Bonnefoy in the Arrière-pays

We have seen Bonnefoy adopt a stance of ethical hope on the question of poetic utterance. The subject of poetic work emerges within a deficit of relation and is established in the renewed attempt at such relation in language. Bonnefoy's construction of experience participates in a comparable effort. He seeks to salvage the conditions of possibility of a certain mental reality — keeping in focus a structure of experience while renouncing practically all of its existing mythical underpinnings. His is the quintessential double bind of the latecomer whose perspective must accommodate a fully critical awareness with an appreciation of the value and fragility of communicative forms. This involves the writing subject in a complex ongoing balancing act across the spectrum of poetic work — as Daniel Leuwers has remarked, '[l]'œuvre d'Yves Bonnefoy se présente comme un massif a la recherche constante de sa cohérence'. ¹ The tensions internal to the dream of dynamic stability or homeostasis, which could be thought to characterize Bonnefoy's construction of the poetic across his oeuvre, exert constant pressures on the formulation of the scene of experience. The lieu becomes here the name of that scene in which experience can be reflected upon in relation to poetry. For Bonnefoy, the exemplary lieu is first of all a reminder rather than a transformation of the terms of this 'problem':

C'est la vertu des terres nues et des ruines qu'elles enseignent qu'affirmer est un devoir absolu. [. . .] Voici le monde sensible. Il faut que la parole, ce sixième et ce plus haut sens, se porte à sa rencontre et en déchiffre les signes. [. . .] Voici ce monde sensible. [. . .] Je dirai qu'il est loin de nous comme une ville interdite. Mais je dirai aussi qu'il est en chacun de nous comme une ville possible. ²

At the core of the construction of experience there appears again, after Segalen and Daumal, an imperative of speech. However, both earlier poets, in very different ways, set the site of poetic experience in an apparently inaccessible place. Their Utopian narratives experience the space of actual speech as profane, and this profanity as somehow fallen. Bonnefoy redefines the question in openly situating this deferral within the interpretative intelligence of the subject. Language itself is seen as a dimension of human experience. The immediate is what proves both most elusive and most relevant to poetic utterance because it is the ever-present reminder of both the enabling and the limiting effects of that linguistic dimension. The scene of poetic experience becomes a virtuality of all situations of the subject. The immediate is the frontier between reality (the order of things in which the projections of language collaborate) and the real:

Disons que le réel, c'est l'arbre comme on le voit avant que notre intellect nous dise que c'est un arbre; ou ces dilatations lentes de la nuée, ces reserrements et déchirements dans le sable de sa couleur qui défient le pouvoir des mots. ³

Poetic speech for Bonnefoy is an utterance alive to this limit of language. 158Unmediated experience is, for him, what undermines all constructions of the intellect. Yet the first quoted extract above, from Les Tombeaux de Ravenne, in its mildly lyrical prose, actually places 'parole' among the senses. Parole is the utterance adequate to all dimensions of its human context, and which is at the same time a de-'conceptualization' of language use. Meta-discursively, parole identifies for the subject that which is both an objective and an end to an intellectual rapport with language:

Le passage du réel à l'objet, qui est une aliénation, et les moyens qui sont laissés à l'homme de notre temps pour surmonter cette aliénation, voilà ce qui me paraît le sujet de réflexion le plus important aujourd'hui pour une conscience déterminée par la poésie[.] ⁴

The world is proffered to the poet as an open continuity and in the guise of the multiple, rather than in the completeness of the analytic terms through which one might attempt to imagine and convey a generality of such experience. Parole inhabits the register of what remains non-amenable to the pre-ordained categories of a discourse of experience. It designates within language the most elemental intimation of being in the world. ⁵ Signifying a reality principle of a kind, it at the same time instigates a principle of vitality — a dynamic — which attempts to save the speaker from the reifying powers of language-become-system. In seeking to be adequate to experience the poetic utterance is thus required to confront the temptation of its own linguistic properties. ⁶ The preferred objects of experience in parole for Bonnefoy, the objects and sets of relations that retain his gaze as a poet, manifest an analogical sympathy with this openness. They are objects and orders that signify their refusal of such status:

La feuille entière, bâtissant son essence immuable de toutes ses nervures, serait déjà le concept. Mais cette feuille brisée, verte et noire, salie, cette feuille qui montre dans sa blessure toute la profondeur de ce qui est, cette feuille infinie est présence pure, et par conséquent mon salut. ⁷

The rejection of a hypothetical purity of the mind working towards the idea, and the consequently saving quality of linguistic humility, assume a quasi-theological value in Bonnefoy's writings. Poetic utterance must achieve a kind of purity in and through impurity. The consequences for an evolution of the utopian dynamic are important. A dialectics of perfectibility-imperfection is set around by the criterion of adequacy to a human situation fully embraced. The optimum towards which this poetics continually gestures can thus retain all of its structurally utopian characteristics even as it rejects the idea of a first-order perfection that typically besets and impairs the notion of utopia. Hence the recurrent effect in Bonnefoy's writing of the persistence of constructs or objects of consciousness within their surpassing or opposite — the feeling of an ironic, self-restraining will underlying the desire for affirmation. The principle of a superior unity in incompleteness, in the face of the evidence of death, retaining a quasi-religious tonality in an oeuvre which is at pains to distance itself from any affiliation in that direction, informs the selection and recognition of the poetic experience. But it is also a move that consistently surfaces in Bonnefoy's reflection on the artwork itself, and on the 159condition of the subject in its pursuit. It is one that is evident, for example, in the second of Bonnefoy's sequences on the figure of the painter Zeuxis, written thirty years after Les Tombeaux de Ravenne, where we are made privy to the thoughts of what is perhaps the major personification of the artist in his oeuvre:

Dieu n'avait fait qu'ébaucher le monde. Il n'y avait laissé que des ruines. [. . .] Seule la lumière a eu vie pleine peut-être, Se dit-il. Et c'est pour cela qu'elle semble simple, et incréée. — Depuis, il n'aime plus, dans l'œuvre des peintres, que les ébauches, Le trait qui se ferme sur soi lui semble trahir la cause de ce dieu qui a préféré l'angoisse de la recherche à la joie de l'œuvre accomplie. ⁸

The figure or name of ultimate closure is thus conscripted into an ongoing renunciation of that quality as an aspiration for art. The world, in the unquiet eye of both the artist and his god, is the meeting of ruins (that is, forms haunted by the question of their own impermanence) and the 'medium' of their becoming apparent (lumière). The medium itself has become the means of thinking the ruin in its incompleteness ('seule la lumière a eu vie pleine'). Only language would appear to have the potential to rival this pre-eminent element. The perspective of the ruin has consequences for the poetic response to the imperative of action, for the 'act' of presence and the 'act' of parole within Bonnefoy's meaning. It moulds, and in so doing occludes, the decisional dimension of the entry into poetic work.