Furia francese in binge ontology:The New French Poetry (Bloodaxe, 1996; edited David Kelley and Jean Khalfa; 319 pp., £10.95; includes thirteen poets with facing translations)
My relation to French poetry is conditioned by the facts of my autobiography. I was a modern linguist, which meant that I studied French and German exhaustively and almost exclusively as an adolescent, paying little attention to literature in English, for which there was no time. At university, I abandoned this course after the first year, in 1976, disgusted perhaps by the teaching or by the prospect of having to do a paper on the odious Goethe; I switched to Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, and thereafter paid little attention to French literature. After graduating, I read a lot of German, and was carried away by an enthusiasm for Russian, a difficult language which occupied me from 1979 to perhaps 1990. My adolescent literary sensibility was French, but that was a long time ago; I was only familiar with three of these poets when I read the anthology.
It is disturbing that there should be geographical obstacles to poetry, but it is certain that the style of this poetry is distinctively French, that there is a collective game or fantasy among cultivated French people which pushes arts irreversibly down a certain axis, that this game is exclusive at the same rate that it is intensive, and that it is only occasionally that it produces something which falls out of the game sufficiently to arouse the interest of someone from the next yard. My situation visavis French poetry is that of someone who "gave up" rock music years ago, but buys an album once every two years or so on the promise that it excels the vices (while incarnating the virtues) of rock music, which pleased us in adolescence. Perhaps the element to dwell on is that of training: the brain is infinitely flexible but also obstinate, it needs repetition to persuade it to do extraordinary things. "Literary" poetry exploits this quality, and the French literary community is overdeveloped and dangerously cultivated in the same way that a cricket team might be expert at cricket, compared to people who had never played it. A current of opinion holds that people who have never played cricket are best at cricket, and people who have never written poetry are better at writing poetry. In a sense, all French poets are writing the same poem; struck at the moment of birth by a dominant image to which their brain adapted itself; and all British poets are writing the same poem.
The notion of national taste has been pushed out of public awareness by the aspiration of the educated to be European, denying that differences exist; and by the spectral rifts within British taste, so that it is quite inexplicable to me why, for example, people bother to read the little airheads Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage. Let's pause to note the rightness of the avant garde, in its guess about the arbitrariness of all literary systems, and in the possibility of inventing a new set of rules which simultaneously creates a new world to play in and exposes the arbitrary and unstable nature of the game rules of mainstream art. After all, if the rules of art simply copied the laws of reality, genres would have no history; but we know they do, whether saints' lives, love poems, Charlemagne romances, or pornography.
The selection is conservative; it may well be reliable, carefully reflected, but it contains very little that wasn't already present in the 1930s, with Char and Eluard. It excludes anyone who challenges the conventions of French poeticality from within; with the exception of Mansour, whose eroticism and defiance of logic or self-control are an affront to what is around them. Mansour is profoundly bored, and by virtue of that profoundly exciting; a kind of rock star. There are no gestures here which I was not familiar with in 1976. One of the shared enterprises of modern French philosophy, an enterprise which certain currents already contradict, has been to attack the logocentricity which is typical of French educated culture, and so of French poetry; how poets have assimilated or occupied this campaign, I do not know. The selection-I said-is not radical. I deduce from the packaging that poets who have, or are going to get, a whole volume, in this wonderful Bloodaxe series edited by Tim Matthews and Michael Worton, are not in the anthology; so that big guns like Yves Bonnefoy, Ren‚ Char, Paul Eluard, Henri Michaux, Andr‚ Fr‚naud, are missing in this special sense. The title "new French poetry" is absurd, since several of the culprits began publishing in the 1950s; the jacket's claim that "much of the poetry shows an affinity with the work of Henri Michaux" is ill-founded.
The cover refers to rigorously ontological poetry, but one cannot help quipping that it is self-indulgently ontological. Cream and brandy ontological. Bloat and guzzle ontological. The problem with reading the poetry is its lack of specifics; pursuing the line of ontology, the crack dividing being from not being, orients the writer towards eternals; what has time drained out of it can be a platitude; the elimination of everything which can change, and has its being within time, leaves a landscape which is profound, perhaps, theological, theophanic, but also devastated and inorganic. The worship of the word (le Verbe) elevates a situation, and that situation involves a speaker and a listener, as preconditions, ontologically, of utterance; since the listener is there to listen, the worship is a self-worship of the writer, in which the reader is a more or less well-rehearsed acolyte.
Ontology strikes the English mind as a non-subject: the space between being and non-being is strictly invisible, and the claim that you can spy on the moments when things come into being is disprovable. Heidegger cannot say anything about what does not exist; even a German professor cannot study this; but he can evoke, conjuring up ghosts at the moment of their disappearance and from the ashes of that disappearance, of the other Mediterranean high cultures, overrun by Greece, and of the versions of Greek culture which never happened, but which are implicit, remain implicit, in the fragments of the Pre-Socratics. The charm of Heidegger's writing lies partly in his evocation of ghosts, in the startling transience of the ideas he conjures up, which one cannot describe afterwards. But his subject is within time: it is the irreversibility and creative power of intellectual shifts during the first millennium BC, around the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. The precondition of an intellectual milieu emerging, in Israel and Hellas, in which the intelligent might share their thoughts in a common language, was precisely that they forfeited their isolation: the sublime, wild uniqueness, mythical thinking. This venture, although cumulative, tends to converge; and on a point which is in its past, indeed before its origin: where most of the potential in the energy system was irrevocably condemned to non-reality; the point of origin is the line between being and non-being, and shapes all that follows. The force of Heidegger's work is his sense of the errors of history; the decisiveness of the decisive moments proves that moments exist, that is that eternity is an exceptional and non-binding element in time. That is, Heidegger is not writing about Being, but about a few thousand people at concrete moments, over a few centuries, in concrete places. Heidegger makes it possible to frame the thought that the other high cultures of the first millennium-Egyptian, Phoenician, Etruscan, Urartian, Tartessian, Babylonian, Hittite-might have founded a quite different intellectual tradition and so a different West; the fragments we have of these cultures, dominated by non-being, perhaps reduce all our social system to conditionality. The fatal course of the West is perhaps inscribed in the alphabetic script. The Latin abstract vocabulary was translated from Greek and partially mistranslated, a tragedy anticipating the formation of the German abstract vocabulary by (mis)translation from Church Latin and recalling the loss of internal diversity of Greek thought from the "classical" 5th century, founding events re-enacted by Heidegger's attempt to found the language of German philosophy de novo, in which he could not succeed because the (reasoning) German nation had already been formed, with a graecised (Hellenistic-patristic) language introduced between the ninth and eighteenth centuries. This French ontological poetry seems to me to lack a sense of the tragic, of the conditionality and corrupt nature of language.
It was in about 1988 that I began, under pressure from my friend David Marriott, to take an interest in modern British poetry; and upon my word, some of it is both forcible and intelligent. I suspect that my interest in the field is at an end, even if I don't know what enthusiasm is going to come next.
The specifics of British poetry cannot be considered separately from the empirical philosophy and the project of experimental investigation of nature, and the opposition to abstract notions, which are such a feature of the seventeenth century, notably with Bacon and Locke. The popularity of high-flown, vague, musical generalisation in France cannot be separated from the Catholic Church, and its modules of eloquence. (The history of those modules, as they offer themselves in sermons by prelates, or in the Breviary, is an issue we cannot enter here, although they are of historically mixed origins.) The English manner (which in this sense is also Scottish and Welsh) is tied up with the rise of technology, with commodity capitalism, with affective individualism, and with Protestantism. The depressing thinginess of cultureless English poetry is mysteriously related to the interest in the precise nature of things shown by the coryphaei of the avant-garde, JH Prynne and Allen Fisher, whose interest in science is not shown by poets elsewhere in the world; if one looks at things closely, one moves into science inevitably, and it is only by refusing to ask any questions that one can remain with a child's apprehension of the properties and histories of things. Prynne's concern with the philosophy of the everyday comes from Lefebvre, his interest in the interaction of observer and observed from Merleau-Ponty; nonetheless his tireless study of materials science is an expression of the English genius, even if at its zenith or furthest stretch.
There is a genre of literate chanson in French which has no equivalent in English. It would be hard to determine whether this has driven poetry back, by controlling a certain territory; or has led poetry out into its territory, by familiarising a broad public with certain literary gestures and a suave verbal intensity. The history of English song has much to teach us about the wreck of English poetry; and the fate of the latter is entangled with the future of pop music.
Fashion in this country is not well informed; the writings of Barthes have played a quite insignificant role in my life compared to those of Yves Bonnefoy or Gaspar Lorand, who I am sure are entities of a much greater magnitude; perhaps the reading public has some catching-up to do. The allure of French fashion in recent years has been almost confined to clothes, food, and the philosophers of the diaspora after the grand disillusion with the Parti communiste fran‡ais. Even the cinema has been mainly restricted to the vogue of a few actors, and the waning popularity of directors who became stars during the nouvelle vague. A self-regarding and rather conservative educated bourgeoisie has failed to hang on to its own hinterland, in the sense of vast numbers of ordinary French people for whom the allure of American culture is first irresistible, and then, perhaps, based on its egalitarianism-its absence of hostility to outsiders. Kierkegaard remarks, I think rightly, that the bourgeoisie acquired all its culture by imitation, i.e. of its social betters; the operation whereby shoals of newly rising individuals from lower classes imitate and become and reinforce the "old" middle class has taken place on a mass scale but, like the massification of aristocratic culture in the nineteenth century, it has included revolts, changes, and misunderstandings. Neither the "old" British nor the "old" French poetry have altogether imposed their artificiality-their cultivated nature, which is their wealth as well as the mark of their antiquity-on the new "meritocracy" defined by success in competitive and anonymous State examinations.
My poetic culture began with French; perhaps the tradition is over-familiar to me. But also, many years of reading other kinds of poetry have given me a detachment from this genre of the stilted-exalted, generalised and imperious. The manner of French poetry goes back to Racine, whose exalted but, to English ears, rather colourless verses are still imprinted on France through the Com‚die fran‡aise, school exercises, and innumerable school plays. The conventions of the seventeenth century-the avoidance of the everyday, of the menial class, of material needs as oppposed to moral impulses, the exclusion of objects, the denial of appetite except divine or romantic love, patriotism, etc.-have remained in force in French poetry to a remarkable extent, and the ways in which they were overthrown, at various times, are quite different from the modernisations of English verse; in which little of this applied during the seventeenth century. The classicism of the French Revolution may have been anti-clerical but it also acted to reinforce many of these conventions, as the chief orators saw themselves as heroes in a racinian drama, and spoke accordingly. Hugo's disturbance of the classical norms on stage came surprisingly late, in 1830. The Republican tradition of oratory resembles, to British ears, the grandiose or objectless wash of an Archbishop's homilies and commands. The earthiness of British verse includes, naturally, factors which make almost all of it unsuccessful. There are so many poems which cannot deal with feelings or ideas-which are surely legitimate objects of interest. Pierre Bourdieu has, in an interesting passage of his book on social reproduction, traced the grandiose and nebulous standard admired style of a French litterato to the Jesuit education of the 17th century, with its complete rejection of practical knowledge and testing, and preoccupation with impressive public speaking. So perhaps Racine, writing his tirades for an upper-class girls' school patronised by the court, is merely a straw in the wind.
The peaceful flow of British poetry was interrupted, around 1960, by a transition from French models, as the coveted symbol of modernity and the truly civilised life, to North American. Prynne's stay in the USA marks, no doubt, the beginning of a new era. Modern French literature, except for philosophy, has been left in the warehouses. The American assets-issuing institutions have been predominant; although the USA is totally unlike Britain, where social rules and typical personality formations bear a much greater resemblance to France. A move away from the USA would be of fundamental importance, but is hardly likely; although an interest in the philosophy of India, and in tribal (oral) literatures, has been an interesting sub-genre since the fashion for meditation and ashrams in the middle sixties. Since I invested grosso modo, as a Modern Linguist, in the European model, it comes as an unpleasant surprise to reflect that the last twenty years (since I gave up my French and German degree) have seen the decline of prestige of French culture within France, that younger writers or artists have nothing like the respect which cultural leaders, not even white-haired, had in 1976.
Britain has non-empirical poets:
She whispers out of these hushed voices
Large invisible seas
Falling on us white as innocence.
(...)
Beyond the body of alabaster
Over cliffsman death, white shrouds
In a great fleet shine forth freedom in her majesty.
A bird's wing is broken into their current.
Across cerulean heights
Starring the dark and fivefold continent
The infinite allotropy of her spirit
Eludes me still. Her voice
Wanders on the wind with no wit in it.
Speak! Speak to me, o aerophyte!
(JF Hendry, from The Orchestral Mountain, 1943)
This kind of poem works better in French; illustrating the point, familiar to anyone versed in the subject, that French words and English ones have different time-values: French ones are naturally stable and eternal, whereas English ones are concrete, decentralised, and apply to de_nite patches or moments of time, effaced or stained by change. Hendry's work (written in English, though he was of course Scottish) has never been reprinted; his elevated tone is connected to his high theme, the death of his wife by bombing and the European war which brought that about; the theme is sited on the crack between being and non-being. Hendry's creative career was vitiated by the war and by the personal tragedy which inspired his poem; it may be that English poetry, taking a completely different turn, would have converged with French poetry, if material problems had not cut down the Forties poets, hindered from following through. The time sense can be examined in the temporal duration of white as innocence: innocence has been white, we can suppose, since time began; it is an ontological adjective, although simultaneously, of course, it is allegorical, and what you cannot see can own no adjective of colour. The substantiality of allegory is its inevitability, a fatal drag which is offset, as an emergency measure, by unpredictable junctures which baffle the reader; why is a mountain like an orchestra? French adjectives last for millions of years longer than English ones, but French sentences are fissured by startling jumps of continuity.
Indeterminacy is the factor which makes French poetry inconsumable to British readers, causing a dispersal of the body image (I think) and a drop of blood pressure; but is also identified by Roman Ingarden as a general feature of modern poetry since Stefan George (i.e. circa 1890), and claimed by Robert Sheppard as what distinguishes (British) small press poetry from the mainstream, and as the source of its politically liberating thrust. One vane of poetry has become increasingly split and dynamic with respect to time and space, moving towards the condition of number; one vane has become increasingly, or has remained, indeterminate and timeless and abstract. Indeterminacy, disputed by the Nincompoop or postmodern wing of the mainstream, has become the core of poetic politics, an asset to fight over and seize. The mixed basket claimed by the cultural managers of the NewGen is greater narrowness of definition with respect to class origin and especially regional origin; with a greater vagueness, or permissiveness, with regard to referentiality or purpose. Indeterminacy appears to fall apart into half a dozen quite different concepts, in an analysis without which debate will be frustrating. For one thing, it represents an inheritance from religion of timeless contemplation, free from the merely material; granting command of virtual worlds, and detached recognition of formative processes; comparing different lives as expressions of the same underlying forces. It constructs a general subject, emptying the poet out of the poem to make it available, a Hohlform, for the reader. The recording of local events in a vocabulary which is common, and whose meanings and reference-sites are general, must be brought in to explain this process: local information is never truly available in the poem. The existence of a sphere of general ideas is the condition of literariness. We look through the specific, not at it.
To grasp the vagueness of French poetry for Anglo-Saxon ears, it would, I think, be necessary to uncoil the nature of wordfields and the discriminations which structure them and require a "high" concept to be separated into "lower" ones which are opposed to each other. Pierre Bourdieu has remarked, in A social critique of taste, how the oppositions which fan out different commodities to form a mature market repeat, carefully and predictably, the oppositions which separate the class fractions which compose the purchasers in the market; within the poetic world, it seems to me that this is happening in a twofold development, of separation of the poetici from the rest of society, and of multiple notches in the spectrum of poetry from each other, and that the chosen means is style, a higher level of organisation than that of separate vocables within a wordfield. The gestures-of affiliation, alliance, possession, defiance, setting at naught-are so very tightly attached to a specific clique, or fraction, and (inverted) to its rivals, that further definiteness as to time and space is unnecessary. The poems are objects that say who you are to a French reader (one, of course, sufficiently "inside" upper middle class society to read the signs correctly), but can say nothing of the kind to a British one, playing quite different (if homologous) games of prestigious speaking and discriminatory and "who I am" consumption, along different spectra of signal. The primary and total oppositions, of Death and Life, Time and Nothing, etc., are one pole of a semantic space also populated by discriminations so fine that they are of low energy, a recession away from the primary which also accounts for the intimisme which John Taylor (in The Oxford Guide to Contemporary World Literature) identifies as central to French literature in the last thirty years. Banal events are recalled with nuances in the savouring of memory which are based on nuances in the way wine is appreciated and which are laden with social information, so wrapping up and selling alliance (desirable on the horizontal axis) and privilege (desirable on the vertical axis). The ontological oppositions are drained of energy and detail because that has been invested in the other pole, of social dialect. If French literature has become dissected by nuance, it is in pursuit of the logic of competitive consumption and discrimination where it has become so important to read Philippe Sollers and drink a wine no-one has heard of that one spurns and laughs at someone drinking Mouton-Rothschild and reading Fran‡oise Mallet-Joris. The fanfare-war of reputations, of book jackets dividing the market so as to bind and capture a part of it, has become so fierce that the contents of books pale into insignificance; a territorialisation, or espace stri‚e, to which Deleuze and Guattari (who of course are only read by those within the ambit of Editions de Minuit) have responded with their summons to deterritorialisation.
The superiority of French poets to British ones resides, I think, in the energy of exaltation which performing to a hostile audience, of rival cliques, incites; they push their claims to far ends and put up a bold front; they are game, like fighting cocks. They fill the room with noise, and develop their strengths. British poets have internalised their guilt, or the valuations of their enemies, much more-to utter them.
The only poems here I really enjoyed were those by Joyce Mansour and Lorand Gaspar. Although he belongs to an older generation and is anyway a martiniquais, it would be wrong to stop without mentioning the name of Aim‚ C‚saire, certainly one of the great poets of the century, and one of the first people to demonstrate that Surrealism was more suited to the Caribbean (and to Latin America) than to its birthplace. I was charmed by Jacques Dupin's "My grandfather's cable-bridge", a domestic set-piece; his grandfather was a notaire and there was a cable-bridge across the Rhone, and the poem is all about that. Dupin uses conventional figures of language: the notary sharpens "the edge of the stone and the register, and the blue of his eye" alongside photographic literalness (an asp writhes on the escutcheon on the doorway, because it did), the poet wallows in the picturesque archaism of notarial language but at the same time, slily, sends it up; "he is the formula the inkwell of consciences being drowned", where poncif is a pun on the venerable set phrases of legal forms (going back to Justinian, no doubt, in some cases) and on the pierre ponce, used to rub or pounce parchments to remove the hair, and no doubt part of the stores of a nineteenth-century notary's office. (Ponce is also a kind of ink.) By being ironic, he seems much more sincere than someone being exalted. He makes the poem continually surprising without breaking its line; all paradoxes traversible. There is a link between the impossibilism of certain verbal figures and intransigent maximalism in politics.
J'ai lanc‚ vers Paris ma syllabe sonore, j'ai lanc‚ ma pierre dans le pr‚cipice. One feature which I think retains the cachet of ecclesiastical rhetoric is the refusal to tell stories (which implies the absence of character, known only through events); the preacher did not tell stories, but deliver exegeses based on Biblical narratives familiar to all. These poets deliver exegeses-exalted, eloquent, generalised, ex cathedra-on their experiences, but do not recount them. When someone speaks of the Absolute, we think first of all of absolute monarchy. The unhindered quality of this poetry is partly a denial of the relation of the poet to other people. It is psychologically na‹ve; states of mind are presented separately from the situations which engendered them, although we know that states of mind have no real existence outside the rush of sense data which constantly conditions them, although sense data are a dimension less complex than states of mind; this is surprising, because French novelists have been so much better than English ones at explaining human motivation (another part of the Jesuit tradition). We find out singularly little, from this lyric poetry, about the loved persons who supposedly give rise to it; it is poetry without character, because the speaker, too, is presented as free and absolute. This self-regard does not make it unromantic, since after all one may find so much eloquence and exaltation romantic and sexually exciting. The inability to tell a story may come from an inhibition of principle, a notion of poeticity which excludes any explanation; a perilous and convergent notion of literariness. Like an aristocrat who cannot dress himself?
The decline of French painting must have a bearing on the decline of French literature. Both are founded in the overwhelming of the heirs, by the prestige of the recent past; the irresistible need to imitate Symbolism and Surrealism, the pointlessness of doing so. I am not certain that the quality of the writing has deteriorated; only its brand image. One can say that, in 1930, nothing significant in visual art was happening outside Paris; in 1960, nothing significant was happening inside Paris. The most plausible solution is to blame the secretive, oligarchic, xenophobic, and inflexible art dealing world, with its legal restrictions assuring all power to the clique of commissaires-priseurs, who could not expand or re-capitalise easily. I know little about this. Perhaps the (French) poet is a kind of small businessman, establishing a shop (‚tabli, or ‚tude) against great opposition, capturing a share of the market, and demanding absolute power within the premises. How we do marry up the vagueness and absoluteness of the poetry with the richly subdivided, dynamic, map, the cadastre parcellaire, of literary groupuscules, obsessed by time-bound points of theory and pr‚s‚ance? It is where brick and water co-exist in the same place. Perhaps the pitiless territorial struggles of the French poetry world disgust poets with the here and now, and the time-denying poetry is a successful attempt at flight. The heat of the rhetoric may be a reaction to the situation of being listened to by one's enemies, and so having to write for them; the tone is proud but not kind. Rhetoric was developed, was it not, for the courtroom, as a brazen and self-confirming weapon of contention for pleading against the other faction. The exacerbated tone of the factional struggles in France (which have been receding since 68, in the demise of ideology as a transcendent quarrel and litigation, in the secularisation of the intransigent) made anything but self-assertion, and grasping of cosmological authority, unattractive (and hard to hear). When your rivals reject your whole personality, introspection and self-knowledge become impossible. Unless you can supply factional loyalty, its passions, its grammar, its cumulation, its score-books, its sacrifices and endurance, its solidarity, this poetry is hard to reach. Identification works differently across the Channel.