THE IMMOBILE VOYAGE: TEXTUAL MOVEMENTS IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH- LANGUAGE POETRY BY ADELE E. PARKER B.A., UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 1990 M.A., SUNY BINGHAMTON, 1997 M.A., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2003 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2008 © Copyright 2008 by Adele Eleanor Parker VITA Adele Parker was born on August 22, 1965, in Jacksonville, Florida. After spending three semesters at Bryn Mawr College, she received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1990 with a double major in Women’s Studies and French. Subsequently she attended the State University of New York at Binghamton for her M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Certificate in Translation, and was awarded Most Promising Translator. While at Brown she taught French language and was the first Helena Rubinstein intern at differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. She has published in Postmodern Culture and The Journal of Caribbean Studies as well as in The War Body on Screen (Continuum, 2008). From 2006-07 Adele was Visiting Lecturer at Colby College and held the same position the following year at the College of the Holy Cross, where she is now Visiting Assistant Professor. Her dissertation “The Immobile Voyage: Textual Movements in Contemporary French-Language Poetry” focuses on postmodern poetry. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Given that I privilege the collaborative aspect of textual meaning, I would be remiss if I did not thank all those who made writing this dissertation possible, though I may inadvertently leave some out. I would like to thank my committee, first of all my advisor Sanda Golopentia, whose intellectual generosity and incisive comments went a long way in shaping this work. Gretchen Schultz has been an ally and a perspicacious reader. Glenn Fetzer proved a lifesaver, stepping in as third reader at the last minute with insightful comments and encouraging words. Thanks also go to Michael Bishop for his kindness and for the inspiration his work has been. My gratitude extends to the Department of French Studies and to the Graduate School, for their support financial and otherwise. I wish to thank the professors of the department, in particular those with whom I have worked—Réda Bensmaia, Michel-André Bossy, Virginia Krause, Pierre Saint-Amand, Lewis Seifert—and who have influenced my thinking more than they may know. Thanks also go to my fellow graduate students for their comradeship over the years, most especially to my friends Shahrzad, Claudia, Sharon, Meadow, Sandra and Heidi. A note of appreciation goes to Barbara Bennett at the Graduate School for the last-minute save. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Marilyn Gaddis Rose for her important mentoring early in my career. Special thanks go to Stephenie Young for being a great friend and a source of inspiration. Deep gratitude goes to Theo Green, for quiet counsel, as well as to the rest of my family—David, Gini, Jonah, Gideon, Cameron, Bart, Rita, Laura, Aaron—for their indispensable love and encouragement, and especially to my mother Yvonne, who first took me to France, and to whom this dissertation is dedicated. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Tracing a Path to the World 1 CHAPTER ONE Jacqueline Risset 20 Je(u)/I 43 Jeu/Play 45 Time and Space 47 Sections and Epigraphs 49 Later Work 63 CHAPTER TWO The Pulse of Absence in Anne Teyssiéras 65 Context 66 Ars poetica 69 Pulse 70 Subject(s) 73 Poet / Reader, Poet / Poem 76 Presence / Absence 78 Science / Myth 88 Masculine / Feminine 93 Being / Becoming 95 vi CHAPTER THREE Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Accumulation 99 The Context of Martinique 105 European Influences 115 Intersubjectivity: Opacity and Community 121 Poetry and Nation 124 CHAPTER FOUR Gaston Miron: The Journey Out 133 From French Canada to Quebec 135 Authentic Speech: Québécanthrope or Compagnon des Amériques? 143 Influences 148 L’homme rapaillé, or l’homme rapiécé 151 Expansion 154 Un homme à tout faire 164 CONCLUSION 166 BIBLIOGRAPHY 176 vii INTRODUCTION Tracing a Path to the World “No straight arrows fly from crisis to solution by means of the language of poetry.”1 A straight arrow is indeed the least likely metaphor for the work of poetic language, by any definition an indirect, allusive, elusive discourse. The term “immobile voyage” in my title is more than a simple metaphor for the sedentary reader or writer being carried away by imagination. “Immobile” refers to the increasingly prevalent notion that no final destination is reached by, in, or with a poem. It is the journey, the poem as activity, that matters, and not a completed cohesive message that must be delivered. Never arriving, or else always beginning again, are common tropes. There has been a “shift […] from the poem as point of origin to recognition of the poem as being in process in its reading” (Easthope vii). Thus reading is part of the act of poetry, which is a sustained movement toward wholeness, toward presence. The immobile voyage may be described as a journey of discovery or a quest for the writer, which the reader follows, albeit making her own detours and divagations. Syntactic function positions words in continual movement toward the real, which prevents stagnation of a finite system of signs. So the writer, like the reader, moves toward the other, toward the external world, within the borders of a world of her own making, within view of her own horizon. The import lies in the interaction between the 1 Michael Bishop, The Language of Poetry, p. 4. 1 2 poet's consciousness and the world and the impact of that relation on the relation between reader and world. The principal way this occurs is through textual movement at play in the rhythms and structures of a text, manifest syntactically, semantically, and thematically. Movement is traditionally central to poetry in the sense that rhythm and rhyme-- both dependent on repetition--have always been cornerstones of lyric.2 Movement is central to human perception insofar as we tend to think in spatial and orientational metaphors, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have pointed out; our conceptual and cognitive processes are generally metaphorical in nature.3 With conceptual frameworks such as ‘happy is up’ and ‘sad is down,’ metaphors and other spatially and kinetically oriented figures convey affective content that is experienced at a subconscious level. Textual movement acts in a similar way, making itself felt and thus communicating crucial information about the message of the text, about the writer and the writer's horizon. My dissertation follows the movements expressed in four poets: Jacqueline Risset and Anne Teyssiéras, both from continental France, Edouard Glissant of Martinique, and Gaston Miron, from Quebec. All four poets see poetry as intimately tied to questions of being and knowing. My choice of these four allows me to study a sampling of textual movements generated by poets of differing identities in different contexts, while at the same time finding similarities among operations of poetic language. Jacqueline Risset’s circularity in writing about writing, while conveying what is at work 2 I was reminded of this important connection by Glenn Fetzer's paper "Contrepoints rythmiques et sonores chez Jean-Michel Espitallier et Lorand Gaspar" (MLA Convention, Philadelphia, Dec. 2006). 3 The Greek etymology of the word ‘metaphor’ is of course to transfer, to carry across; metaphors themselves transfer meaning from one term to another. The sense of movement is highlighted in Paul Ricoeur's description: “On the one hand, [...] the metaphorical utterance reproduces the form of a movement in a portion of the trajectory of meaning that goes beyond the familiar referential field where the meaning is already constituted. On the other hand, it brings an unknown referential field towards language, and within the ambit of this field the semantic aim functions and unfolds” (Rule 299). 3 in écriture, generates a movement of return that opens up a space within which to meditate on choices and what is at stake in making them. Anne Teyssiéras writes that “Le génie est de savoir tout sacrifier au mouvement” (Clavicules), indicating a commitment to the primacy of movement, to giving oneself over to a vital force—pulsation. For Edouard Glissant, “L’accumulation est la technique la plus appropriée de dévoilement d’une réalité qui elle-même s’éparpille” (Discours 17), the reality that is the diffuse history of the Caribbean. Gaston Miron’s expansive ‘march to love’ traces a radius from the singular to the collective in a bid for wholeness. This study undertakes to examine, within a hermeneutical and phenomenological framework, how these movements offer experiential constructs for affective and cognitive reactions to and engagement with poetic language and with the writer's own history. These are not the best-known poets of French expression, not poets that one is likely to casually encounter in an anthology. Nor are they the easiest, and it is precisely their difficulty that I find most compelling. The difficulty here may vary in kind and degree, but it has common a basis in resistance to easy answers and easy questions fostered by a life lived outside of a literary or linguistic mainstream. If Mallarmé’s difficulty was occasioned by a search for symbols that would convey impressions of a most personal nature, these four poets, while their modes of expression present their thought processes in a way that could only be called personal, are also inspired by a more global and objective project. The poetic act is meant to “à partir du langage, [...] instaurer avec autrui une relation qui englobe le monde” (Doumet 17).