest” of lucidity that blows them all away.
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The prefatory quotation from Shakespeare's Winter's Tale (“They look'd as they had heard of a world ransom'd, or one destroyed”) describes the struggle between image and life as embodied in Dans le leurre du seuil.
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Dans le leurre du seuil had quoted the inscription left by such a predecessor in the indeterminate past: “Et Jean Aubry, d'Orgon / Et ses fils Claude et Jean. / ‘Nous avons fait ce jour / Appui de communion.’ La date manque” (DLS 320).
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This is Yves Bonnefoy's description of the temporal atmosphere of the house at Valsaintes, In the Shadow's Light 167.
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“On dit que la lumière est un enfant / Qui joue, qui ne veut rien, qui rêve ou chante. / Si elle vient à nous c'est par jeu encore, / Touchant le sol d'un pied distrait, qui serait l'aube” (SL 92).
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The rejected “farewell” will be encountered again in the poem “L'Adieu,” where, like Adam and Eve hesitating at the edge of the archetypal locus amoenus, the dialogic couple question the value of un-writing, wondering if the “seed of light” can be taken out of the image and into the world: “Pourrons-nous recueillir de cette lumière / Qui a été le miracle d'ici / La semence dans nos mains sombres, pour d'autres flaques / Au secret d'autres champs ‘barrés de pierres’?” (SL 23).
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