Experimentation and the Lyric in Contemporary French Poetry

Jeff Barda

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030152925
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030152932
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Experimentation and the Lyric in Contemporary French Poetry offers a new theoretical approach and historical perspective on the remarkable upsurge in creative poetic practices in France that have challenged traditional definitions of poetry and of the lyric. Focusing on the work of Pierre Alferi, Olivier Cadiot, Emmanuel Hocquard, Franck Leibovici, Anne Portugal and Denis Roche, this book provides an analysis of the most influential poets in French poetry of the last few decades. It contextualizes the theoretical models that inform their investigations, analyzing them alongside the history of the avant-garde and the heated theoretical debates that have taken place over whether to continue or bring an end to the lyric. Systematically addressing the various strategies employed by these poets and drawing on reception theory and cognitive studies, Jeff Barda argues that French radical poetics re-evaluates the lyric in cognitive terms beyond the personal. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in twenty-first-century forms of experimental writing and the connections between literature and the arts today.

© The Author(s) 2019

J. BardaExperimentation and the Lyric in Contemporary French Poetry Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15293-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: ‘It was war between the literalist and the lyric poets. Starwars. The grammatical-communist Robots against the real Humans’

Jeff Barda¹

(1)

Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Jeff Barda

‘C’était la guerre entre littéralité et lyrisme. La guerre des étoiles. Les Robots grammatico-communistes contre les vrais humains’ asserts Olivier Cadiot. ‘Réenchanter les formes’ interview by Marie Gil and Patrice Maniglier, Les Temps Modernes, 5 no. 676 (2013): 9.

End Abstract

Une de ces pistes – parmi bien d’autres – pourrait consister à recueillir, dans la visite d’un mausolée, à l’aide d’un magnétophone ou de toute autre machine à reproduire, des discours ou des morceaux pertinents de discours, dont la destination première n’a rien de poétique, et à les citer (comme on cite un témoin à comparaître) sans intervenir autrement qu’en leur donnant une forme différente de ce qu’ils avaient au départ. Il s’agit donc de faire écho. Se taire. Écouter. Choisir. Recueillir. Reconstituer l’écho. La réverbération logique. La réflexion. Réciter.

[One of these options – among many others – could be to collect, during a visit to a mausoleum with the aid of a tape recorder or any other recording device, speeches or relevant parts of speeches, whose original intention is not at all poetic, and cite them (as one would cite a witness in a trial) without doing anything more than giving them a different shape to the one they initially had. It is a question of echoing. Of remaining silent. Listening. Choosing. Collecting. Reconstructing the echo. The logical reverberation. Reflection. Recite.] (Emmanuel Hocquard¹)

This opening quote by French poet Emmanuel Hocquard is not only a fitting response to the new conditions of writing today, but it also provides us with an effective illustration of much of the discussion contained within Experimentation and the Lyric . As Hocquard strategically posits, today, the task of the poet is not to write more but to invent modes of capture—techniques—through the recycling of found materials, often stemming from contexts far removed from literary practice. Creating the ‘echo’ of an original does not only suggest the idea of repetition, a central theme of contemporary French poetry, it is also a refusal: a refusal to permit the self to speak for itself and, instead, allowing expression only through the appropriation of the language of another. Hence, by reversing the lyric’s dialectic (narcissism/emotion) by another conception of writing based on a constructivist approach (objectivity/construction), Hocquard and many contemporary poets reject the presence of the ego scriptor, advocating an effort of self-effacement that permits language itself to mirror and surface. Far from being laconic, dry or austere, the writings of these poets offer new perspectives on the problematical situation of the lyric in contemporary French poetics.

One of the most characteristic features or central concerns of contemporary French poetry in recent year has been to challenge the very definition of the lyric. Debates over whether lyric discourse has a future or whether it faces extinction have been at the center of many controversies in poetics, dividing the poetry of the last four decades into the opposing tendencies of ‘for’ and ‘against’ the lyric. Adherents of the former approach, such as Jean-Pierre Lemaire and Martine Broda, who, it has been claimed, advocate a critical distance from lyrical effusiveness, believe poetry to be a traditional tool of self-expression and they share many of the concerns of poets of an earlier generation; these include, in particular, those of the postwar period, such as Yves Bonnefoy, André du Bouchet and Jacques Dupin, whose work can be described as metaphysical, that is, engaged with philosophy and concerned with the question of expressing the ineffable. Jean-Michel Maulpoix, a French poet, theorist and the leading voice of the ‘new lyric poets’ (also known as ‘the critical lyric poets’) in France, describes in his manifesto the essence of the lyric as comprising three core principles: ‘[Il] peut être entendu comme le mouvement escaladant de la parole par lequel le sujet se fraie un passage vers l’idéal, comme une tentative de surmonter la déchirure ontologique et comme la passion ou le ravissement du sujet dans le langage’ (It can be understood as the rising movement of speech by which the subject makes his way toward the ideal, as an attempt to overcome ontological tearing and as the passion or the rapture of the subject within language).² The lyric would thus be consubstantial with poetic expression: it would not only be an ethos, a particular disposition of the subject with regard to language and the world, an expression of the spirit that seeks through self-expression to attain universalization, but it would also reveal a certain trust in the power of language.

While this model remains very much on the horizon for many poets, proponents of the latter approach—including Claude Royet-Journoud, Jean Daive, Emmanuel Hocquard—who are often categorized by literary critics as ‘literalists’, nevertheless reject the centrality of subjectivity, the traditional enunciative apparatus, the suggestion of a separate ‘poetic’ language and the notion of poetic image. Instead, they choose to reuse ready-made materials and reinvigorate everyday language (often to political ends). Although these poets, all of whom were born before 1945, do not associate themselves with any particular artistic movement or school, the influence of earlier moments in French poetry—Dadaism and Situationism—and of Anglo-American poetry—Objectivism, Beat, Language and Neo-conceptualism—can nonetheless be readily identified. Referring often to examples from the avant-garde and the visual arts—Marcel Duchamp, Lawrence Weiner and Mark Lombardi to cite but a few—these poets call for a perception of writing based on reappropriation and repurposing. Their heterogeneity of practices and divergent approaches show that their works exit the literary space: these poets challenge the text-bound nature of the page as a standard space of writing. Their poetry often incorporates filmic or pictorial fragments that migrate throughout other fields, genres and media, overcoming the notion of the poetic and demonstrating an engagement with the real. As Jean-Marie Gleize, one of the most significant theorists of poetry in France today, explains, these poets work ‘à partir de fragments ou segments de réalité […] y compris des énoncés déjà là, prélevés dans le ruban réel du discours social […] qu’ils recyclent et font travailler, qu’ils mettent en page (par montage, collage, découpage, ou analyse logique des éléments, décompositions, mise à nu des articulations, catalogues des types d’énoncés, productions de grammaires locales, etc.)’ (from fragments or segments of reality […] including ready-made utterances, sampled in the reality of social discourse […] that they recycle and put to work and which they place on the page (through montage, collage, cutting up, or logical analysis of elements, decompositions, exposure of their articulations, catalogues of the types of utterances, productions of local grammar, etc.)).³ If, in the age of information, texts and other media can be remixed, copied, edited or globally repurposed again providing new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, Gleize also notes that such practices work against the founding principles, formal parameters and foundations that constitute the essence of the lyric. Disdainful of poetics, metaphors, prosody, image or even rhythm, their urgent program could be described as a strict repudiation of ‘l’idéalisme chanté, le subjectivisme, la sublimation des images’ (harmonic idealism, subjectivism, the sublimation of images)⁴ as an attempt to reverse the vertical and transcendental axis associated with the lyric into a horizontal and immanent one. This model, which consists in dismantling the edifice of poetry and the unity of the poetic subject, has a long genealogy, and can be traced back to early French romanticism:

Pour n’importe quel poète (de Lamartine à Claude Royet-Journoud ), ‘la’ poésie n’existe pas, elle est sans définition. […] On peut risquer ceci: la poésie (en cela inacceptable, par définition subversive et scandaleuse) serait une pratique tendant à effacer les images, à les traverser (vers la réalité), une façon de chercher une langue immédiate […] une relatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: ‘It was war between the literalist and the lyric poets. Starwars. The grammatical-communist Robots against the real Humans’
• Part I. A Poetic Tool Box
• Part II. Language Outside Its Customary Furrows
• Part III. Mechanics of the Lyric
• Back Matter