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The Crack in the Mirror: The Subversion of Image and Representation in the Poetry of Yves Bonnefoy

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SOURCE: Stamelman, Richard. “The Crack in the Mirror: The Subversion of Image and Representation in the Poetry of Yves Bonnefoy.”1French Forum 13, no. 1 (January 1988): 69-81.

[In the following essay, Stamelman explores the dimensions of “Bonnefoy's subversion of representation in his poetry and writings on art.”]

“C'est simple,” Yves Bonnefoy writes in “L'Entaille,” a recent poem in prose:

On trempe un doigt dans la gouache bleue, on le fait glisser sur les mots à peine tracés dans l'encre noire, et du mélange de l'encre et de la couleur monte, marée, algues qui remuent dans l'eau trouble, ce qui n'est plus le signe, n'est plus l'image,—nos deux passions, nos deux leurres. On a ouvert les yeux, on avance, dans la lumière de l'aube.


Mais je m'éveille. Devant moi sur le mur aux couleurs superposées qui s'écaillent, il y a cette forme qui fut gravée dans leur profondeur, avec un clou, jusqu'au plâtre. Est-ce l'évocation d'un agneau qu'un dieu porte sur ses épaules? Est-ce une figure obscène? En fait l'entaille va si avant dans la nuit du plâtre que c'est son rebord désert qui compte seul, déchirure qu'il est de toute quête d'image, dissipation de tout signe.2

Image and sign are undone by the mixing of color and ink, subverted by a combination that has neither the visual form of painting nor the lexical structure of writing. Rather, a blurring, an amorphous intermingling, of elements normally used to create a representation has occurred. But this is only the first failure or subversion of mimesis in the poem. For the groove etched in the wall and penetrating through several coats of paint—like the tear that death cuts into the night of human existence or the zigzag that a flash of lightning engraves momentarily on a black sky—opens the closed world of the image to the reality of finite being. It breaks the prisonhouse of poetic and artistic form; it interrupts a representation's confident but deceptive will-to-meaning, to perfect imitation, invading its illusory dream-world of completeness and immobility with the ambiguity (is it a lamb? is it an obscene figure?), the barrenness (the plaster has become night) and the loss (image and sign are dispersed) that are associated with mortal existence. In Yves Bonnefoy's poetic and critical writings the mirror of representation is cracked. Through the fractured image enter the pain and joy, the darkness and light, the being and nothingness of a perpetually open, changing and immediate world which the closure of form, sign and image could never fully apprehend or express. In what follows I would like to discuss three dimensions of Yves Bonnefoy's subversion of representation in his poetry and writings on art: first, his questioning of the authority of the image and of mimesis; second, his fascination with the non-representational powers of color and light; and third, his insistence on the drift away from imitation, the swerving toward what is unintended and other, that is inherent in all representations.

“AN ART FREED FROM MIMESIS” (NR 131)

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. It symbolizes the desire to construct a perfect, transcendent and self-enclosed world, so narcissistically preoccupied with its own system and structure that the finitude, mortality and fragmentary nature of temporal existence are masked. It is the hubris of representation, Bonnefoy argues, that seeks to triumph over what is most menacing in the world, to master the incoherence of being, to order the chaos of fragmentary events and to signify an inexpressible plenitude. The image needs to be in harmony with temporal rhythms of living and dying. It should express the inaccessibility of presence; it should insist on the primacy of being over representation. Representations in poetry and art need to be traversed by fissures, fragmented by cuts, effaced by erosion, their forms and letters rendered indecipherable by the passage of time, their sealed world made porous to finite being, their will-to-perfection disrupted.

This explains, for example, Bonnefoy's fascination with the final scene of The Winter's Tale, redramatized in his long poem Dans le leurre du seuil. At the end of Shakespeare's play love magically dissolves the bonds of art that have kept Hermione entrapped in a sublime, cold perfection that, while giving the illusion of beauty and lifelikeness—“we are mocked with art” (V, iii, 67), Leontes says—envelops her in death. Love, the relation of one being to another, awakens the representation to life, for the statue's mimetic perfection is an invitation to the world, a self-defeating lure, that will eventually destroy the very art of the image: “Good my lord, forbear!” warns Paulina in order to keep Leontes from embracing the statue, “The ruddiness upon her lip is wet; / You'll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own / With oily painting” (V, iii, 80-83). But marring and staining are effects that art and poetry should strive for. Leontes moves to open the statue to the world of pain, absence and loss in which he has dwelled. His act is that of a poet:

Et poésie, si ce mot est dicible,
N'est-ce pas de savoir, là où l'étoile
Parut conduire mais pour rien sinon la mort,
Aimer cette lumière encore? Aimer ouvrir
L'amande de l'absence dans la parole?

(CQFSL 42)

Similarly, in a recent fable, appropriately entitled “Les Raisins de Zeuxis,” Bonnefoy describes how mimetic representation contains the seeds of its own destruction. As the creation of a perfect copy the most sublime of representations contributes to its own undoing. Bonnefoy reaches back to the legendary sources of mimetic art in the West to reveal nature's antagonism to representation, offering an intriguing interpretation of the classic story of how Zeuxis, the great realist painter of antiquity, deceived the birds:

Un sac de toile mouillée dans le caniveau, c'est le tableau de Zeuxis, les raisins, que les oiseaux furieux ont tellement désiré, ont si violemment percé de leurs becs rapaces, que les grappes ont disparu, puis la couleur, puis toute trace d'image en cette heure de crépuscule du monde où ils l'ont traîné sur les dalles.

(Raisins)

As a representation perfect in its imitation of natural forms, Zeuxis's painting of grapes is attacked by the world, punctured, pierced and made imperfect. Attracted to the false lure of the image, the world takes its revenge. Forms, colors and figures disappear. The surface of the painting is wiped clean, until nothing remains but the wrinkled canvas itself. 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 has never really ceased to be. The painting has been picked clean of its images. In this effacing of the imaginary, this washing away of form and color, is found Bonnefoy's impossible longing for an image that is “purifiée, lavée, de son être—de sa différence—d'image … délivrée, en sa naissance même, en sa conception par l'artiste, de la boue de la rêverie” (“L'Artiste du dernier jour,” RR 175-76).3

The opacity of the image is undone, its lines, colors, forms, structures and relationships effaced. The unsatisfiable desire for an art freed from mimesis comes perhaps a little closer to possible realization. This is to be welcomed because human dependence on representation has gotten out of hand, as Bonnefoy suggests in “L'Artiste du dernier jour,” an extraordinary tale in which the world is about to end because the number of images that mankind has produced will shortly surpass the number of living creatures. Mimesis is the evil which “le péché de l'œil” (RR 177) has created. In his dealings with the finite world man cannot do without the mediation that the image affords. The world's only hope for salvation and rebirth at this twilight hour of doom is that some artist will be able to stop the proliferation of images by magically creating an imageless image, an “outre-image” (NR 362), a non-mimetic representation, wherein

… cette figure ne montre plus, ne dise pas, ne suggère rien, ne soit plus la rivale illicite de ce qui est,—soit, elle-même et tout simplement, comme les images jamais ne furent, qui se dédoublent sans fin, se déchirent, renaissent, dans l'espace de la parole, soit comme l'arbre ou la pierre sont, dans l'ignorance d'eux-mêmes.

(“L'Artiste du dernier jour,” RR 176)

Only a representation of the unrepresentable, the expression of what Bonnefoy calls the “au-delà du représentable” (“Liberté” 11 and “Héritier” 8)—a different kind of representation, self-consciously aware of the limits and deficiencies of mimetic figuration—can initiate a new kind of art free from the tyranny of mimesis. The last chance “l'artiste du dernier jour” may possibly have—and it is not certain in Bonnefoy's story that he will undertake it—is to “copy” a child's face, that is, to draw the purity of “l'irreprésentable lumière” (RR 177), the unrepresentable light of joy emanating from that face. For Bonnefoy light is a phenomenon which, although it may be the essential concern and preoccupation of the painter, cannot ultimately be represented, and the child, “l'enfant / Qui porte le monde” (DLS 42), is the unifying force of hope, redemption, love and presence inhabiting the center of the world, the transparence of things (I 318). Light is a child “Qui joue, qui ne veut rien, qui rêve ou chante” (CQFSL 92). By incorporating the light of the child's joyful face into his drawing, the artist may possibly escape the immobility of figurative representation, for light is not a fixed image. The contact with the radiance of the child's innocent face may possibly “redeem” the drawing, removing it from the domain of mimesis and marking it with the trace of an unrepresentable plenitude that is not unlike the purity and wholeness of childhood itself. Similarly, in another enigmatic tale Bonnefoy describes the artist who creates an icon of the Virgin from paint that has been mixed with thousands of particles of ground glass. The resulting representation radiates with the reflected light of the sky, its thousands of shimmering sequins and dazzling facets replacing and blotting out the image itself (“La Mort du peintre d'icônes,” RR 171). The encounter with light, therefore, can change the nature of representation because no strategy of mimetic recovery could ever capture the experience which light offers and which Bonnefoy calls “la présence,” the enigmatic encounter with plenitude and oneness that happens in an instant so fleeting that neither meaning nor sign nor image has the time to coalesce, to “take,” to re-present. Presence is the unrepresentable “clef de la vie” (“Liberté” 18).

Bonnefoy wages a war against the image not in order to do away with it, but rather to make it more expressive of realities of disintegration and effacement. A representation must always be corrected by the world: by the fading light of a setting sun, by the owl's cry, the cricket's chirp, the rustle of trees, a child's smile, a red cloth, a puddle of water, a stone, all of which must be allowed to “collaborate in our works” (“La Mort du peintre d'icônes,” RR 172). Bonnefoy's denunciation of the Image (with a capital I) as a pure, transcendent and self-centered essence, hiding the fragmentary, divided condition of human existence, does not, however, compromise his love of images. He knows that in language, poetry and art images cannot be dispensed with. They translate human desire, even if they do tend to become part of the imaginary, idealized world he calls “le rêve.” Images are signs of a longing for what is non-existent, unrealized, and they are obstinate acts of hope for future fulfillment (NR 163). They are expressions of the humanness of desire endlessly nourished by lack and absence.4 Although we are, Bonnefoy remarks, “les prisonniers de l'image que nous substituons à ce monde” (E 143), and even though “l'Image est certainement le mensonge, aussi sincère soit l'imagier” (PI 34), this does not mean that the poet must renounce their use. Bonnefoy's assertion, “Je me refusais au culte des images” (E 16), is a refusal not of images in themselves, but of a reverence, an excessive worship or passion, for images. He rejects the kind of representation that privileges the image above everything else, life included. It is the “Image” as a Platonic Form that Bonnefoy rejects. Poetry, he writes, “a dénoncé l'Image mais pour aimer, de tout son cœur, les images” (PI 56). Where being and image coexist, where existence corrects and unsettles the figures of represented entities, where unsatisfied desire thwarts the final saying of things, Bonnefoy finds representations, poetic or pictorial, that are very much open to the world. The true artist, the painter of finitude, is one who works to “accueillir comme et quand il vient le grand flux des choses fugaces” (“Cartier-Bresson” 7). As long as a representation does not lose sight of the object it re-presents, of the original for which it is the copy, of the fleeting perception it has immobilized, then Bonnefoy welcomes it. He desires a representation that, being open to the world, will present the pure and immediate evidence of the here and now as fleetingly, as minimally and as precariously as the Zen artist who paints a bird or a tree or a crab as it has never been seen before with one, just one, quickly executed brushstroke of color, explaining that this single line—this breath—of color expresses with haiku-like density all that need be expressed, and that it is the most beautiful representation only because it embodies the painter's close experience with the bird or the tree or the crab: his having become one with the physical time and place of its being in the world. The brushstroke, the trace of color on the canvas, is thus “une émanation du monde” (“Cartier-Bresson” 8).5

In several collections of poetry and in innumerable essays on painting, sculpture, drawing and architecture—from Byzantine art through the Quattrocento to Poussin and Rubens, down to Giacometti, Mondrian and Cartier-Bresson in our own day and age—Bonnefoy searches for an art delivered from the primacy of mimesis, an art sensitive to the otherness that lies behind every representation: the other words and images that could have been written in a poem, the other forms and shapes a painting could have displayed, the other world of death and suffering, which every immutable representation hides: “le temps de la douleur / Avant l'image” (DLS 34). Not only does a representation contain a will to perfection and to petrification that eventually contributes to its own downfall, as in Zeuxis's painting of the grapes, but it also conceals other, secret and dangerous images behind those painted or drawn on its surface: images of death, destruction and darkness, each capable, like the anamorphic skull in Holbein's The Ambassadors, of troubling the viewer's perception of the intersecting lines, the harmony of colors, the balance of forms that compose the work of art. In one of Bonnefoy's récits, for example, a painter describes the fresco of the Madonna and child on which he has been laboring for years. Behind the Virgin's hair, which falls in curls onto her shoulders, behind her crown sparkling with jewels and behind the beatific smile she directs at the radiant face of the child she holds in her arms, there appeared

“… les ailes et les griffes, … le cou et le bec étrange d'un immense vautour totalement dégagé de la pénombre d'un arbre sur lequel il était perché, vers la cime, regardant fixement je ne sais quoi hors du monde. Je poussais un cri, de douleur. Il s'envola.


“Mais pendant toutes les années qui suivirent, mes amis, je ne cessai de pousser ce cri, ce fut ce que vous disiez mon silence.”

(“Le Vautour,” RR 169)

This is a cry echoing the otherness, the shadowy alterity, the dark unconscious that every representation possesses, but also necessarily represses.

COLOR AND LIGHT: THE BEYOND OF REPRESENTATION

Bonnefoy's sensitivity to the otherness that representations hide has led him to write a poetry that in its fight against closure meanders, swerves, digresses, circles and turns away, as if an “esthetics of drift” might allow the poem to escape the immobilizing finality of form and meaning. In his long poems Dans le leurre du seuil and Ce qui fut sans lumière and in recent prose poems and stories, concerning the non-referentiality of color and the artist's problematic attitude toward the representability of the world, Bonnefoy actively questions and subverts the authority of representation. In Dans le leurre du seuil, for example, the textual field is transformed into an “interstitial space,” recalling the world beyond the poem. Here a fragmented, irregular syntax, a decentered, digressive poetic discourse, a flow of disappearing and reappearing metaphors and a poetics of gathering and dispersion, all work to mar the so-called “beauty” of poetic speech, opening it to death and nothingness, darkening its transparence, cracking the mirror of its mimetic surface, thus causing the cri, the cry of pain and death, to pierce the mask of the écrit, the text.

Moreover, in several very recent prose poems and poetic fables and récits (Remarques sur la couleur, L'Artiste du dernier jour—both collected in Récits en réve—and Les Raisins de Zeuxis) Bonnefoy suggests that color, through its immediacy, energy and vibrant physicality, opens representation to an encounter with the temporal world of mortal existence. Color is the “chiffre de la présence” (I 328), the light of being itself. Neither an abstract quality nor a formal concept, it is simple, elemental and rarely capturable. It is free of the imaginary. Color is not a representation, but a light; not an image or a copy, but a substance; not an imitation, but the direct apprehension of the real. Color undoes the image, for it establishes the presentness of a thing, the being-thereness (Dasein) of material reality; it has ontological presence. It does not copy a thing, it is a thing, “une présence de chose” (“Liberté” 17), in the fullness and immediacy of its corporeality. And this presentness of color is always new, always disruptive of form and image, which it pierces like Roland Barthes's punctum.6 Color in a painting is not only seen, but lived. By means of reds, blues, yellows and greens a work of art is touched by the materiality and physicality of the world and by its relativity as well, since colors are never perceived as they truly and physically are and since there are as many “blues,” for example, as there are persons who hear the word and call the color to mind, as Joseph Albers, the painter and color theorist, has demonstrated.7 Through color the world comes to inhabit, to participate in and to collaborate with the work of art. As a power, a mass of energies, “une densité de possibles (formes ou vies)” (“Héritier” 12), color has a life truly all its own; it has its own pulsation, its own vibration. It becomes a force of presencing, and what it makes present, especially in the enclosed pictorial space of the work of art, is the world. It is in revolt against representability because pure color is ultimately unrepresentable, uncopiable and unnameable. In its innumerable hues, tones, intensities and values, color defeats nomination; it announces an alterity and an indeterminacy that its name cannot signify or explain.8 It thus affirms “un au-delà du représentable,” that which is beyond or outside representation (“Héritier” 8). It is through color, Bonnefoy argues, that art seeks “la délivrance de l'être dans le dépassement de l'image” (“Héritier” 17).9

Bonnefoy's fascination with color translates a certain fascination with light, the very matter and medium of color. For Bonnefoy light is “le miracle d'ici” (CQFSL 23), something lived and felt, “une joie” (CQSFL 66). His poetry could be described as expressing a “poetics of light.” He is conscious of the unseizability of light, its continuous passage; but he is also sensitive to the way it transfigures the world, opening it to sudden flashes, to epiphanic illuminations, to a “matière soudain lumière” (NR 115). Wherever it appears, light carries the authentic presence of the world: whether in a flash of the setting sun reflected in a windowpane or in a luminously red cloud or in an owl's cry “suddenly filling a sealed sign with light” (NR 326) or in “a moment of true radiance on some stony path” (NR 76) or in the way a painter “guides things toward their true place, / there enveloping them in light” (CQFSL 68) or in poetry through which we come to know, “there where the star / Appears to lead us toward nothing if not death, how, still, to love this light” (CQFSL 42). Through the heliotropic intensity of color and through the chromatic presence of light, physical reality in all its fundamental unrepresentability—“Qui a jamais pu imiter un rayon solaire?” (NR 128)—is momentarily brought into the framed, enclosed, artificial space of the work of art.10 Light is “la tâche du peintre, et non le matériau de son entreprise” (“La Mort du peintre d'icônes,” RR 170), as it is also the preoccupation of a poet concerned with the ephemeral visibility of things and with words “blessée[s] d'une lumière” (DLS 116). Thus, through light and through color the finite world in all its immediacy, vibrancy and presentness comes to dwell within a representation that it simultaneously creates and contests, that it fashions and fragments. A work of art for Bonnefoy is a mirror held up to the world of appearances. But it is also the crack the world opens in the smooth, reflecting surface of that mirror: the wound, tear, hole, cut, rupture—signs of death and loss, alterity and difference—which every representation possesses but labors to disguise. This is what Bonnefoy refers to as “le cri / Qui perce la musique” (DLS 85), “La tache noire dans l'image” (DLS 85), “[la] ronce dans les bouquets” (RT 52), “[le] cauchemar dans le plus beau rêve” (E 33)—each expressing the surge of mortality through perfect form; for Bonnefoy never forgets that while death is often a figure of speech, it is also, as the poet Joseph Brodsky writes, “a figure that leaves [us] speechless.”11

THE “DRIFT” OF REPRESENTATION

Often in his poetry and criticism Bonnefoy uses the imagery of cloud and river to express the reality of writing, painting and being. Both images, as well as the natural phenomena they signify, are essential to his poetic and ontological response to the world. There can be no forgetting the lesson in movement taught by what he calls “La dérive majeure de la nuée” (DLS 116), poignantly incarnated, for example, in Mondrian's painting The Red Cloud, as there can be no closing one's ears to the sounds of a rushing river, sign of the perpetually disruptive flux of living. But in a deeper, more substantial way these images point to what one might call the “drift” (in the double sense of orientation and deviation) of representation: that is, the way a poem or a painting may errantly wander away from the object, event or subject the creator has in mind to copy, thus defeating mimetic intention by swerving in an unforeseen direction. In addition to this swerving away from intention in the artistic process, which establishes otherness, there is also the movement of representation away from the world of everyday reality, its enclosure within a haven of eternal, unchanging form. This errancy of representation is also its error, its falseness and illusion—the way it distorts reality by excluding the transitory and impermanent experience of being-in-the-world.

In Dans le leurre du seuil Bonnefoy makes his images resist their own will to closure and coherence; they function as forces of disintegration (E 140), breaking apart the poetic systems which they, along with words and sounds, construct. Self-consciously aware of their “fault,” their “error,” these images call themselves into question; they paradoxically affirm and deny their own reality as representations, for they are “written” according to “le vocabulaire et la syntaxe premiers du naître, du vivre, et du mourir” (NR 280). These images—as well as the long poetic sequences or “ensembles” of poem-fragments which constitute Bonnefoy's œuvre—focus attention on the contradictory, often discontinuous movements by which they move towards and then swerve away from the assertion of a meaning. In addition, they emphasize the dialectical nature of a poetry where acts of gathering and dispersion have equal power. In their movements to and fro and in their contestative relations with each other, images in Dans le leurre du seuil resemble the restless, drifting, cloud-like words that give them expression, as the final verses of the poem affirm:

Les mots comme le ciel
Aujourd'hui,
Quelque chose qui s'assemble, qui se disperse.
Les mots comme le ciel
Infini
Mais tout entier soudain dans la flaque brève.

(DLS 121)

This is an unsettled, changeable writing, a cloud-writing, but one that does not dwell only within airy, atmospheric spaces high above the earth, so to speak. Writing is reflected in the world, coming to dwell in the simplest and most fugitive of places: in a pool of rain water, the “flaque brève,” that will soon evaporate. Words for Bonnefoy are like the sky, images like clouds, poetry like the river. A representation or a writing should suddenly be subject to change the way a summer sky can darken with clouds and then, following a torrential rain, become clear again, or it should swell and expire the way a wave gathers momentum, crests and then crashes onto shore. Both of these metaphors express a gathering of force and energy, an initial filling up and expansion, followed by an unleashing, an emptying, a depletion, of power. Cloud and wave lose their form, are hollowed out, “consumed,” dissipated and exhausted into formlessness after they have, so to speak, ex-pressed themselves. They stand as models for the precarious reality that images should have in representations.

In Dans le leurre du seuil poetic representation is self-consciously dialectical. Acts of gathering, coalescence, assembling, knotting, concentration, linking, clustering and convergence are countered by powerful centrifugal motions of dissipation, errancy, unknotting, divergence, depletion, crumbling, fracturing and excavation. The acts of gathering and dispersion determine the swerving, drifting motion of the poem, which at various moments comes together in long verse formations not unlike massed clouds, and at others dissipates into the vacancy and the incompletion symbolized by dots of ellipsis and white space. We are given a vision of what the title of the final section of the poem calls “L'Epars, L'Indivisible.” It is this dialectical pattern of dispersion and compaction, of depletion and accumulation—so vividly expressed in the images of cloud, river and wave—that characterizes what could be called the “drift” of images in Bonnefoy's work: what he identifies, in regard to the painting of Piero della Francesca, as “la dialectique du centre et de l'à-côté” (RT 33), the contest between the artistic work centered upon itself and the world of finitude lying to the side, beyond the protecting frame.12

CONCLUSION

The poet and the painter live, according to Bonnefoy, in a tentative world which, because it is buffeted by the realities of time and death, is continuously open; it is, in fact, that place of finitude and mutability that Rilke in the eighth of the Duino Elegies named the “Open.” The artist is one who, “hardi autant que privé d'espoir, se risque un instant dans l'ouvert” (NR 142) and who seeks to “rétablir l'ouvert” (PI 51). Any representation that presents this place of being as closed, complete or permanent is a fiction, a dream. For the artist or writer who must work with forms that almost naturally and inherently tend toward closure and toward the illusion of achieved harmony, sublime perfection and esthetic plenitude, the only hope is to seek the unrepresentable: that light, those colors, those material forms that enter the enclosed spaces of a work of art or the ordered syntax of a poem, still steaming with the heat of the world, still moving unpredictably like a cloud, in other words, a light, a color, a physical presence that not only represent reality, but are the real itself. Addressing the painter—and, implicitly, the poet—in “Dedham, vu de Langham” (a poem inspired by the Constable painting), Bonnefoy calls on him or her to link image with world, representation with death, poetry with temporality, and to open mimesis to the disintegration and fragmentation of things as they truly and simply are in the physical and sensual light of being:

Peintre,
Dès que je t'ai connu je t'ai fait confiance,
Car tu as beau rêver tes yeux sont ouverts
Et risques-tu ta pensée dans l'image
Comme on trempe la main dans l'eau, tu prends le fruit
De la couleur, de la forme brisées,
Tu le poses réel parmi les choses dites.

                                                                                                    Elle, la mort,
Elle défait le temps qui va le monde,
Montre le mur qu'éclaire le couchant,
Et mène autour de la maison vers la tonnelle
Pour offrir, ô bonheur ici, dans l'heure brève,
Les fruits, les voix, les reflets, les rumeurs,
Le vin léger dans rien que la lumière.

(CQFSL 67, 69)

Notes

  1. This article is an expanded version of a paper delivered in December 1986 at a session on “Non-representational Strategies in Twentieth-Century Poetry” at a meeting of the Modern Language Association in New York City.

  2. Les Raisins de Zeuxis et d'autres fables/The Grapes of Zeuxis and Other Fables, trans. Richard Stamelman, with etchings by George Nama (Montauk: Monument Press, 1987), n. pag. (hereafter cited as Raisins). Further references to Yves Bonnefoy's work will be indicated by the following abbreviations: “Cartier-Bresson”: Introduction to Henri Cartier-Bresson, photographe (Paris: Delpire, 1979); CQFSL: Ce qui fut sans lumière (Paris: Mercure de France, 1987); DLS: Dans le leurre du seuil (Paris: Mercure de France, 1975); E: Entretiens sur la poésie, coll. Langages (Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1981); “Héritier”: “Un Héritier de Rimbaud,” Derrière le Miroir, 279 (May 1978) (Paris: Maeght) 1-17 (exhibition catalogue of the works of Pablo Palazuelo); I: L'Improbable et autres essais (Paris: Mercure de France, 1980); “Liberté”: “La Liberté de l'esprit,” Raymond Mason, coll. Contemporains 6 (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985) 9-33; NR: Le Nuage rouge: Essais sur la poétique (Paris: Mercure de France, 1977); PI: La Présence et l'image (Paris: Mercure de France, 1983); RR: Récits en rêve (Paris: Mercure de France, 1987); RT: Rue Traversière (Paris: Mercure de France, 1977).

  3. A similar decomposition of the image is imagined by Bonnefoy in the fading away of a photograph, which over time becomes fused with the natural landscape it might have represented. The image is reintegrated into the “real.” No longer are representation and world separate; they are joined through an experience of temporal loss, for this is a photograph of “quelques arbres sur une crête mais prise par accident, d'un déclic imprévu, inaperçu, de l'appareil, et jamais développée, puis jetée, et perdue, vraiment perdue, rendue aux dissolutions et transmutations de la matière sous un éboulement de décombres—l'humidité défaisant les sels, l'astre sans dimensions ni couleur se levant dans la couleur, dans la forme” (“L'Artiste du dernier jour,” RR 176).

  4. To give expression to a desire sustained and ultimately struck by loss is for Bonnefoy the goal of poetic writing: “On écrit pour ne pas oublier, non tant l'unité perdue, que le désir qu'on en a, et qui lui-même s'efface” (“Le Sommeil de personne,” Du romantisme au surnaturalisme: Hommage à Claude Pichois, coll. Langages [Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1985] 316).

  5. Related to the Zen artist is the aged painter of washes in Bonnefoy's récit “Le Fou Rire.” His speciality is tracing “d'un seul grand coup de pinceau—oui, des fous rires,” with the result that the painted “image” coalesces with, becomes the phenomenon represented: “Et, sur la pointe des pieds, dans cette galerie du fond du jardin de bambous, on s'approchait de la porte de sa cellule. Ecoutez, chuchotait-on (et l'on riait, l'on riait!), écoutez le bruit du pinceau” (RT 113).

  6. Color, writes Barthes in an essay on the artist Cy Twombly, is an intrusion, an invasion, a penetration, a piercing of the visual field in which it appears: “Qu'est-ce que la couleur? Une jouissance. … Il faut se rappeler que la couleur est aussi une idée (une idée sensuelle): pour qu'il y ait couleur (au sens jouissif du terme), il n'est pas nécessaire que la couleur soit soumise à des modes emphatiques d'existence; il n'est pas nécessaire qu'elle soit intense, violente, riche, ou même délicate, raffinée, rare, ou encore étale, pâteuse, fluide, etc.; bref il n'est pas nécessaire qu'il y ait affirmation, installation de la couleur. Il suffit qu'elle apparaisse, qu'elle soit là, qu'elle s'inscrive comme un trait d'épingle dans le coin de l'œil … il suffit qu'elle déchire quelque chose.” Color does not express an effect, but “un geste, le plaisir d'un geste.” It is something “à la fois attendu (ce crayon que je tiens, je sais qu'il est bleu) et inattendu (non seulement je ne sais quel bleu va sortir, mais encore le saurais-je, j'en serais toujours surpris, car la couleur, à l'instar de l'événement, est neuve à chaque coup; c'est précisément le coup qui fait la couleur, comme il fait la jouissance)” (L'Obvie et l'obtus: Essais critiques III, coll. Tel Quel [Paris: Seuil, 1982] 153).

  7. Interaction of Color (rev. ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975).

  8. Ludwig Wittgenstein observes that “When we're asked ‘What do the words “red,” “blue,” “black,” “white” mean?’ we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours,—but our ability to explain the meanings of these words goes no further! For the rest, we have either no idea at all of their use, or a very rough and to some extent false one” (Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977] 11). And in a later passage he remarks that it is wrong to say “‘Just look at the colours in nature and you will see that it is so.’ For looking does not teach us anything about the concepts of colours” (12). This is true because “In any serious question uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem” (23).

  9. For a related discussion of the poetics of color in Bonnefoy's poetry and prose, see my “Transfigurings of Red: Color, Representation, and Being in Yves Bonnefoy and Claude Garache,” The Comparatist 10 (May 1986) 90-107.

  10. In truth, light for Bonnefoy is ultimately not seizable, not possessable, because it is perpetually in passage. Unlike the image, it cannot be permanently fixed, pinned down, enclosed by forms. It resists incarnation. In its unseizability it resembles the past itself, the childhood that we, as adults, can do no more than nostalgically look back upon. The narrator of Bonnefoy's story “La Mort du peintre d'icônes” suggests this by describing how as a child he and his school friends would “play” with light: “Quand l'heure avait trop duré, il y avait bien un garçon pour tirer de sa poche un de ces minces miroirs qui étaient en ce temps-là à la mode, ronds ou ovales, avec Greta Garbo imprimée sur le fer émaillé rose ou vert pomme de l'autre face. Il captait le soleil dans ce petit piège, il en faisait danser le reflet sur les murs ou le plafond de la salle, légère tache effrayée qui n'en finissait pas de bondir, de s'enfuir par la fenêtre, de revenir comme un oiseau aveuglé,—jusqu'à se prendre, tremblante, dans les cheveux de l'institutrice. Et là cette illusion s'attardait, toute une minute, sous l'ondée de nos rires mal réprimés; puis elle s'effaçait, dans la crue qui montait de toute part, fleuve sans rives ni rides, de cette lumière d'alors, que nul n'a revue sur la terre” (RR 173). To think that the “lumière d'alors” can be captured is an illusion. For a brief moment the mirror does indeed contain and focus the light, does single out one ray to dance upon the face of things. In an instant radiance is given body, is concentrated in a concrete form. From it ephemeral icons of crystallized light can be fashioned, as the painter in the story, who has mixed particles of glass with his paint, learns. The appearance of light is more memory than presence, however. It is effaced quickly. Its capture is only momentary (“et là cette illusion s'attardait, toute une minute”), for it flees the space of its containment like a flowing, cresting river. Unlike the artistic representation whose surface absorbs and contains an embodied light which, strictly speaking, since it is now “captured,” ceases to be light, the mirror reflects only the passage of light, the movement from presence to absence. Such radiance is eventually remembered as the light of childhood now lost, “cette lumière d'alors, que nul n'a revue sur la terre.”

  11. Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986) 49.

  12. For further discussion of the drift and otherness of representation in Bonnefoy's poetry, see my “‘Le Cri qui perce la musique’: Le surgissement de l'altérité dans l'œuvre d'Yves Bonnefoy,” Sud 15 (1985) 171-210.

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