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Two Approaches to anIntangible: Jules Supervielle:Jules SupervielleMichel Benamoua

a Dartmouth CollegePublished online: 06 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Michel Benamou (1962) Two Approaches to an Intangible: JulesSupervielle: Jules Supervielle, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures,16:4, 307-310, DOI: 10.1080/00397709.1962.10732750

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00397709.1962.10732750

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TWO APPROACHES TO AN INTANGIBLE: JULES SUPERVIELLE

TATIANA W. GREENE: Jules Supervielle. Geneve, Droz, 195 8. 439 pp.DOROTHY S. BLAIR: Jules Supervielle. Oxford, Blackwell, 1960. 186 pp.

THE RECOGNITION of Jules Supervielle as a major twentieth-century poet isunder way. This is made clear by several publications. The last Octoberissue of La nOllVelle revue jra1lfaise} having the hurried quality of a posthumoushomage, would not normally be counted as evidence, except that it containedexcerpts from other such homages in the French press. In addition, it hadarticles by the lucid critics Maurice Blanchet and Georges Poulet. These areworth reading because they shatter the generally held view that Supervielleis a gentle, harmless, and shallow poet. Both Poulet and Blanchot pickedout his "oublieuse memoire" as the generating center of his poetry. Theyshow him, the orphaned traveler, as obsessed by memory lapses. Who am I?Forgetfulness engulfs our past, our origins, our identity. Hence the constantquestioning, a stylistic feature otherwise meaningless:

Je suis celui quiParlait tout a l'heureSuis-je encore celuiQui parle apresent?(Plein Ciel)

Poulet stresses the anguish of the quest, both in time and in space. Forget­fulness makes a vacuum within, a vertiginous inner ocean, correspondingwith the outer one:

Comme je me vois de loin IJe ne suis qu'un frHe pointQui bat vite et qui respireSur l'eau profonde entourante(Nuit en moi, nuit au dehors)

The poetic image, in rare moments of self recollection, assumes ontologicalimportance, since it alone can bridge the distance and establish the identityof the poet's self.

This obviously partial interpretation is nonetheless stimulating. It does notpreclude the connivance of the poet with the outside world-an importantaspect of Supervielle's poetry-but reserves it as a "happy ending."Forgetfulness eventually yields to the omnipresence of the poet in theworld. Maurice Blanchot also chose "forgetful memory" as his theme,insisting more than Poulet on the creativity of forgetfulness: it is deep,while memories are at the surface. Another reason for ascribing poetic valueto forgetfulness might be that it fosters the metamorphoses of dim recollec­tions. One turns into another: "L'un efface l'autre/Et change en montant'(Plein Ciel). And Blanchot's conclusion that Supervielle remembered forget-

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tingly throws light on the somewhat loose concatenation of imagery in someof his best poems. The total effect of these two articles in La nouvelle revuefra"faise is a fresh insight into the philosophical aspects of Supervielle's style.But is the style itself worthy of attention?

This is the question ably answered by Tatiana Greene's book, whichfollows, by and large, a stylistic approach. It is a definitive study, extremelywell written in excellent French. The completeness of Mrs. Greene's treat­ment-the book was written as a Ph. D. thesis at Columbia University­might at times seem a little ponderous, but this is offset by a nearly infalliblesensitivity. Adhering to Jean Hytier's distinction between theme andpretexts, and using Pedro Salinas' terminology of theme and subthemes,the author disengages the central sentiment of Supervielle's poetry, anguish,from the tributary themes of death, night, love, God, etc.

This result, which is in agreement with the result of philosophical analysis,is due to critical awareness as much as to literary instinct. The thematiccoverage is completed by a study of Supervielle's vocabulary according toPierre Guiraud's statistic method. Very properly, the author does not hideher doubts about the value of her painstaking word-count. It is a tool forthe diagnosis investigation. But then this in tum forces her to repeat undersymbols notions already studied as themes: for instance "la mort" on page 45and "les morts" on page 102 are related thematically by fear or acceptance.On the other hand much benefit could be derived from grammatical ratherthan semantic statistics: the proportions of adjectives, nouns, verbs, andbound forms, etc. (The high proportion of unique singulars in Mallarmecontrasting with the debauch of plurals in Rimbaud indicates oppositevisions.) All depends on whether the statistics were programmed stylisticallyor not.

Mrs. Greene's treatment of Supervielle's imagery is by far the mostoriginal and enlightening part of her book. It gives a key to the structureof the poet's imagination, because it classifies the modes of association:the exchange of abstract with concrete, of time with space (this reinforcesGeorges Poulet's analysis), of dream and wakefulness, inner and outer. It iscorrectly assumed that the characteristic "glide" between images is morea psychic than an artistic problem: is not this glide due to the "oublieusememoire P" This unifying theme reappears in Mrs. Greene's seventh typeof images, "variations de la nature du sentiment de son identite." Here,esthetics lets psychology-with Ribot's theory of depersonalization-takeover entirely. In spite of this momentary lapse in the point of view, we aregrateful for a vital insight. Although short, the section devoted toSupervielle's rich variety of stanzaic forms, metre, and sound effects isconvincing, a rare quality in that domain of non-objectivity.

The next three chapters deal separately with Supervielle's poems, novelsand stories, and plays from the standpoint of the evolution of his matterand manner through three periods: formation (19°1-1919), rise to originality(1920-1938), and humanitarianism (1938-1960). In view of the precedingstylistic treatment this generic approach was necessary. It is most useful forthe drama, the least studied part of the poet's works. It is abundandycomplemented with precise data as well as references to other works, either

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by Supervielle or modern dramatists, underscoring his profound originality.In contrast, a last chapter multiplies "echoes and affinities," citing at least 17possible such: too many to matter. One should take note, however, ofBecquer and other Hispanic influences. Jean Le Louet, in the issue of NRFmentioned earlier, also points out Spanish affinities, which pervade the lastbook of poems published by Supervielle, Le Corps Tragiqlle (1960) withtranslations of Lorca and Jorge Guillen. Thanks to more than 120 pagesof Appendices, Mrs. Greene's book is also a source of primary material:variants to all the poems, with commentaries on the changes, lists ofkeywords, chronologically arranged excerpts from critics, a few letters fromSupervielle, and the most complete bibliography to date. In summaryMrs. Greene's book is scholarship at its best: thorough yet selective,methodi­cal yet sensitive, and respectful ofproportions.

Unequal in size, Dorothy S. Blair's Jllies SlIperoielle, a Modern Fablliist,was written prior to 1958 but published in 1960. As a trimmed-down Ph. D.thesis (University of Witwatersand) it has no claim as a scholarly instrument,but it reads elegantly as an introduction to Supervielle's poetic universe.

The author's knowledge of Supervillian geography is quite impressive.Her primary dimension is space: hence the unfair impression of a travelogue.But she rightly emphasizes the influence of Supervielle's wanderings on hispoetry and succeeds in fitting together biography and literary creation. Theapproach is at first through the themes, and the method, visible in thedivisions of each chapter, is to organize this world of the poems topically:mountains, space, time, the body, the world without, etc. It is an exhaustivecensus: in the body, the limbs, the bones, the nerves (each time withinteresting quotes), the hands, the heart, the soul ... At this last item, theauthor stops in critical self-awareness to acknowledge that "Supervielle'simagery is far too illusive [sic] to be card-indexed in clearly definedcategories ... How is one to classify the image of the soul?" But in the nextparagraph we find "A third classification of Supervielle's imagery of thesoul ...."It seems a serious drawback in a study of a poet's "fonctionfabulatrice" to treat his imagination as a container of images instead of thedynamic producer of images. The result is to falsify the proportions withinhis creative center. The vital theme of his quest for identity is put on a parwith secondary themes, such as love or "kinship with the world without."This does not mean Mrs. Blair did not see the relationship. She keenlyremarks that "the lyric. poet, obsessed with his own solitude, searchingfor a point of union between his inner universe and the world around him"is looking for security. Bnt this insight is lost in hierarchies of "the worldwithout."

In chapter six, after enumerating some of the sixty species of animals­counted with British enthusiasm by Professor Orr-which "people"Supervielle's dreamland, a sense of travel-weariness is again half expressed:"we see that Supervielle's bestiary is, in fact, limitless." The reason is in the"passage clandestin" from one species to another. "Supervielle in Wonder­land," the next chapter, depicts these metamorphoses. Mrs. Blair refers thereader to "the time-honoured mythology of classical metamorphosis" and

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"legendary monsters of mythology old and new," but he would welcomethe sort of help given by modern archetypal criticism. Failing to distinguishbetween fable and myth-the Littre definition is insufficient-the ensuinganalysis goes through "undeveloped images," "embryo fables," "deathsymbols," "the theme of the personification of mountains," and "themythology of illness." Yet for all its vague terminology, this chapter seventantalizes the reader more than any other. It is the center of Mrs. Blair's book.

In conclusion, one may raise the question of the usefulness of studies ofa poet's imagination which take building blocks from the edifice of eachpoem in order to reconstruct a "poetic universe" apart from the poetry.Especially with a "clear" poet, as Supervielle strove to be, such work isbetter approached from the generating center, if it can be found beneaththe surface. The two stumbling blocks on the path of Supervielle's recogni­tion are prejudices about his style-too transparent, not surprising enough-and his themes-innocuous in appearance. Mrs. Greene's book hasremoved the former, and Georges Poulet's article, together with Mrs. Blair'sstudy, have removed the latter. With the latest study, by Etiemble, ofSupervielle's human measure (Jules Supertlie//e, Gallimard 1960), a morecomplete picture emerges: that of fear and darkness mastered by poetry.

Dartmouth College MICHEL BENAMOU

JOSEPH CHURCH: Language and the Discovery of Reality. New York, RandomHouse, 1961. Z4S pp.

THE RISE of intense interest of late in psycholinguistics, that still amorphousdiscipline which is the rapprochement between psychology and linguistics,can only be all the more heightened by Church's book which elucidates,without committing the sin of popularizing, this dense area in such a fashionas to make it accessible even to the non-specialist. Church's language andstyle are pleasantly imaginative but deceptively simple. His solid scholarshipis immediately evident yet non-obtrusive.

Those interested in the psychology of language will find not only manyand diverse insights expressed in a succinct and terse manner, but willperhaps have also deepened their awareness of human behavior. Ourapperception of the overlapping of these two areas is frequently vague asChurch makes us appreciate with his sharp focus. This sharpness is all themore warmly accepted when contrasted with the first writings in this areaby Wundt at the turn of the century. All too often separate compartmentali­zation occurs and parallel tracks emerge from considerations on these areaswhich most certainly are not mutually exclusive.

This developmental psychology of cognition has two parts. Part Icomprises certain basic principles of the development of our cognitivefaculties in the preverbal stage. There is a description of the way in whichchildren come to understand and use language, the transformation of humanfunctioning and the behavior which follows. The possible cognitive opera­tions thus effected are explored at some length. Part II illuminates onepsychological approach to the problems of meaning and reference, con sid-

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