J. Robert Loy_Things in Recent French Literature

Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA.

http://www.jstor.org

Things in Recent French Literature Author(s): J. Robert Loy Source: PMLA, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Mar., 1956), pp. 27-41Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/460189Accessed: 12-05-2015 23:38 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 109.121.63.134 on Tue, 12 May 2015 23:38:06 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mla

http://www.jstor.org/stable/460189

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp



THINGS IN RECENT FRENCH LITERATURE

By J. Robert Loy

Crains dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t'epie A la matiere meme un verbe est attache?Nerval

0 ressources infinies de Pepaisseur des choses rendues par les ressources infinies de l'epaisseur semantique des mots!?Ponge

SINCE THE SECOND world war, journalistic critics and generalizing

cultural pundits have been pointing out to us that serious French literature is headed, on the one hand, toward an eventually sterile period of realistic despair, and, on the other, toward an intensification of diffi- cult writing characterized by a kind of supreme indifference to audience on the part of the creator. Examples to prove their point are not lacking. There would seem to be, however, at least one other trend in recent French writing which, although owing something, perhaps, in the way of formation or occasion for reaction to the two types mentioned, falls not at all into such categories. For lack of a better name, and in order to avoid painful jargon, this literature might best be called a literature of

Things. The Things would include all that is inanimate matter, natural or

man-made, the crude stone as well as the objet d'art, as well as, thanks to a comfortable anthropocentrism, those growing and living plants and animals not endowed with a rational mind and the faculty of speech.1 At the outset, let it be clear that this use of the word Things does not include the usual background, or descriptive, or secondary use of things so common in the novel from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thus, we are not concerned here with the historical and descriptive backdrop of the Romantics (Hugo's sewers in Les Miserables), or with the documentary display of wares in the Naturalists (Zola's meats and

vegetables in Le Ventre de Paris), or the long studies of things which

are, in another way, so important a part of Proust's world. We are, metaphysically and stylistically, worlds away from the special objective- subjective vision of Flaubert which Georges Poulet calls his pensee circulaire.2 To the exclusion of persons and ideas, the inanimate object becomes the literary subject; it is the persons, if any, the ideas and the emotions that form the descriptive background, if and when it exists.

1 Thus, the realm of animal literature (Colette, medieval fabliaux, etc.) does not properly fall under object-literature, for the motivation of such writing, its charm and attraction, lie in the fantasy of animals playing men.

2 "La Pens6e circulaire de Flaubert" in NNRF, xxxi (1955), 30-52, as well as Poulet's point of departure in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, 1953), pp. 482-491.

27



28 "Things" in Recent French Literature

This study, then, proposes to review, tentatively, what seems to be one

of the more important recent literary manifestations, and to suggest that

the Things themselves have either directly or indirectly influenced the

means of expression. It must be seen from the start that French literature in the past

century has spoken little of Things per se. The Romantics were too

fond of their own emotional status to consider the inanimate object save

in a very secondary manner as the repository for or catalyst of their own

feelings. The Parnassians used Things as a means toward achieving a

cold, plastic picture of beauty, but they were less interested in the things themselves than in the static effect of the work conjured up by them. The Symbolists, almost by definition, were interested in what lay behind

the Thing and came close to rehabilitating it. But their very insistence on the suggestiveness, the subtlety, the hermetic quality of symbolic expression prevented them from calling a spade a spade. The giants like Mallarme and Valery are equally far from the Thing as object. Mallarme

wilfully laboring after the difHcult, delighting in the obfuscation of ideas and forms, was not a friend of Things; the flower "absente de tous bou-

quets" is not that peculiarly organized collection of matter which one can pluck, handle and admire. Valery's concern with Monsieur Teste and the processes of intellectual effort is not immediately involved with the shape, substance, and texture of objects. The Impressionists, the

Cubists, the Surrealists?like the Symbolists?seem for a moment to be on the track of Things. But surrealism was a revolution and primarily an intellectual revolution; one does not make a revolution against Things.3 Searching for a new and more honest mode of communication in which the Thing was to play a major role, surrealism failed in its

incapability to communicate from things up, rather than from the intellect down. Those closest to Things from symbolism to surrealism were also those most concerned with style and expression. Sensing the

importance of objects, yet too much in revolt against traditional com?

munication, exceedingly distrustful of words, they ended by retreating into a difHcult, over-refined and elliptical world of the mind where

Things existed, to be sure, but only oneirocritically and hazily, far re- moved from the world of matter.

For the Things which interest us here are of solid matter. They have name and substance and extension. And although they possess secondary symbolic and oneiric attributes, they must still look and sound and feel like the material objects they are when communication between writer and reader is first made. This kind of Thing, roughly speaking, makes

8 Rene* Crevel, however, comes many times very close to object-writing in his general and repeated plea for a return to the world as it is. See particularly the conclusions of Le Clavecin de Diderot (Paris: Editions Surr&distes, 1932), pp. 62-63, 128-129.



/. Robert Loy 29

its most recent appearance in French literature after 1930, with a notice- able concentration of frequency and clarity following the second world war. One can as yet speak of no movement; indeed, the individual treat- ment given by each artist to his stock of Things seems to preclude the

possibility of a movement. Some of the writers were formerly surrealists as seems natural when one considers that Apollinaire, at the threshold of surrealism, had on occasion written of such material objects. All of them have lived through the confusion common to the twentieth century, and the moral and philosophic readjustment in France after the second war. They come now to Things in varying degrees of directness and

immediacy. It is our conviction that they come to them as a new point of departure for both literature and general world outlook, out of the crisis of meaning in letters and out of the realm of absurdity and despair in philosophy.

A discussion of this new direction falls naturally into two broad com-

partments: the meaning behind Things, or the reason for the attraction

they hold for writers; the accompanying changes in means of literary communication in a literature surfeited with words and basically distrustful of them. In the literature at the center of this discussion, the latter problem has become secondary to the first in point of logical process if not in point of importance; a change of attitudes toward verbal ex?

pression is slowly growing out of a change in general philosophic view-

point. In considering the philosophic implication of Things, two very dif-

ferent climates of thought and feeling are to be distinguished. These two kinds of writers might most rapidly be summed up as those who use

Things as a prerequisite to more primary concerns, and those for whom the Thing is the primary concern, motivation, center, and final achieve- ment of their writing. In the first group, Sartre and Camus suggest them? selves immediately. The unforgettable passage in La Nausee, that existentialist literary primer, suffices as an example of the role played by things in Sartre: "La racine du maronnier s'enfoncait dans la terre, juste au-dessous de mon banc. Je ne me rappelais plus que c'etait une racine. Les mots s'etaient evanouis et avec eux, la signification des choses, leurs modes d'emploi, les faibles reperes que les hommes ont traces a leur surface. . . . Le mot d'absurdite nait a present sous ma plume; tout a,

l'heure, au jardin, je ne l'ai pas trouve, mais je ne le cherchais pas non plus, je n'en avais pas besoin: je pensais sans mots, sur les choses, avec les choses."4 It can be said that the gnarled root is no more than a symbol, most certainly not rare in literature. Symbol it is, to be sure, and yet it is also a Thing and essentially a Thing. Other similar scenes from Sartre's

1 La Nausee (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), pp. 161-163.




later novels in the Chemins de la liberte series could be found. The sun

and microbe provide the same sort of basis for the realization of absurdity in Camus. And except for a basic difference in conclusions, one might cite

the interfering mosquito net at the beginning of La Condition humaine and the line of trees in Malraux' Noyers de VAUenburg.

The basic frustration is the same as that involved in the classic humor-

ous example of the runaway collar button. Things can be notoriously unsympathetic to anthropomorphic design.5 The physical universe is

adamant, and nothing is to be gained by human reasoning, cajolery, and menace. The easiest way out of a bad situation is, perhaps, to install into the Thing a personality and superior design of its own, and thus at least save one's human dignity. This solution the early Greeks under- stood well. For Sartre, Camus, and, in a less conclusive way, Malraux, these crucial encounters with objects spell out the basic absurdity of human existence?with all that such existence suggests in the way of

logic, reason, culture, and social organization?in a universe of inanimate

objects. Camus was in no way annexing alien material when he chose the Sisyphus myth with its perverse rock as the title for his philosophic essay. From this confrontation with Things, however, Camus and the existentialists do not continue as far, from a point of view of literature, as writers of the second group whose interest in Things is essential. For

Sartre, the absurdity leads to "engagement" with little insistence on the

secondary problem of literary expression. For Camus, the absurd diverts us from primary literary considerations to the realm of social ideas. For

Malraux, the same absurdity has led along several trails to his present concern with Art?as if the basic frustration of the Thing's impact on human nature could lead finally only back to the Thing, this time the

object created and impressed with man's will. In his predilection for the

plastic arts, Malraux seems little interested in the problem of words. In the poetry of Henri Michaux, one comes closer to the development:

Things-absurdity-experiment in expression. That Michaux is struck with the absurdity of existence there can be little doubt, but that this ab?

surdity should be represented primarily by Things is not so clear. There seems to be equally an inherent distrust with particulars of human nature. Nor does Michaux accept Things?cooperative or uncooperative?as his central theme. Nevertheless, his attempt at conveying his own sort of nausea fits into this survey. His richness of invention is immediately an indication of his basic direction. Since words no longer suffice to suggest his immense disgust with the state of the world, nor yet to project what he would do with such a state of affairs, he invents Things which become

6 Cf. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New York: Doubleday), p. 103, for the mythic or what he calls the physiognomic character of things. They have lost their "objective or cosmological" value but not their "anthropological value."



J. Robert Loy 31

words, or words which become Things. "Ayant conscience de mon in-

justice," says Michaux, "j'ecris de moins en moins et tres peu des autres hommes. Si les cailloux et la nature m'entendaient, je n'oserais plus parler. . . . Heureusement, ils n'en savent rien et je n'ai pas a en tenir

compte."6 But Michaux, by the very inventiveness of his word-things, is not honest with the material world as it exists and, as in the text

quoted above, would seem to indicate only a direction toward the Thing, with, at once, distrust and nostalgia for such direct inspiration.

There is such an incipient direction in Raymond Queneau. In one work he comes close to combining an intoxication with Things and a

special mode of expression. It is his Petite Cosmogonie portative, a kind of modern De Rerum Natura ("ou Lucrece voisine avec Jarry," says Jean Rostand).7 However bitter the Cosmogonie about man's role in

existence, however frequent the strong expressions, when, at the end of the third canto after an enumeration of mineral elements, he concludes: "Le poeme jaillit d'un coin de cette terre," one can see in Queneau a

potential movement toward the kind of writing under discussion. His

predilection for experimental styles and expression are, however, far from the cold description of Things to be seen later.

Supervielle, Prevert,8 and Rene Crevel (and perhaps others) would

eventually merit mention in any exhaustive analysis of writers who show tendencies rather than clear steps in the new direction. But "reve- nons a nos moutons." The clearest example, the most cogent apologist, as it were, is Francis Ponge. The very title of his most widely read collection tells much?Le Parti pris des Choses. "Le parti pris des choses, les Sapates, sont de la litterature-type de l'apres revolution." In the Parti pris collection of 1942 (and most of the poems were written before, starting in 1928), Ponge very simply and forthrightly describes inanimate

objects. "Et puis donc, aussi bien qu'il est de nature de l'homme d' elever la voix au milieu de la foule des choses silencieuses, qu'il le fasse du moins parfois a leur propos."9 The world itself is no less absurd for

Ponge than for Camus; he is no less aware of the crisis of communication and words than Paulhan:

Bien entendu le monde est absurde! Bien entendu, la non-signification du monde! Mais qu'y a-t-il la de tragique? J'6terai volontiers a Tabsurde son coefficient de tragique.

6 Passages (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 30. 7 "Raymond Queneau et la Cosmogonie," Critique, xlix (1951), 489. 8 Despite the reservations of Georges Bataille, "De l'age de pierre a Jacques PreVert,"

Critique, iii-iv (1946), 195-214. There are clearly many texts of these poets which do not lend themselves to our analysis; that is why I speak of tendency. I am convinced, however, that the poets are basically intent upon communicating and that they trust language as a medium.

9 Protmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 208, 130.




. . . celui [the theme] de Tinndelite des moyens d'expression, celui de l'impossibili- te pour rhomme non seulement de s'exprimer mais d'exprimer n'importe quoi. (pp. 146, 166)

Hence, his predilection for Things; thus, his descriptive songs of the

pebble. There is not necessarily any meaning in the Things; there is the

possibility of seizing their material being in words. "Si j'ai choisi de

parler de la coccinelle c'est par degout des idees. . . . C'est parce qu'elles ne me viennent pas a bonheur, mais a malheur" (p. 146). Hence a literature of rain, orange-crates, cigarettes, bread, flre, water, meat, and stones. One thinks immediately of the Cubists, and with good reason where Braque is concerned.10 Yet there is a difference. All of the Cubists were not essentially interested in Things; sometimes their collage of

disparate objects only "used" the objects to point up the disjointedness of existence. One thinks also of the medieval lapidary and bestiary and with some justiflcation. But there is a difference; this descriptive cata-

logue pretends to be no learned work, no encyclopedia of knowledge. It pretends only to "talk about" the inanimate object since so much talk of the intellectual and human process would seem to have brought us to a blank wall: "Eh bien! Pierre, galet, poussiere, occasion de sentiments si communs quoique si contradictoires, je ne te juge pas si rapide- ment, car je desire te juger a ta valeur: et tu me serviras, et tu serviras des lors aux hommes a bien d'autres expressions, tu leur fourniras pour leurs discussions entre eux ou avec eux-memes bien d'autres arguments; meme, si j'ai assez de talent, tu les armeras de quelques nouveaux

proverbes ou lieux communs: voila toute mon ambition" (p. 142). Thus, for Ponge, the object is not end in itself, for such process could only lead eventually to literary sterility. And yet the object is the starting place: for new thinking (disgust with traditional ideas), and for new forms of expression (new proverbs and new commonplaces), in short, for a new literature in a world whose absurdity has been pointed out with such frequency. "Oui, le parti pris nait a Pextremite d'une philosophie de la non-signification du monde (et de l'inndelite des moyens d'ex?

pression" (p. 171). Things constitute a vital sounding-board for the poetry of Guillevic,

yet one senses in this indignant crusader for a more human society that

10 It was Ponge who wrote the introduction for a folio of Braque reproductions (Paris: A. Skira, 1947) which he calls "Braque, le reconciliateur." The introductory essay gives a clear indication of the sympathy of Ponge, writer of things, for Braque, the painter of them. "J'ai dit que la seule raison et justification de Part ?tait une imperieuse necessite d'expression. Non pour troubler, mais pour rassurer. J'ai dit que la seule facon de nous exprimer authentiquement ?tait de nous enfoncer dans notre diff?rence,?de l'exprimer a travers une matiere traitee sans vergogne, non a partir de nous-memes mais a partir du monde?et donc des objets les plus familiers. ..."



/. Robert Loy 33

the object begins by being an excuse for talking of men, and that the

secondary step of humanism as seen by Ponge already preconditions the poet's vision of the external thing. Nonetheless, there are striking passages of word still-life. In "Veillee" a cascading series of objects, in "Le Maitre" the solitary presence of a pine tree serve to spell out, first, the real world of man's hope, then the measure of his blindness. Yet in the same collection, in "Tyrannie," the "Mais toi tu savais / T'ap- procher des choses" gives clear indication that Ponge's direction Thing- Man has become here Man-thing. The stark object painting in "Taureau" and particularly in the glass-jug-and-paper of "Filets"?"Oui, c'est vous qui menez" gives ample proof that Guillevic has, nonetheless, under- stood the message of Things.

Although poetry has seemed to yield the richest example in Ponge, Things are not entirely absent from recent prose writing. The Irish writer in French, Samuel Beckett, writes in a style, and creates an

atmosphere of indifference, which lean heavily on objects. Their im-

portance throughout Molloy is striking. But the long episode of the "peb- bles to suck on" which troubles Molloy for several pages is such a

pointed example that the reader wonders if Molloy is sensitive to any- thing except inanimate things in his strange world. This suspicion is borne out by many passages of Malone meuri and VInnommable, The whole motivation for Beckett's writing, which shows none of the opti- mism of a Ponge, seems precisely a need to talk, and to talk about Things. He ends the last novel {VInnommable) saying: "II faut dire des mots, tant qu'il y en a, il faut les dire jusqu'a ce qu'ils me trouvent." And until the words find the me, one suspects that the author is condemned to talk of Things. The complete absence of human action and motivation, the theatrical stagnancy of En attendant Godot where objects assume such importance have no more immediate explanation.11

There is strong suggestion of similar direction in two other prose writers. The protagonists of Jean Cayrol (Je vivrai Vamour des autres)? particularly in the first two volumes of the three-volume novel?seem somehow to exist only among the objects they see. Armand, in Les Premiers Jours, is rarely more than an automaton passing noiselessly through the Paris railroad station, the family-style restaurant, the Monoprix stores. Indeed, existence for him is somewhat like the garishly lit counters of the Monoprix where he can quietly observe a multitude of

11 "J'en Sais," says Beckett in Molloy, "ce que savent les mots et les choses mortes, et ca fait une jolie petite somme, avec un commencement, un milieu et une fin, comme dans les phrases bien baties et dans la longue sonate des cadavres." For different explanations of the phenomenon, Beckett, see Georges Bataille, "Le Silence de Molloy," Critique, xlviii (1951), 387-396; and Edith Kern, "Drama Stripped for Inaction," YFS, xrv (1955), 41: "It is not man's relationship to the world of things that counts for Beckett."




objects?cold, detached, and awaiting the moment when they become his toothpaste and his knife. Cayrol suggests that the human being is far from the motivating force of his life; he passes through a forest of objects much as Baudelaire, in quite different fashion and with completely opposed metaphysic, passed through his forest of symbols. The most recent prose writer is Alain Robbe-Grillet (Les Gommes, "Trois Visions

reflechies").12 He limits even more stringently than Ponge his literary world; it can best be described as visual. The mute objects, the Things come to life under his detached eye and seem to possess the only real existence in the work. Unlike Ponge, however, he concentrates upon objects for stylistic and psychological reasons almost wholly within the human realm. Yet it is more than a little difncult to reconcile his shadowy persons with the crystal-clear Things. The reader is more certain of the

objective description, as he finishes Les Gommes, than he is of the people involved. As Roland Barthes points out in a study of Robbe-Grillet,13 the very description of the objects is the life of the literature. Whereas, says Barthes, classic description was a prospect of the unchanging Thing, Robbe-Grillet's description becomes a project of seizing the object in its changing state. That visual observation presupposes and encourages no secondary approach: the texture, the touch of the object is unim-

portant and unreliable; the mood, the interpretation of the observer is never known. Thus with Robbe-Grillet there is a reaffirmation of the

point made above?the Thing or object of this new literature has not

yet become, will perhaps never become, a symbol, an allegory.14 Robbe- Grillet remarked about Beckett's play En attendant Godot, using the words of Heidegger: "La condition de l'homme, c'est d'etre la."15 Just so Barthes is right in saying of Robbe-Grillet's own objects that they are there, and so it can be said of Ponge and Beckett that the author has

only stated that his objects "are there" and are not something else or the explanation of something else, or hiding behind something else.

This rapid survey of recent French literature has, it is hoped, pointed up an interest in Things and a mistrust of literary expression which, in

varying degree, characterize a part of modern French writing. If the

12 Les Gommes (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1953); "Trois Visions r6fl6chies," NNRF, xvi (1954), 614H523. Robbe-Grillet's latest work, reviewed in NNRF, xxxi (1955), 105- 112, by Maurice Blanchot, is Le Voyeur (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955).

13 In Critiquey lxxxvi-lxxxvii (1954), 581-591. 14 See the perceptive article of Rene" Micha, "Une nouvelle LittSrature all6gorique,"

NNRF, xvi (1954), 696-706, where he groups Rene* Daumal, Julien Gracq, Noel Devaulx, and others (e.g., Beckett?and wrongly so, I think) as writers influenced by the "open universe" of Kafka and absurdity (therefore somewhat like the writers discussed here) who identify themselves with the objects of their novels by way of allegory. What Micha is discussing is not object-literature.

18 Cited in article by Barthes, Critique, lxxxvi-lxxxvii (1954).



/. Robert Loy 35

objects seemed secondary and acted only as philosophic catalysts in

Sartre and Camus, if they seemed fragmentary or tendentious in some of the writers discussed, they have reached their fullest expression in the writers last discussed, and most particularly in Ponge. One looks for some explanation as to why and how they have invaded literary thinking. It is the basic hypothesis of this study that these instances, far from

being isolated cases, indicate a peculiar contemporary state of mind. What these authors are talking about is a Ding an sich without the spiritual overtones of a Rilke. Much more than objects may, of course, be hidden behind and suggested by this return to Things, but thus far one is still

very much in the realm of the material.

The explanatory hypothesis which arises from the very physical analysis of objects is at once the most immediate and satisfactory. Things are matter, and, most men would agree, simply matter. One must then

suppose that such object orientation in literature represents a basically materialistic conception of the universe, however disastrous for poetry such a conclusion might at first appear.16 But there are materialisms and

materialisms, and for the past two centuries it has become increasingly important to distinguish among them.

The kind of materialism involved is, it would seem, the Epicurean or Lucretian17 variety which played an important role in European thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is a renewal and reesti- mate of a timeless point of view. Our writers start again from the fact of material stufl in the world, its relation to man, and somehow hope to detach conclusions other than those current at present. There is no con-

viction, no credo involved. The new direction is a humanist counterpart of empiricism in the natural sciences, with this difference: the wealth of

myth remains and constitutes a twin process of investigation along with rational or objective denomination of Things. If it yields nothing star-

tling, it must nevertheless be seen as a serious experiment to which, for some writers, the only alternative would seem to be literary stagnation and philosophic nihilism.

For Sartre and Camus, the adamant object served for the realization of the basic absurdity of existence. From there, a return to the human

sphere and proposals of solution and alleviation. Ponge very clearly shows that the absurdity is a foregone conclusion, the anterior step to

16 Cf. Ponge at the conclusion of his short pamphlet Note hdtive d la gloire de Groethuysen (Lyon: Les Ecrivains rSunis, 1951): "Mais c'est bien a partir d'ici, mon Grceth, si comme je le pense, la Matiere est Tunique providence de Pesprit. ..."

17 Cf. Ponge, "Texte sur l'61ectricit6" in NNRFt xxxi (1955), 14; "Et puis je relis Lucrece et je me dis qu'on n'a jamais rien 6crit de plus beau, que rien de ce qu'il a avancS, dans aucun ordre, ne me paralt avoir ?t? sSrieusement d&nenti, mais au contraire plutdt con- firmeV^



36 uThings" in Recent French Literature

returning to Things?no longer to prove a certain status but rather to solicit clarification and improvement of the status. The world is absurd, therefore Things are, and are important and vital to men. "Seule la litterature (et seule dans la litterature celle de description?par opposi- tion a celle d'explication?: parti pris des choses, dictionnaire pheno- menologique, cosmogonie) permet de jouer le grand jeu; de refaire le

monde, a tous les sens du mot refaire, grace au caractere a la fois concret et abstrait, interieur et exterieur du Verbe, grace a son epaisseur seman-

tique."18 Ponge's long-range aim is, of course, humanist: "C'est a un homme simple que nous tendons," he says in "Notes premieres de Thom- me." But that humanism is more remote for Ponge than for Sartre, and the progression toward it must be made in the close company of Things. For in objects lies precisely the potential clue to existence?material at

first, human eventually?which Ponge hopes to uncover.

Thus it is Ponge who most clearly sketches the potential of the object in relation to man. His experiment is another attempt at a tabula rasa, but this time an humble attempt which does not pretend to explain the all in an all-embracing structure. It hopefully assigns to itself the re- communion of man?in a very physical and objective19 way?with the

Things which surround him. It suffices to talk: "II faut parler: le silence ... est ce qu'il y a de plus dangereux au monde."20 One human attribute follows the poet from the beginning of his descriptive experi? ment?the word. As Gaston Bachelard puts it: "Toute connaissance de l'intimite des choses est immediatement un poeme."21 There is no need for the poet to feel inferior in the face of the world, says Ponge, for it is in

18 Protmes, p. 180. 19 Sartre, despite his study of Ponge (UBomme et les Choses, Paris: Seghers, 1947),

would find fault with the use of the word as well as with the subsequent discussion of passing from denomination of things to comprehension of man, as he makes clear in an attack on materialist method. "Mais une fois qu'il a supprime' la subjectivite* au profit de l'objet, au lieu de se voir chose parmi les choses, ballotte* par les ressacs de l'univers physique, il se fait regard objectif et prStend contempler la nature telle qu'elle est absolument. II y a un jeu de mot sur Pobjectivit6, qui tant6t signifie la qualite" passive de l'objet regarde" et tant6t la valeur absolue d'un regard dSpouille" des faiblesses subjectives. Ainsi le matSrialiste, ayant d6pass6 toute subjectivite* et s'Stant assimile* a la pure vSrite* objective, se promene dans un monde d'objets habite* par des hommes-objets" (Situations III, Paris: Gallimard, 1949, p. 141). For an excellent presentation of Ponge as seen by Sartre, see Robert Cham- pigny, FR, xxv (1952), 254-261.

20 Protmes, p. 162. 21 Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les rdveries du repos (Paris: Corti, 1948), p. 11. The valu-

able and unique studies of Bachelard include UAir et les songes, UEau et les r&ves, La Terre et les r&oeries de la volonU, and La Psychanalyse du jeu. Although written from a special point of view, Bachelard's studies are extremely illuminating on the whole problem of object-literature. In the text quoted, depending upon the meaning given to "connaissance," Bachelard suggests equally egocentric poetry and object-poetry.



/. Robert Loy 37

his power "metalogiquement de le refaire [the world]." To which Jean Tortel, in a review of Ponge's collection Protmes adds a valuable com-

mentary on both the philosophic and the rhetorical aspects of Ponge's work: "Si la parole peut refaire le monde, c'est la preuve que l'homme

peut, dans une certaine mesure, etre le plus fort?et celle aussi que le monde peut a bon droit etre considere par le poete comme reel, dans le sens qu'admet le savant, et faire Pobjet d'experiences verbales du m&me ordre que l'experience scientifique. II y aurait donc, a l'interieur de Pceuvre de Ponge une tentative pour reunir en une?non pas pour faire

dependre l'une de l'autre?les deux grandes methodes d'investigation."22 Thus Ponge is not afraid of words, nor basically distrustful of them: "... parce que les mots, fait bizarre, interessent les poetes plus encore

(c'est sensible) que les faiseurs de dictionnaires. Et peut-etre parce que tout le passe de la sensibilite et de la connaissance m'y semble inclus."23

His, at first, enigmatic "issue unique; parler contre les paroles" can

only, in the context of all his poetry, mean a poetic determination to use words in order to destroy their tyranny, to put a limit to the silent and

hermetic, to recreate Things (at first, and until the poet regains his confidence and moves forward to human models)24 by conjuring them in words. Thus he will begin again to know the physical universe from which the poet springs and to reestablish the poet's tool of language as

respectable and trustworthy in a literary world long in revolt against that tool.

The direct connection of the metaphysical overtones of Things with literature and the realm of poetic creation and expression becomes clearer, and is not as tenuous as it might have seemed at first. For since the artist's basic problem is one of communication?as was true of the symbolists and surrealists in their struggle with words and signs, so for the new materialism an immediate problem of expression or rhetoric imposes itself; "c'est quand nous nous enfoncons, nous aussi, dans notre matiere: les sons significatifs," says Ponge.25 It is Jean Paulhan (Les Fleurs de

Tarbes, Le Decryptement, A Demain la poesie)y despite his occasional

propensity toward errantry and an overworked epigrammatic style, who has best summed up in recent times the status of rhetoric from the critic's point of view. It seems clear that Paulhan is encouraging an end to verbal distrust and endless discussions about commonplaces, the

meaning of meaning and the bankruptcy of organized literary expression.

22 Cahiers du Sud, ccvc (1949), 481. 23 Ponge, "Texte sur l'&ectriciteV' p. 9. 24 Cf. Protmes, p. 161: "J'ai choisi alors le parti pris des choses. . . . Mais je ne vais pas

en rester la . . . c'est l'Homme qui est le but (Homme enfin devenu centaure, a force de se chevaucher lui-meme)."

25 Ponge, "Texte sur l'&ectriciteV' p. 15.




What he (and in general the NNRF reflects similar interests) is under-

writing is a return to what might be called classicism for lack of a better term.26 Again it is Ponge who furnishes corroboration that such is the inherent implication of a return to the material object as model and theme. "Rhetorique par objet (c'est a dire par poeme). La forme meme du poeme est en quelque sorte determinee par son sujet."27 Tortel sees this clearly in the conclusion of his article of Proemes: "Comment . . .

n'y pas voir [in Ponge's decision to talk against words] la definition, comme cristalisee, d'un art, d'un eflort: l'art volonte, le defi classiques. (Nous y revoila donc!)"28 Ponge himself says simply, continuing a remark

quoted above: "C'est a un homme simple que nous tendons. Blanc et

simple. Nouveau classicisme."29 If one passes to considerations other than vocabulary and style,

the use of the word classic finds equal justification. For whatever name one assigns to all the poetry from Baudelaire forward, it is essentially romantic if one sees, as one must, the individual at the center of the

poetic creation. Indeed we have been nurtured so long on poetry as the

expression?very personal and intimate?of the individual at grips with his own particular world, that the idea of calling upon the indifferent atoms?as Lucretius did?for the stuff of poetry seems strange and alien to us. Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Valery30 were all concerned, in their own way, with rising above the trite and stagnant of the so-called world of reality. Surrealism has no other goal. And yet, in various ways, they all worked from the particular and idiosyncratic of the individual

poet toward a more inclusive truth which assumed mystic and cosmic

26 That the term begs many a question and is capable of arousing much disagreement, I am quite aware. By classic, it seems to me, one must necessarily suggest "more tendencies in one direction than in another," just as by "romantic" one does not nicely delimit a metaphysic, a theme, and a style. Thus, my usage here approximates the scientific manner of delineating acidity-alkalinity on a sliding scale. G. E. Clancier, Panorama critique de Rim- baud au surrealisme (Paris: Seghers, 1953) would disagree because "on ne peut pourtant pas parler de classicisme a propos d'une poesie qui s'eleve en un temps tragique, au milieu d'un monde en ruines . . . et qui doit user d'un langage qui ne peut plus, depuis longtemps, etre le lieu commun des pensSes ou des sentiments d'une societe coherente." Thus Clancier, too intent on a purely sociological interpretation of classic tendencies, misses the whole novelty and interest of Ponge's experiment.

27 My Creative Method (a work of Ponge I have not seen), cited in Ponge's UAraignee (Paris: Aubier, 1952) in the introduction to the poem written by Georges Garampon, "F.P. ou la r&olution humaine." Garampon is himself close to Ponge, e.g., "Poemes en langue morte" in Esprit, x (1951), 498-500.

28 Cahiers du Sud, ccvc. 29 Protmes, p. 205. 30 For Ponge on Mallarmg, see Protmes, pp. 63-56: on Val6ry, p. 163. Rimbaud is men-

tioned frequently in Ponge's works, e.g., "II faut travailler a partir de la d&ouverte faite par Rimbaud et Lautr6amont (de la ngcessite* d'une nouvelle rh6torique)." My Creative Method, vide supra.



J. Robert Loy 39

proportions, hoping that an initiated few readers could follow them

eventually and complete the poetic communication. Here is where the

object-literature differs vitally. The poet, concentrating on the world of material objects at the start?even if this be simply an exercise in rhetoric?can progress only from that outer, inanimate, material docu- mentation to humanity in general and finally to the individual himself.

Through all this literature there is a pervading sense of loneliness, a

feeling of isolation not only from other men (which is not new) but from one's own personality, and from the exterior world.31 Yet the writers have made little attempt at identification of the human poet with the

object; Ponge's poem, VAraignee, is a first step in this direction.32 The

Things stand of themselves and by themselves; the artists are but eyes with words.

Clearly this new poet hopes eventually to arrive at some personal awareness of his cosmic position, but this will come as an end result, not as a beginning. The new understanding of the world remains, however, the reason for the literary work; one does not write a poem voluntarily, one studies objects in the hope that the result will be a poem. If it must

eventually be called non-poetry, that matters little.33 The writer of

Things is not classic in the generally accepted sense of the seventeenth

century, for he starts past human nature with objects, whereas the classic writers had made a fetish of the second step, or nature (as they called it) which was in essence historical human nature coaxed into the confines of a particular social organization. Yet he is consciously or unconsciously in revolt against romanticism under all its changing cloaks. If the

terminology is misleading, one must find some other term. There would be no new direction without romanticism,34 there could be no return to

objects without the surrealists who in many ways almost achieved this direction themselves, and would have, had they managed to limit their "revolution" and step out of their Freudian selves.35

31 There is no suggestion here, however, that the Pascalian situation of the human being has influenced these writers. On the contrary, most of them, like Ponge, are anti-Pascal. Cf. Protmes, p. 208. See also the article of Georges Mounin, "L'Anti-Pascal, ou la poesie et les vacances?Francis Ponge," Critique, xxxvn (1949), 493-500, despite its overworked political conclusion.

32 In this poem, Ponge is at once the spider and the poet describing the spider. In the introductory essay by Georges Garampon, Garampon's final word for the attempt Ponge makes to synthesize the object and the poet is "sympathy." "L'ceuvre de Francis Ponge procede d'un principe de sympathie."

33 Cf. Ponge, La Rage de Vexpression (Lausanne: Mermod, 1952), p. 12. 34 What Roland Barthes says {Critique, lxxxvi-lxxxvii, 587) of Robbe-Grillet applies to this whole discussion: "En somme, les opeYations descriptives de Robbe-Grillet peuvent se r6sumer ainsi: detruire Baudelaire sous un recours derisoire a Lamartine, et du meme coup, cela va sans dire, detruire Lamartine."

86 As Monnerot, La PoSsie moderne et le sacrS (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 145, puts it:




Hugo's revolution had aimed chiefly at fixed forms and the empty elegance of rhetoric, but he had been careful not to include syntax? "guerre a la rhetorique, et paix a la syntaxe." The surrealists, in their search for the honest revolutionized literature, had declared war on both. This was, of course, a great risk if not indeed impossible, for lan?

guage needs some frame?if not generally accepted, at least capable of communication and ultimate acceptance. The new writers are still in revolt against the world as it is, but they are conscious of the need for communication. That communication seems to start with the naming of material objects. The rest?all the wealth of the subconscious and

mythic?must come later, after the communication of description has been established.36 Iri speaking of Sartre, Bachelard calls attention to this naming. "II semble que les innommables, des qu'elles sont retenues

par Pinconscient, cherchent sans fin un nom. D'avoir nomme un instant ventre ce qui etait banquette, cela a suffi pour faire sortir de Pinconscient des bouffees d'affectivite."37 But the Sartre passage of which Bachelard

speaks has already drawn on a secondary form of naming, the symbol. The writer of objects?seemingly fearful of the jump from object to

symbol?prefers for the moment to call a spade a spade, a banquette a

banquette, and a stone a stone. Picon, speaking of new directions in

poetry without mentioning the Things in that poetry, sums up well the difference: "Cette poesie est au lyrisme et au symbolisme ce que le recit de

reportage est au roman d'imagination. Passage de la psychologie a la

metaphysique, de Pimagination au reportage pour le roman; du lyrisme au realisme ou a la mythologie pour le poeme, c'est toujours le meme

passage: celui du subjectif a Pobjectif. . . . II ne s'agit plus d'annexer le reel a la poesie, mais d'annexer la poesie au reel."38

It would be helpful to be able to attach some identifiable name to the direction. Descriptionism? Reism?39 But terms are, at best, confusing

"Us [the surrealists] ont accepte que l'inconscient fut quelque chose d'homogene, alors qu'une propriete toute nggative le definit."

36 Cf. in Ponge, "Texte sur l'electricit6," the recurring and perhaps overdone phrase "Est-ce clair? Je crois que c'est clair."

37 La Terre et les reveries du repos, p. 169. 38 Panorama de la nouvelle UtUrature franqaise (Paris: Le Point du jour, 1951), p. 151. 39 Reism is the term chosen by Yvan Goll for a manifesto on poetry. First in his Masque

de cendre (1945) and later in the Manifesto of Reism, he seems very close to the kind of direction towards Things under discussion. "Surgie du Verbe seul, la po6sie reste dans le domaine de la rh6torique, de la grammaire, de Partifice cr6e par l'homme lui-m6me. 'Au commencement 6tait le Verbe?' Le r&ste dira plut6t: 'A la fin 6tait le Verbe,' apres unelongue et patiente mStamorphose qui dans le poete ou l'artiste, transforme l'objet en Verbe, en ceuvre d'art." The term as used here, and as I understand it, must not be confused with the much-discussed riification, which, although sharing perhaps some common points of insistence on materialism with our discussion of Things, is a much stronger and broader concept with psychological and political overtones, and lacks the humanisra we have



J. Robert Loy 41

and there is no movement. There is a trend, unless this survey has

jumped too quickly to conclusions, a trend which this study, in no way, holds to be unique or undeniably dominant. And there is a new kind of writer who has subjected the "homme revolte" to the talker and artisan in words. Here is how Ponge puts it: "Je ne peux m'expliquer rien au monde que d'une seule facon: par le desespoir. Dans ce monde

que je ne comprends pas, dont je ne peux rien admettre, ou je ne peux rien admettre, ou je ne peux rien desirer . . . , je suis oblige a une certaine tenue. . . . Je ne rebonderai jamais que dans la pose du revolutionnaire ou du poete."40

It would seem that the poet had won out, not because the revolte was unnecessary in his training, but because the revolution had led to an

impasse of fear, distrust, and isolation. It would be a mistake to call the new direction popular,41 but it would be equally wrong not to see that it is interested in communicating. The poetic world of the individual mind in isolation becomes eventually sterile. "L'esprit," says Ponge, "dont on peut dire qu'il s'abime d'abord aux choses (qui ne sont que riens) dans leur contemplation, renait par la nomination de leurs qualit6s telles que lorsqu'au lieu de lui ce sont elles qui les proposent."42 The

reacquaintance with Things is the fond, the naming of their qualities is the forme which aims to make the written word respectable. Ponge's outcry in Proemes makes his mission clear: "Le Verbe est Dieu! Je suis le Verbe! II n'y a que le Verbe!" The representatives of the new trend

encourage a tentative, but fundamental and significant, change in the

aphorism of Saint John. "In the beginning was the Thing, and the Word was in Things, and the Word was with Man"?and therein lies

perhaps a hopeful, at least a refreshing direction for literature.

University of Vermont

Burlington

attempted to read into a literature like Ponge's. Cf. the article by Joseph Gabel, "La R&fication," Esprit, x (1951), 459-482.

40 Protmes, pp. 105-107. 41 It would be equally a mistake to equate the movement with political sentiment. Ponge,

in his most recent "Texte sur FSlectriciteY' p. 17, where more than a little preciosity begins to show through, says: "Les architectes, comme les poetes, sont des artistes. En tant que tels, ils voient les choses dans FSternite' plus que dans le temporel. Pratiquement, ils se d?fient de la mode. Je parle des meilleurs d'entre eux."

42 Proemes, p. 117.



Documents

J. Robert Loy_Things in Recent French Literature