Poetic Images, Presence, and the Theater of Kenotic Rituals

Eniko Sepsi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367757694
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000453348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: European Drama

This book explores the interrelation of contemporary French theatre and poetry.

Using the pictorial turn in the various branches of art and science, its observable features, and the theoretical framework of the conceptual metaphor, this study seeks to gather together the divergent manners in which French poetry and theatre address this turn. Poetry in space and theatricality of poetry are studied alongside theatre, especially to the performative aspect of the originally theological concept of "kenosis". In doing so the author attempts to make use of the theological concept of kenosis, of central importance in Novarina's oeuvre, for theatrical and dramatological purposes. Within poetic rituals, kenotic rituals are also examined in the book in a few theatrical practices – János Pilinszky and Robert Wilson, Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba – facilitating a better understanding of Novarina's works.

Accompanied by new English translations in the appendices, this is the first English language monograph related to the French essayist, dramaturg and director Valère Novarina's theatre, and will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and literature studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Part I
Image and presence: two trends in contemporary French poetry

1 Predecessors: contemporary French poets in the pages of Nyugat and La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) between 1909 and 1937¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163930-1

In these chapters of the book, we analyze two trends in contemporary French poetry, whose relationship to the image is determinative. One trend looks on it with suspicion (that of Yves Bonnefoy, poet of presence), while the other luxuriates in it (that of Jean-Michel Maulpoix, representative of the new lyricism); yet, both of them consider the image to be a credible example of reality. The opening chapter enumerates the debates which preceded the entrance of Yves Bonnefoy and the poets of presence on the stage of post-surrealism.

The goal of this preliminary study is to provide a picture of the contemporaneous poets appearing in the pages of the NRF and Nyugat [Occident]. I do not mention poets who passed away shortly before the two periodicals were established; the reason is that my primary interest is the critics’ role, as revealed by the given periodicals’ choice of poetic texts and the commentaries accompanying them.

An overview of the texts of the era’s French poets and their reviews in the NRF yields a relatively long list: Paul Éluard, Aragon, Breton, Michel Leiris, Desnos, Henri Michaux, Valéry, and Claudel. Henri Michaux’s first volume, Qui je fus (Who I Was), was published in 1927 in Jean Paulhan’s journal. Valéry Larbaud preferred the literary criticism. Among the poets, however, we often find art critics: thus Leiris, who began his career under the aegis of Max Jacob, who often wrote about, for instance, Erik Satie in his column, Chronique, and who wrote in 1936 about Marcel Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors);² but we could also mention Pierre Jean Jouve, who wrote about Alban Berg’s violin concerto,³ or Raymond Queneau, who wrote about the paintings of Jean Hélion. This tendency is an idiosyncrasy of twentieth-century French poetry, when the writers are not afraid to speak out about fields other than their own. Their texts continue a lively dialogue with painting as well as music.

Nyugat published, among contemporary French poets, three poems by Claudel in Ernő Szép’s translation in 1912; Dezső Kosztolányi translated Valéry’s Cimetière marin (Seaside Cemetery) and Endre Nagy did the same for L’Aurore [Dawn] in 1933; Árpád Tóth’s translation of Francis Jammes’s La gomme coule [The Sap Flows] was published in 1917. András Komor analyzed the partiality in the selection of poems by Apollinaire chosen by Miklós Radnóti and István Vas in 1940. We cannot discuss whether they took the selections of the NRF into account, since there was no personal connection between the two journals, except the NRF’s prose writers, with whom Albert Gyergyai was in continual contact.

The periodicals were decisive in determining the taste of the writers of the age, as Aurélien Sauvageot also observes in his 1937 book La découverte de la Hongrie [The Discovery of Hungary]: “With a little perspicacity, it is easy to see that the reading lists chosen by your interlocutors are dictated by the advice given generously and disinterestedly, in the word’s literal meaning, by the French journals and literary periodicals. Let us note that the Nouvelle Revue Française and its victorious team stands in first place, followed by Les Nouvelles Littéraires.”⁴

The less dense art forms in the NRF, such as the “notes” or “chronicles,” became more and more common in the 1920s, and the essay also developed into an important art form; the contemporary essay anthology with texts by Benda, Suarès, and Alain appeared in 1929. Remy de Gourmont worked to ensure that the critic be open to the individual character of every single literary figure;⁵ ideologically close is the critique of Du Bos, based on identification, which uses the method of “approximation,” or the sort of approach whose ideal degree would be assimilation. Several of the NRF staff joined this movement. The critical work of Jacques Rivière, which focused on the given subject, as well as Alain’s wonder-filled engagement or even his assimilation or fusion with his subject, can also be assigned to this movement.

It is true that Nándor Szávai or André Maurois, too—to cite one of Alain’s famous students who first wrote about the master’s series of books Propos in the Pléiade edition—consider that these meditations come about from will and in connection with will. On the one hand, from will, because “without the commitment to write on a defined schedule, these summary poems would never have come into being”; and on the other hand, in connection with will, since according to Alain, “One must maintain a firm equilibrium between two extremes: the one believing that we are capable of everything, and the other that we’re incapable of anything.”⁶ Will is action; it does not mean that I will act, but that I am acting. If the idea changes in the course of the proceeding, then thought can no longer be anything but the daughter of action. Action is the actualization of will in the world, that is, the path leading from concept toward reality, from the passions to wisdom, from nature to freedom, so in the end, it is nothing but taking possession of ourselves, or rather auto-appropriation. I will, therefore I exist.

This is actionism; that is, voluntarism stands at the center of the note that Benda wrote about Péguy’s standpoint, that he only marveled about philosophical schools or trends to the extent that they “brawled well.” The excerpt continues thus: “Today, we encounter more and more in people of the mind this striving, namely, to value the philosophers’ action-related virtues higher than their intellectual virtues. Alain, in his remembrance of Lagneau (Souvenirs concernant Jules Lagneau) tries to give a loftier idea of his master by praising his energy and decisiveness at least as highly as his intellect.”⁷

I examine the context in which the French poets wrote in the pages of the NRF from this decided but latent viewpoint of Alain’s. In Hungary, this viewpoint influenced neither the editorial selections nor the prose-writers’ opinions, and the question was never raised until the inflamed controversy over Babits and the treason of the scribes, or rather, his translation of Benda.

The first text to discuss contemporary poetry appeared in the 1 August 1909 issue of the NRF, discussing the issue of the journal Poesia containing Marinetti’s futurist manifesto.⁸ In an ironic tone, Jacques Copeau questioned the importance of the movement as a school and called Marinetti a mere Maecenas who, arriving from Italy, sought to conquer Paris. In 1910, Nyugat took a stand against the avant-garde. Babits accused futurism of lacking originality, even to the extent of using copies autographed by the author: “Au directeur de Nyugat hommage sympathique de Poesia” [To the editor of Nyugat with best wishes from Poesia]. Béla Balázs was of a similar opinion: “Too easy [that is, to argue with them].”⁹ Dezső Szabó reviewed the manifesto ironically, although he later wrote with less prejudice about the political novel in verse Le Monoplan du Pape [The Pope’s Monoplane]. Similarly dismissive remarks sprang from the pen of Albert Thibaudet concerning surrealism, in 1925:

Surrealism exists. … It exists through consciousness: consciousness of unconsciousness, organization of the inorganic, all that holds or does not hold, in the image of the soluble fish. In the past, when we mentioned “rue de Grenelle”—then it meant either the Ministry of Public Education or the NRF, two institutions of calm. Now it brings to mind the Soviet embassy or the Office of Surrealist Research …. André Breton’s Manifeste de surréalisme (Surrealist Manifesto), Louis Aragon’s Une Vague de Rêves (A Wave of Dreams), which the author causes to break in the pages of Commerce …, spreads out over the surrealist movement … with abundant light, perhaps even too abundant. Like Mallarmé, I would like to place a little darkness back into it …. Surrealism is ease itself, the ease of dreams.¹⁰

Thibaudet was the much-respected critic of the period between the world wars, who wrote in the NRF’s Chronicle column from 1912 until his death. The NRF, following its silence during the First World War, only gained its classic form thanks to Marcel Arland, Thibaudet, and the philosopher Alain, as well as the editorial work of Jean Paulhan. When Thibaudet died in 1936, Paul Valéry wrote in his obituary that he first met him when he began to work on Mallarmé’s poetry. He placed Thibaudet “among the lyricists,” although he established that “his striving for precision dulled the life of his critical lyricism.” He thought that “nobody had a greater talent than he to open new perspectives in the great forest of Literature.”¹¹ A few months after Thibaudet’s column, Antonin Artaud used Roger Vitrac’s work Les mystères de l’amour (The Mysteries of Love) to defend surrealism: “It never occurred to anyone to consider surrealism as a mode of activity capable of freeing itself by the sole method of automatic writing. Surrealism is perfectly reconcilable with a certain lucidity of mind. A superior logic participates in this lucidity, which induces one to select, from among the elements suggested by the subconscious, a certain number of them that systematic logic would set aside.”¹² This logic of a higher order than the everyday intellect leads to the demolition of that intellect, which is one of Artaud’s favorite methods.

Marcel Arland published a fairly summary opinion about Tristan Tzara’s Sept manifestes Dada (Seven Dada Manifestos): “One must not see anything other than a protest against the state of the spirit and of literature in these manifestos. Nor can one even see any effort to escape from this double situation. … It ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction (theoretical framework)
• PART I: Image and presence: two trends in contemporary French poetry
• PART II: Theatrical presence, poetic rituality, and the theater of kenotic rituals
• Appendices
• Index