Roger Laporte: The Orphic Text

Ian Maclachlan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781900755382
• eBook ISBN: 9781351198417
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Languages

"This is the first full-length study devoted to Roger Laporte, whose lifelong exploration of the stakes of writing has produced a body of work on the borderline of literature and philosophy. Charting the development of Laporte's writing in relation to the work of Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot and Derrida, this study offers both a comprehensive reading of Laporte's oeuvre and a new perspective on an important strand of recent thinking about literature. In particular, it is claimed here that the imperfect reflexivity of Laporte's 'Ophic' texts effects a singular opening to reading, and that in doing so it illuminates the ethical dimension of literature which has been the subject of much recent discussion."

Chapter 1
Orphic Writing

On 24 February 1982, Roger Laporte ceased to be a writer.¹ Since that time, to be sure, he has written and published a number of critical and occasional texts, but on completing the final 'Post-scriptum' of Moriendo, he ceased to write in his sense of the word, bringing to an end one of the most remarkable and distinctive undertakings in postwar French literature.

The aim of this study is to survey the entirety of Roger Laporte's literary enterprise, from the three short récits of the 1950s to Moriendo, which marked the end of a series of works subtitled biographic initiated by Fugue in 1970. The publication in 1986 of a collected volume entitled Une Vie effectively extended the designation of biographie to the three volumes of the 1960s included therein. The term biographie is better seen as a marker of genre than as a subtitle, in fact, for Laporte's ambition is to institute a new type of writing; what exactly is at stake in this ambition will be fully explored later,² but to situate these texts in terms of existing categories, one might say that they are essays which explore the experience of writing. But one would have to add immediately that, in an important sense, this is not writing on writing, but rather, in the words of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, it is a question of 'écrire l'écriture, ce qui n'est pas la réfléchir déjà existante, mais l'inventer encore inconnue, en faire l'expérience nue et primitive'.³ My exploration of Laporte's invention of writing⁴ will draw on all of his published work, but my overriding concern will be with the paradoxically concluded but interminable project of biographie.

Laporte's work has attracted a number of commentaries, but predominantly in the form of review-articles on the occasion of a new publication. Only a few of these endeavour to consider the broad itinerary of Laporte's writing, and even then they do so at a length which precludes consideration of that itinerary in any detail. My objective in writing the first full-length study of Laporte's work is therefore to analyse individual works in detail, but at the same time to attend to the progression in Laporte's work, focusing particularly on the transitions between stages ofLaporte's writing, which we shall come to regard as ambivalent brisures, at once connective and disjunctive.

These commentators have included, from quite an early stage, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot and, more recently, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. But the celebrity of such commentators has not been enough to ensure a large readership for Laporte's work; in his 'Avant-Propos' to Lettre à personne, Lacoue-Labarthe describes him as 'un écrivain pratiquement sans lecteurs (ils sont tout au plus un petit millier)' (LP 14). This is the case, despite the fact that the publication of Une Vie had stimulated a small upsurge in interest, leading even to the first British appreciation of Laporte's work to appear in print, in the form ofjohn Sturrock's full-page review of Une Vie in the Times Literary Supplement.⁵

The objective of the present study will largely have been fulfilled if, in some form, it is able to play a part in fostering a wider readership for Laporte's work, the importance of which is an implicit, and at times explicit, claim of the pages which follow. This claim is not simply predicated on the eminence of some of Laporte's commentators, although the names associated with Laporte are indicative of a limited—one might say, documentary—interest of Laporte's work. In surveying the itinerary of Laporte's writing, it is possible to trace certain key developments in post-war French thought and writing, beginning with the early récits of the 1950s, which reveal the influence of Blanchot and, partly through the mediation of the latter, of German philosophy, particularly that of Heidegger; there follows the transitional phase of the texts of the 1960s, in which these influences are still discernible, along with that of Levinas, for example, but which at the same time mark the development of a more distinctive idiom; the Fugue series is most obviously distinguished from its predecessors through a focus on writing which owes much to the work of Derrida; finally, Suite and Moriendo mark something of a return to the idiom of earlier texts, particularly La Veille, but in a manner still informed by a Derridean conception of writing, as well as by a psychoanalytic perspective which had begun to manifest itself in the Fugue series. In fact, the stages which I have briefly sketched out here largely account for the structure of my argument.

But if Laporte's writing were simply reducible to a set of influences, its interest would indeed be merely that of a marginal document in French intellectual and literary history. In any case, the question of influence is not quite so simple as my brief outline suggests; it will be my contention in the early part of Chapter 3, for example, that Laporte's texts of the 1960s may be said already to anticipate the influence of Derrida. More importantly, I will also contend that Laporte's enterprise of biographie, his attempt to 'écrire l'écriture', gives rise to a writing which promises to outstrip the limits of philosophical or theoretical thought, an impossible transgression which is the only possibility of a certain conception of literature; in making this case, which is particularly to the fore in the latter part ofChapter 3 and in my Conclusion, I am myself, of course, indebted in particular to the work of Blanchot and of Derrida.

I am also indebted to Blanchot for the title of this study, which alludes to Blanchot's use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in L'Espace littéraire,⁶ which I discuss in the course of Chapter 2, and to which I return intermittently thereafter. I use the term 'Orphic text' to distinguish the reflexivity of works like Laporte's from a more conventional conception of literary reflexivity, applied to works which are seen, in some way, as successfully mirroring themselves or containing their own image, a conception whose mythological counterpart is generally given as Narcissus; it is one of the effects of the Orphic text to reveal such successful self-reflection to be illusory. The Orphic text turns towards its own origin to discover that origin to be ever-receding and yet still to be accomplished, and returns on itself to find itself already other; the reflexivity of the Orphic text turns out to be the impossibility of perfect reflexivity. In this failure of self-coincidence, the reflexive moment of the Orphic text no longer consolidates its integrity as a work, but becomes instead a movement towards the other, sealing its own ruin or désœuvrement as a work, but at the same time founding an ethical communication, in the sense of ethics elaborated by Levinas.⁷

For reasons such as these, Laporte's work seems to me to have an importance not presently reflected by the extent of his readership. In particular, it is a body of work which would repay greater attention at a time when discussion in literary theory and contemporary philosophy has increasingly focused on the question of ethics.⁸ This tendency, which was already in evidence and received an unexpected impetus from the Paul de Man affair, has cast a welcome light on the ethics of deconstruction and on the ethical dimension of literature in general, and has brought nearer to the foreground figures such as Levinas and Blanchot. Laporte's work has a great deal to offer in such a climate.

To write of Laportes work under the rubric of the Orphic text is implicitly to place that work in a particular tradition, a tradition which Laporte has clearly indicated in his published Carnets and in a number of critical studies; in the case of a number of figures in this tradition, Laporte has also signalled the extent to which these were mediated for him by Blanchot's critical writings. In the 'Post-face, ou un chemin de halage' written for his first collection of critical essays, Quittze variations sur un thème biographique (QV 229—46), Laporte offers a simple justification for his critical writing: 'il est juste de payer ses dettes' (QV 235), a sentiment echoed in Laporte's cover-note to his second such collection, Etudes, which ends with the last line from Rene Char's poem 'Qu'il vive!': 'Dans mon pays, on remercie'.

Char himself is of course one of the later figures in this tradition, and was also instrumental in encouraging Laporte's earliest literary efforts, ensuring the first publication of Souvenir de Reims in the journal Botteghe Oscure in 1954.⁹ Laporte's essay, 'Clarté de René Char' (QV 7—15), focuses on two complementary movements in Char's poetry, which find an echo in Laporte's work: towards an originary moment, a movement indicated by the title of Char's collection Retour amont, and towards the unknown as unknown, which is the very domain of poetry, as Char's famous aphorism, 'Le poème est l'amour réalisé du desir demeuré désir'¹⁰ reminds us, a movement whose counterpart in Laporte's work will be explored, in a Blanchotian context, in Chapter 2. That the two movements are one, the movement towards an unattainable origin at the same time an opening to a perpetual future, as in Laporte's own work, is suggested by the opening lines of the section 'Odin le Roc' of Char's 'Les Transparents', with which Laporte concludes his study: 'Ce qui vous fascine par endroit dans mon vers, c'est l'avenir, glissante obscurité d'avant l'aurore, tandis que la nuit est au passé déjà.'¹¹

To restrict oneself to the domain of French literature, the obvious place to which one would look for the beginnings of this tradition is the work of Mallarme. Laporte has not, in fact, devoted a study to Mallarmé, an omission which he notes in the 'Post-face' of Quinze variations (QV 235), but the importance of Mallarmé for him is clear enough from his Carnets, and indeed from his study of Blanchot, 'Une Passion',¹² some of which concerns his reading of Blanchot's essays on Mallarmé. In fact, he ascribes the foundation of his work to a misreading of Blanchot's 'Le silence de Mallarmé',¹³ his ambition being, he says, to write 'le Livre' which Mallarme never achieved, taking Blanchot's article to be 'un appel en ce sens' (DLMB 55). However, despite this contresens in his reading of Blanchot's article, he adds: 'En fait, ma position et celle de Blanchot ne sont pas très éloignées puisque Blanchot a dû écrire toute sa vie afin tout au plus d'indiquer l'absence de livre, alors que je passe ma vie à écrire un Livre qui sans cesse se dérobe; il n'empêche qu'en droit nos positions sont radicalement différentes' (DLMB 56). The position of Mallarmé at the origin of a particular tradition of reflexivity, and the importance of his writing for a view of poetic language, impersonality, and the necessary failure of the work which is central to much contemporary writing and theory, and to Blanchot's work in particular, has already been too well-documented to require further comment here.¹⁴

Laporte's Carnets and critical writings readily suggest other figures in this tradition: Valéry, in particular, for Laporte, Monsieur Teste and the Cahiers (cf. E 305–17), the latter presenting clear parallels with aspects of Laporte's work in terms, for example, of its evocation of the w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Orphic Writing
• 2 Writing the Unknown
• 3 Writing as Fugue
• 4 Writing Bio-graphy: A Matter of Life and Death
• 5 Giving Reading
• Bibliography
• Index