Strands of Utopia

Spaces of Poetic Work in Twentieth Century France

Michael G Kelly

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781905981144
• eBook ISBN: 9781351195133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"The poetic is an abiding yet elusive qualification within the discursive system of twentieth-century French literature. No longer amenable to formal assignment, its recurrences delimit a shifting, multi-layered practice of artistic and intellectual (self-) invention. This study attempts to outline certain durable properties of that practice by confronting it with the complex theoretical and spatial metaphor of utopia. Drawing, in particular, upon the oeuvres of Victor Segalen (1878-1919), Rene Daumal (1908-44) and Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923), it traces poetic work - work done in support of poetic difference - along the social, physical and textual axes of what is argued to be a sustained and radically inclusive utopian practice within the literary field. The complex utopian quality of poetic work is linked to the cultural persistence of the poetic as a simple attribute within literary practice. In uncovering this link, the study encourages revised understandings of both the poetic and the utopian in the modern French literary context."

PART I
Lieu commun Poetic Foundation and the Limit of Community

§I. The Common Object of Poetic Work

aigu d'absolu
épuisé de solitude
vivre avec les moyens de la mort¹

The term 'community' is adopted here in respect of the social space of poetic work. In this sense it is a horizon of what we have called poetic foundation —the transition from the poetic work (travail) of an individual subject to the work (œuvre) received as poetic (and by extension, as the work of a poet). The figure of community emerging in poetic foundation is consonant with the Utopian qualities of the poetic, for in the theory and practice of poetic foundation we encounter a variously liminal and optimal construction of human community Central to this question is the status imagined by poets and philosophers for the object of poetic work (the œuvre as the outcome of travail) — a status set up between the theoretical poles of the singular and the common.

Community, communication, communion derive from a common Latin source, communis, denoting that which is shared. At the root of these related terms is thus the figure of an object. Community, which conveyed originally the implication of a common, shared space — the idea of a locality — has also long revolved around this idea of mediation through a body of ideas or texts or practices. In the case of the monastic community, for example, several of these layers cohere — there is a common space regulated by a common rule whose inspiration derives from a common text, and so on. The religious sacrament of communion might be placed as the end point to such ordered, transcendence-based togetherness. Even there, however, the common (mystical) object is mediated by a common (theological) principle. The dimension of a shared physical space, once the ubiquity of this meta-discursive supplement has been recognized, can readily be seen to give way to more metaphorical constructions of a common space for community — such emancipation having been accelerated in particular through the development of textual cultures and technologies.

The social space in which we are interested here might then be thought to be the actual community of practice emergent around a given term within the literary repertoire over an extended period. From the 'poetic' field as an abstract whole to the various groups that have centred their reflection and practice on the term, this social dimension can of course be seen to be material to the practice of individual poetic writers. But our first engagement is with community as it arises in relation to the question of the poetic itself — that is, in relation to the poetic as a centrally linguistic activity and thereby as an aspect of a sui generis 'social' phenomenon. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty has argued in a major text, the operations of language give rise in an unparalleled way to a frameable, durable, shared reality. '[Ce qui] justifie la situation particulière que l'on fait d'ordinaire au langage [. . .] c'est que seule de toutes les opérations expressives, la parole est capable de se sédimenter et de constituer un acquis intersubjectif.² Moving from this principle, community at its barest would be the minimal order of co-presence in which utterance or the individual accession to speech (parole) becomes the possible basis of a common object. The limits of community may thus be understood as directly related to a reflection on the possibility of such accession to speech. The limits of community are approached, alternatively, through a reflection on the limits, as a common object, of the acquis intersubjectif accruing through the accession to speech. The common object of poetic work emerges., in other words, from a particularly searching engagement with the possibility of such an acquis, its potential, and the horizons to which it gives rise.

The elementary communicative scenario, which reinforces the connection between language production and an intersubjective practice, is of course the direct contact of face-to-face conversation. The characteristics and potential of the acquis as the mediator of community are however transformed in cultures of the written and, later again, of the printed word. The humanist cultures of early modernity, which gave rise to the generic utopia, represent a high point in the creation or imagination of community between writers and their readers. The demise of the version of literary communication developed at that time, a version exemplified in the transparency of the generic 'utopian' law, is a commonplace of contemporary commentary.³ Its discredit appears analogous to the general discredit of utopian optimism at the close of the twentieth century. Yet the humanist model of a space of written address is one, notwithstanding its insufficiencies, that retains a certain hold over those still participating in the 'culture of literacy' (Godzich) upon which written poetic practice is dependent.⁴ If the humanist model is insufficient as a questioning of writing and its ability, as acquis intersubjectif, to establish the social space of 'community', it is one with regard to which the poetic may nonetheless stand in fruitful critical relation: one that — as the figure of transparent communication between individuated subjects — at the very least haunts the imagination of poetic utterance.

Our preoccupation is with the institution of a 'social' space — that is, the question of the poetic as that of the possibility and limits of a common object. This preoccupation is distinct from that with a literary field or actual literary sociability, and from the imperatives and determinations associated with both. What the concept of the literary field does however make clear is the association of authorial foundation with the principle and figure of (personal, literary) individuality. Authorial foundation in the modern scenario (recognition as a writer of literature typically identified by genre) is the entry into an open-ended textually mediated social space according to the premise of exceptional if not exacerbated individuality. Compounded by an unavoidable vocational solitude (writing being a largely solitary activity), this 'individuality' is compounded in the case of the 'poet' by the apparent, and frequently thematized, exclusion of that figure from the dominant rationality A programmatic utterance of Jacques Dupin's articulates this self-preserving self-exclusion with memorably high seriousness:

La dérision, la honte même d'être poète, nulle société plus que la nôtre ne l'a refoulée dans des déserts appropriés, à l'écart des techniques qui ont fait de l'homme cet être soulevé de terre, étranger à son souffle, séparé de sa vie.⁵

The 'vocation' of the poet as realized in the oeuvre could be characterized unsympathetically as a particularly arduous construction of distinction, with subjective singularity as both the material and the governing myth of the isolate individual 'worker'. If we adopt the viewpoint of such an individual, however, and conceive of this activity as the fullest possible effort towards engagement with the question of being in the world, the question of the 'social space' of poetry becomes that whether the written communicative act as embodied in the œuvre is receivable as an object of community. Generalization at this level is doubtless of limited value, but we shall posit here that the terms of the equation whereby any such space may be conceived are consistently exacting throughout the course of the twentieth century. As regards the individual, first of all, a growing tension is observable between the fragility of the myth of the individual on the one hand and the pressure it is made, formally, to bear on the other. The growing ubiquity of 'individuality' makes the limits of the myth more and more tragically apparent.⁶ One such increasingly apparent aspect of the latter-day fragility of the myth lies in the conflation of a de facto (literal) indivisibility with an entirely theoretical sovereignty. This phenomenon transcends any sectional equation of the figure of the individual with a particular political regime or ideology. While the limits of individualism are clear enough as regards the model of the individual-as-operator-and-outcome-of-choices with which members of the consumer society are familiar, the viability of the individual is equally in question where individuation is founded upon a continuum of speaking subject, travail, and œuvre. A celebrated version of this continuum arguably appears in Marxism's view of 'l'homme défini comme producteur (on pourrait dire aussi: l'homme défini, tout court), et fondamentalement comme producteur de sa propre essence sous les espèces de son travail ou de ses ceuvres' (Nancy).⁷

Such 'definition', in other words, may be thinkable as a matter of pure autonomy, but, notwithstanding the Cartesian cogito, it is not thus achievable. The formal shell of a self is unable to realize selfhood in the world as of right. This realization is central, for example, to the work of Georges Bataille on the question of community. Bataille's principe d'insuffisance might be thought a reformulation of the proverbial no man is an island but for the problematic horizon it presents to the individual subject: one in which alterity is experienced as an open-ended question rather than a possible (resolution. Alterity is what exposes the subject's insufficiency rather than what resolves or alleviates it. To be human in the sight of other humans, in other words, is to become continually, renewedly, incomplete. Maurice Blanchot glosses Bataille's principle thus:

C'est un principe, notons-le bien, cela qui commande et ordonne la possibilité d'un être. D'où il résulte que ce manque par principe ne va pas de pair avec une nécessité de complétude. [. . .] L'être cherche, non pas à être reconnu, mais à être contesté: il va, pour exister, vers l'autre qui le conteste et parfois le nie, afin qu'il ne commence d'être que dans eette privation qui le rend conscient (c'est là l'origine de sa conscience) de l'impossibilité d'être lui-même, d'insister comme ipse ou, si l'on veut, comme individu séparé [. . .].⁸

The 'individual' being in its thus chronic 'incompleteness' is a function of the 'other' — it requires the 'other' in order to experience itself as ex-isting. Community becomes that which is necessary in order for the individual subject to experience itself as both separate and incomplete. What becomes of the 'common object' in this analysis? The logic would on the one hand seem to be leading us to an account, if not a course, of symbolic action. Surely 'community' is that which awakens the individual to its incurable insufficiency and constitutes the initiating condition of strategies of symbolic replacement (œuvre)? Surely 'community' in this analysis initiates a dynamic productive of symbolic outcomes, resolutions, compensations (more or less alienated) — which taken together as a 'culture' represent and perpetuate that community more or less 'authentically'?

The line of thought developed from the early 1930s on by Bataille and in his reception on this question in the 1980s by Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy appears to insist upon the inadmissibility of such interpositions. All three focus instead on what can be taken as an absolutely 'common' object — unknowable and unauthored. For all three thinkers death provides this residual governing aporia. The common object is confined solely to the representation of the possibility of community derived from the principe d'insuffisance. The role of the object is reduced to that of a notional certainty — a development coextensive with poetry's rarefied preoccupation with its own possibility as a communicative act.

Nancy employs the Lucretian term clinamen to denote that which 'inclines' members of a putative community towards one another. Clinamen is the metaphysical entity that founds the 'rapport' — it thus operates the absolute distinction between community and all figures of the absolute, the 'sans-rapport'. Yet it too is no more than such an axiom, a designation of the limit: 'Le rapport (la communauté) n'est, s'il est, que ce qui défait dans son principe — et sur sa clôture ou sur sa limite — l'autarcie de l'immanence absolue'.⁹ The 'limit of community' is also, read negatively, the limit of the absolute. All forms and mentions of 'work' (both the 'acquis intersubjectif' of the œuvre and the pre-foundational processes of travail to that end) read, in this perspective, more as evasive strategies than as valid engagements with the philosophical conditions for action.¹⁰ The pressuring of the common object of community in this way appears to prescribe a mute quasi-stoical resignation to the parameters of existence.

This is the base setting of what Bataille had defined as 'la communauté de ceux qui n'ont pas de communauté'. It is what Blanchot, after Bataille, has called 'la communauté négative', in which the common object is evacuated, but its spectral presence remains central to the logic of practice. 'Negative community' resonates to some extent with an account of modernity as homelessness or estrangement —and with those for whom the question of 'community' remains an open, future-oriented one. The idea that 'community' is in a state of ongoing definitional crisis is one typically accompanied by a version of modernity as the historical period of the dislocation of community, setting this up as an object of nostalgia and situating the human in terms of an irrecoverable framework. Nancy disagrees, however, with this association of ideas. What was lost with the advent of 'society' (and, inescapably, 'history') was, in his view, no more 'community' than are its modern replacements. 'Si bien que la communauté, loin d'être ce que la société aurait rompu ou perdu, est ce qui nous arrive — question, attente, événement, impératif — à partir de la société'.¹¹ The impossibility of the common object comes to fill the space of that common object.

Such a philosophy of the (always already) absent centre being replaced by the undeniably present disquiet it generates is a move recognizable in oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Towards a Utopian Space of Poetic Work
• PART I: LIEU COMMUN POETIC FOUNDATION AND THE LIMIT OF COMMUNITY
• PART II: HAUT LIEU (DIS)PLACING THE SCENE OF POETIC EXPERIENCE
• PART III: NON-LIEU FORMATIVE AND TRANSFORMATIONAL ATTRIBUTES OF POETIC TEXTUALITY
• Conclusion: Within Disenchantment
• Select Bibliography
• Index