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Toward a New Poetics

University of California Press

It might be said that until the 1980s, all new literary movements in France seemed to arise from an aggressive critique of the dominant literary practice. This tradition goes back at least to the Renaissance, when Joachim du Bellay attacked medieval poetics in his Difense et illustration de la langue frangaise (1549). Ever since that inaugural text, which can be considered the first in a long line of manifestos, French literary life has never been the same. Replete with hyperbolic, Manichaean constructs, each successive pronouncement condemned the predecessor's principles while adumbrating new and antithetical ones. In our own time this conflictual practice was perfectly illustrated in surrealism's positions during the interwar years and, after World War II, in existentialism's severe critique of that movement, a critique that never forgot the intimate connection between poetics and politics.

Perhaps what most typifies French intellectual experience is this interlocking system within which a political critique based on ethical considerations is combined with proposals for the foundation of a new poetics, itself grounded in an overall ideological context. By "a new poetics" I mean to suggest not only a reconceptualization of the rules of poetry writing and the forms to be followed, but also the ideological justification for such changes.

The first part of this introduction situates the dominant poetics of the sixties, which maintained its hegemony well into the late seventies, represented by the group around the magazine Tel Quel and its publishing arm by the same name at Editions du Seuil. In reflecting on their positions during the sixties, we will also consider the influence of surrealism and existentialism in shaping the ideological radicalization of the sixties. In light of this background, we will then turn to the poets and novelists featured in this volume and offer a collective redefinition of an undogmatic poetics breaking with the traditional repetition of formulaic structures that has come to characterize the French cultural experience through history.

Were one to isolate a single concept that held sway in the radical poetics of the sixties, it would be icriture , as philosophically elaborated by Jacques Derrida and systematically, incisively, and polemically reinterpreted by Tel Quel , which published Derrida's earliest works. Within the all-encompassing order of structuralism, icriture became one of the reigning critical and creative concepts among poets, writers, and intellectuals in all disciplines. This moment in French thought, which succeeded in unifying many if not all the intellectual disciplines (a possibly unprecedented feat), has left its stamp on contemporary poetics. We shall see how the present both is marked by these experiences of the recent past and has managed to distance itself from them. We shall also note the importance in France of American poetry and poetics since the thirties, which illustrates both the apparent irreconcilable differences between the French and the Americans and the increasing resemblances that have developed through a systematic series of exchanges and translations.

Although the scope of this project is vast, for practical reasons I concentrate on the twelve writers I have interviewed and translated in the present volume. This group is not only representative of views in contemporary French avant-garde thinking, it is also symptomatic of a quiet revolution now going on in France, characterized by new though unsystematic practices that are coming to substitute for the more rigid poetics of the past.1

When Humanism Became a Dirty Word

How simple it would be to consider humanism the continuing identity of the dominant strain in the French philosophicoliterary corpus since the Renaissance! Yet for the poet-politician Aimi Cisaire, writing his Discourse on Colonialism in 1950, humanism had become a vacuous though all-powerful ideology used to justify the exploitation of nonwhites in the colonies of France. Thus humanism, especially from the end of World War II, became a double-edged sword. It represented the self-serving lay ethics of the imperialist Fourth and Fifth Republics but was increasingly disputed by those Antilleans and Africans who had been educated in French universities and then expeditiously marginalized. Blacks were, as Cisaire pointed out, considered barbarians—the Other—and therefore qualified as nonhumans.2 Attacks against humanism, however, had begun before the outbreak of the war. Jean-Paul Sartre criticizes its bourgeois doctrines in Nausea (1938).3 For him there was an indelible connection between this form of inane, though repetitively significant, ideology and the power structure in place. He was not alone in his views.

The poet Francis Ponge adamantly opposed what he called the nefarious Jerusalem-Athens-Rome axis.4 For Ponge, decentering human beings from their dominant position becomes a near-obsession, involving a rejection of the figural representation of that hallowed humanist tradition: the God-like quality the poet assumed, that self-centered, anthropomorphizing stance couched in lyric tones.5

In his caricature of the romantic poet (a view shared by the surrealists), Ponge decried this preoccupation with self and shifted his gaze to the material world, especially to those things historically overlooked by poets. Clearly Sartre was not the only disciple of German phenomenology; immediately after the war a group of German students came to Paris, at the encouragement of Bernhard Groethuysen, to pay homage to Ponge as the "magus of phenomenology."6 The Pongean shift to things, to a Lucretian universe, was also a move away from a Sartrean realisttaste to one that would later be appreciated by Tel Quel as an aesthetics founded on linguistics. Thus, without mentioning Husserl (that German philosopher under whom Sartre had studied as a young man in Berlin before the war),7 as Ponge looked beyond humanistic symbols, he too envisaged a cleansing of a humanist, bourgeois language in ways not unlike Antonin Artaud's hygienic solutions for the theater and its languages.8

Earlier still, surrealism's philosophic posture, defined in 1924, aimed at destabilizing the centrality of the creative I through the practice of automatic writing. Only this rejection of authorial overdetermination could free the transcription of thought from aesthetic, religious, and political interferences.

In all these prewar critical stances, as represented by Sartre, Ponge, and Breton, Marxism played its part. Was there really a need to wait for the French philosopher Louis Althusser's Pour Marx (1965) to discover that in Marx's own evolution an initial humanistic phase was overthrown in 1846 in favor of a "scientific" explanation based on dialectical materialism?9 That fundamental break with philosophical idealism suggested an interpretative grid whereby the literary would no longer be impervious to the philosophical implications of economic power.

It is impossible to diminish the impact of Marx's dialectical materialism—from surrealism's interpretation of it in Andri Breton's Second Surrealist Manifesto of 1929 and Louis Aragon's unexpected line "Long live dialectical materialism" in his much-criticized poem The Red Front , to Jean-Paul Sartre's Search for a Method and, finally, Philippe Sollers's exploitation of that...