Transatlantica Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal

1 | 2016 Modernist Revolutions: American Poetry and the Paradigm of the New

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Modernist Revolutions: American Poetry and the Paradigm of the New

Introduction. Modernist Revolutions: American Poetry and the Paradigm of the New Clément Oudart

(Women Writing) The Modernist Line Cristanne Miller

“Radical”: Marianne Moore and the Revision of Modernism Aurore Clavier

Eliot’s Modernist Manifesto Viorica Patea

Beyond the American Difficult Poem: Paul Celan’s “Du liegst” Xavier Kalck

The Ongoing French Reception of the Objectivists Abigail Lang

The Open Boat and the Shipwreck of the Singular: American Poetry and the Democratic Ideal Elizabeth Willis

The Rhetoric of the Rearguard? Sincerity in Innovative American Poetics Nicholas Manning

Spectral Telepathy: the Late Style of Susan Howe Marjorie Perloff

Hors Thème

Fundamental Education: UNESCO and American Post-War Modernism Matthew Chambers

« Hair-oes » et « hair-oines » : les choix capillaires osés de John Neal, ou comment circonscrire l’Américain, entre poil dur et poil souple Sébastien Liagre

Tracer l’animal dans les nouvelles de Rick Bass Claire Cazajous-Augé

Actualités de la recherche

Conférence d’Emory Douglas, ancien ministre de la Culture des Black Panthers, peintre et illustrateur Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 16 octobre 2015 Alice Morin

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“The Cultures and Politics of Leisure in the British Isles & the United States” Université Paris-Sorbonne – November 6th-7th, 2015 Auréliane Narvaez and Sarah Leboime

Journée d’étude « Le témoin et l’écriture de l’histoire » Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, vendredi 29 janvier 2016 Jessica Jacquel

« Mobilisation(s) politique(s) des groupes ethno-raciaux dans l’Amérique d’Obama » Roman Vinadia

Colloque « Bible et Amériques du XIXe siècle à aujourd’hui : métamorphoses, diffractions et métissages de la Bible dans les Amériques » Université Bretagne Sud, Lorient, 28 avril 2016 Mariannick Guennec

International Ecopoetics Conference“Dwellings of Enchantment : Writing and Reenchanting the Earth” Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, June 22-25, 2016 Diane Deplante, Caroline Durand-Rous and Fanny Monnier

Fiction Rescues History: Don DeLillo Conference in Paris Paris Diderot University and Paris Sorbonne University, February 18th – 20th, 2016 Luca Ferrando Battistà, Maud Bougerol, Aliette Ventejoux, Béatrice Pire and Sarah Boulet

Les archives sonores de la poésie: production – conservation – utilisation 24-25 November 2016, Maison de la Recherche de Paris-Sorbonne Chris Mustazza

Journée d’étude « D’une crise à l’autre aux États-Unis (1929-2008) – Approches historiques et sociologiques des crises et des politiques sociales aux États-Unis » Université Paris-Diderot, 21 janvier 2016 Manuel Bocquier

Journée d’étude « Écritures féminines des diasporas asiatiques aux États-Unis » Université Bordeaux Montaigne, 1er avril 2016 Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni and Nelly Mok

International Conference “Staging American Bodies” Staging America – Seventh Annual International Conference, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, March 17-18, 2016 Yaël Pouffary

Recensions

Claude Le Fustec, Northrop Frye and American Fiction Robert D. Denham

Frédéric Dumas, Mark Twain : Tourisme et vanité Stéphanie Carrez

Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America Laure Gillot-Assayag

Nathalie Dessens et Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, dirs, Interculturalité: la Louisiane au carrefour des cultures Claire Parfait

Nama, Adilifu. Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino David Roche

Rebecca Walsh, The Geopoetics of Modernism Beci Carver

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Catherine COLLOMP, Résister au nazisme. Le Jewish Labor Committee, New York, 1934-1945 Annie Ousset-Krief

Revue Imaginaires n°19 « Pop Culture ! Les Cultures populaires aujourd’hui. » Nicolas Labarre

Stefani, Anne, Unlikely Dissenters: White Southern Women in the Fight for Racial Justice, 1920-1970 David Diallo

Anca Cristofovici & Barbara Montefalcone: Hands-on / Hands-0ff Susan Barbour

Reconnaissances

An Interview with Rick Bass Claire Cazajous-Augé

An Interview with Hollis Seamon Bordeaux, April 2016 Pascale Antolin

Trans'Arts

À rebours : Retour sur l’exposition de la collection de photographies de Sam Wagstaff au Getty Center à Los Angeles (15 mars - 31 juillet 2016) The Thrill of the Chase: The Wagstaff Collection of Photographs Isabella Seniuta

Francesca Woodman, « On Being an Angel » Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, du 11 mai au 31 juillet 2016 (commissaire Anna Tellgren) Juliette Melia

« As good as real » A propos de deux photographies de dioramas présentées dans l’exposition Le grand orchestre des animaux (Fondation Cartier, Paris, Juillet 2016-Janvier 2017) Camille Joseph

Western stories Arles 2016-2017, Les Rencontres de la photographie Chiara Salari

“For the benefit and enjoyment of the people”: from wilderness icons to National Geographic’s bear’s-eye views on the occasion of the National Park Service's 100th anniversary Chiara Salari

Review of Méliès to 3D: the Cinema Machine exhibition at the Cinémathèque de Paris (October 5th-January 29th, 2017) David Lipson

Passion Patchwork : l'étoffe de l'Amérique Adélaïde Desnoé

“Restructuring of Forms in American Patchwork” Exhibition “Once Upon a Quilt: America as a Patchwork,” Fondation des Etats-Unis, 2-26 octobre 2016 Marva Mercedes Dixon

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Revue de l’exposition The Color Line – Les artistes africains-américains et la ségrégation (1865-2016) Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac, Paris, 4 octobre 2016 – 15 janvier 2017 Églantine Morvant

La Peinture américaine des années 1930 Exposition du 12 octobre 2016 au 30 janvier 2017 au Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris Muriel Adrien

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Modernist Revolutions: American Poetry and the Paradigm of the New

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Introduction. Modernist Revolutions: American Poetry and the Paradigm of the New

Clément Oudart

‘Literature is news that STAYS news’ Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 1934

1 By bringing together such critical touchstones as Modernism, Revolution(s), and the New, this issue seeks to draw attention to one of the foundational mirages of the modernist experience, that of a clear-cut, definitive, history-bound Modernist revolution. Rather than engage in yet another attempt to pin down an ultimate definition or to settle the debate regarding the blurry timeframe of early, high, late (let alone post-) Modernism, the purpose of this issue is to revisit the modernists’ revolutionary claims and their vicissitudes through over a century of experimental writing. From the “cradle of modernism” (Rabaté, 2007)—with the 1913 New York Armory Show and the publication, arranged from London by Ezra Pound, of H.D.’s first Imagist poems in Chicago’s Poetry magazine—to the latest writings of, say, Susan Howe, the writing of innovative verse has gone through a bewildering sequence of movements, breaks, manifestoes and revolutions. To such an extent that one may wonder if the word revolution should not be understood literally and in the plural, as pointing less to the coming of age of a Marxian upheaval than to the planetary revolutions of a global poetic trend whose inherent obliquity prevents the perpetual return of the same and the paradoxical establishment of an ongoing “tradition of the new” (Rosenberg, 1959). Such debate about drastic change is unavoidably haunted by Eugene Jolas and his “Revolution of the Word” transition issue of 1929. His much-quoted “Proclamation” fostered the literary craftsman’s use of a dismantled syntax, along with the disintegration of pre-existing words and fashioning of a new, multilingual idiom, understood as the literary means for an intercontinental revolution. Reading modernism requires tackling the double bind of innovative writing: the resurgence of revolutionary claims and the new forms of the “New” in American poetry—both in the

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critical and creative arenas—from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries.

Pound’s Renovation or Make It New’s Old News

2 A key axiom of the modernist rhetoric of rupture seems to be predicated upon a multifaceted paradox, which in itself aptly encapsulates the tensions and contradictions underlying the modernist endeavor. The famous Poundian expression, an apparent injunction, is mostly remembered as a revolutionary call-to-arms (make it new!), or as the very definition of the task of the true poet (to make it new). Although the phrase is usually associated with the inaugural modernist moment, it mostly gained circulation owing to its visibility as the largely allusive and mostly misunderstood title of Pound’s collection of essays, published in London in 1934 and in the U.S. the following year. Yet the publication date signals that it had little to do with the incipient modernist breakthrough, or with any revolutionary call to action complete with an exclamation mark, as a misperception long maintained the idea. True, the book gathered essays written between 1908 and 1920, but as such came across as rather old news at the time of publication. Oddly enough, Make It New’s timing turns out to be rather off, both “too late” and “too early,” to paraphrase Guy Davenport,1 and either way the contents proved no match to what appeared—and indeed was chiefly mistaken —to be the claim on the wrapping.

Ezra Pound, Make It New, New Haven (CT), Yale UP, 1935

© Yale University Press

3 Under the banner of radical change, Pound mixes old and new critical material of his, from the oldest, “Date Line,” which he had written in Rapallo in 1912 and where he wryly confessed that “[i]t is impossible to deal with the whole question of education, ‘culture,’ paideuma, in one volume of literary criticism” (Make It New, 1934, 5), to various essays on the “Troubadours” (1913), “Arnaut Daniel” (1920), “Elizabethan Classicists” (1917-18), “Translators of Greek” (1918-19; 1920), “French Poets” (1918), “Cavalcanti” (1910/1931), Henry James (1918), Rémy de Gourmont (1920), and the much-quoted “A Stray Document,” originally entitled “A Retrospect” when published in 1918, made up of notes on poetics from the period 1908-1912, compiled with “A Few Don’ts” from 1913 and further notes from 1917. Ironically, then, most of the material published under the arresting headline (Make It New) was fifteen to twenty years old and circulated in small

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journals when selected for a reprint. Besides, in most essays Pound’s primary concern was to fashion a Western poetic canon in keeping with his increasingly reactionary values, to delineate a European, or rather a Romance tradition of master texts from the Medieval and Renaissance eras, rather than to expose his latest theory promoting a fresh –ism(e) (Symbolisme, Imagisme, Vorticism). Yet, as Michael North has forcefully argued in Novelty: A History of the New (2013), Pound’s own recycling of old material was indeed in accordance with the actual meaning of the phrase, and its complex genealogy: “when Pound chooses Make It New as the title for his collection of essays on the troubadours, Elizabethan classicists, and translators of Greek, he is being consistent with the tradition of cultural rediscovery and rebirth exemplified by the Italian Renaissance” (North, “The Making of ‘Make It New’”).

4 In Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), published the same year as the American edition of Make It New, Pound quotes the Ta Hio, one of the core books making up the doctrine of Confucianism, where the poet had found the original reference. In a passage entitled “King Tching T’ang on Government. Part of the inscription on the king’s bath-tub cited by Kung in the Ta Hio II. I.,” Pound wrote: “One should respect intelligence, ‘the luminous principle of reason,’ the faculties of others, one should look to a constant renovation.//‘Make it new, make it new as the young grass shoot’” (28). The Confucian philosophy and its faith in organic renewal (re-novation) is now warped by Pound’s reading ancient wisdom through a Fascist lens.

Title page of Make It New, London, Faber, 1934. © Faber and Faber

Image courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

5 The two Chinese ideograms inscribed on the title page of Make It New, transcribed as hsin et jih following Fenollosa’s system in The Cantos (265), designate on the one hand

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the process of destruction and purification, namely vegetal regeneration, and on the other the sun, day and renewal (“to put away old habits, the daily increase of plants, improve the state of, restore”): “The first ideogram (on the right) shows the fascist axe for the clearing away of rubbish (left half) the tree, organic vegetable renewal. The second ideograph is the sun sign, day, ‘renovate, day by day renew’” (Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 20). Rather than innovation, Pound actually praises renovation. Rather than revolution, restoration. The language of Fascism and the rhetoric of reaction henceforth recover the original Confucian thought.

6 It wasn’t until the publication of his Cantos LII-LXI (1940), a cycle known as the Chinese History Cantos that Ezra Pound acknowledged the source of his catchphrase more specifically when chronicling the life of China’s great emperors:

7 Canto LIII opens with the “First Dinasty hia” before moving on to “Tching Tang of Chang” (1766-53 BC), who, according to Confucius, had inscribed the motto on his washbasin or bathtub. Pound knew the Ta Hio by Confucius through Victorian sinologist James Legge, who translated the phrase as “If you can one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation.” Pound was implementing what he exhorted his readers to do: “cut the underbrush, / pile the logs / keep it growing” are in Pound’s mind the ideogrammic components assembled in the character xin or hsin 新 (“new”): an axe 斤, logs 木, and growth 立. Through his practice of ideogrammic distortion or mistranslation, Pound not only altered Legge’s original English translation, he also made up a new understanding of the Chinese language and created a new method for composing poetry. As Michael North explains, Pound started providing a scrupulously warped vision of the Confucian tenet to adapt it artificially to the modern Mussolinian travesty of “continuous revolution”: It was Pound’s own inventiveness that associated the ancient Chinese hatchet with the Fascist axe and his own increasingly vindictive hatred of complications that provided the rubbish, which is not present in the Chinese original. Pound had in fact taken his slogan quite a way from its Chinese origins, which emphasized the necessity of self- renewal, not the forced renewal of others, and he had removed it even farther from any association with avant-garde agitation. (North, “The Making of ‘Make It New’”)

8 Interestingly, though, Pound also discovered the Ta Hio by way of the French translation he owned by M. G. Pauthier, Confucius et Mencius: Les quatre livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine (1858), and which translated the phrase as: “Renouvelle-toi complètement chaque jour; fais-le de nouveau, encore de nouveau, et toujours de nouveau.” When Pound published his own translation of Confucius as Ta Hio: The Great Learning, Newly Rendered into the American Language (1928), he translated the motto from Pauthier’s French as: “Renovate, dod gast you, renovate!” He therefore steered away from a more literal translation of Pauthier’s French, but supplied a more straightforward translation in a footnote: “renew thyself daily, utterly, make it new and again new, make it new.” It is in this footnote, then, that the phrase “make it new”

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appears for the first time. And it is rather fascinating that it should directly stem from a mistranslation of “fais-le de nouveau,” which, if rendered correctly as “do it anew,” would have dramatically changed the literary history of Modernism. Michael North comments on the influence of Pound’s mistake on the history of modernism: Moreover, “make it new” seems to remove the reflexive sense present in all these translations and thus to turn the aphorism away from its obvious topic of self- renovation. But Pound is clearly a little transfixed by the italicized nouveau, attracted to it, and oblivious to the possibility that its force might not be augmented but rather diluted by repetition. (North, “The Making of ‘Make It New’”)

9 In short, what the text meant and what Pound should have translated was: Make Yourself New, Utterly, Every Day (do it anew, and anew, and anew). Of tremendous significance is the fact that Pound never used the phrase “make it new” without the two ideograms he associated with it (hsin and jih), whether on the title page of Make It New, in his translation of the Ta Hio, in Jefferson and/or Mussolini or in Canto LIII. The phrase was never used as a catchphrase removed from its Chinese context, wrenched from its ancient philosophical and linguistic roots, which definitely gave his concept of novelty its fullness of meaning. Of course, and quite fittingly somehow, the critical fortune enjoyed by the phrase from the 1950s onward added layers of distortion and recycling to this very old idea of the new.

新日日新: “make it noo”?

10 All in all, “make it new” is a key phrase that is useful to understand Modernism, but for other reasons than usually expected. To sum up Michael North’s line of thought, it is interesting because it wasn’t Pound’s—or new—at all, but was most ancient, and utterly unoriginal,2 since the idea first appeared in a Confucian text; because it had initially nothing to do with art but consisted in encouraging political rulers to keep their principles fresh; because it involved self-renewal and was no injunction or exhortation, certainly not to urge others to produce original art; because the phrase derives from a misreading, from a willful mistranslation of a (French) translation of the original Chinese characters; because it also has an eerie antecedent in the Biblical language of the New Testament, especially Revelation 21:5, which promises, “Behold, I make all things new.” The reception and growing circulation of the phrase in critical discourse is also noteworthy. First, when Pound suggested the phrase for the title of his essay collection, T.S. Eliot warned Pound that Faber was not “altogether happy about [his] new title make it noo [sic] we may have missed subtle literary allusion but if we do I reckon genl public will also” (quoted in North, “The Making of ‘Make It New’”). Eliot’s own reaction, pleading ignorance in the face of the obscure new title, is revelatory of the fact that even one of Pound’s closest readers and supporters (Faber also published Pound’s ABC of Reading in 1934 and Eliot later edited his Literary Essays) could not make sense of the phrase and, perhaps more importantly, refused to take its meaning for granted, as most subsequent readers unfortunately would. Not only was the phrase a solipsistic reference, an unacknowledged borrowing, and yet another idiosyncrasy in the Poundian vocabulary of the 1930s, but it remained so until the 1960s, after the distorted Confucian fragment gained exposure in the critical lexicon of Hugh Kenner, as the latter lifted it directly from Pound’s translation of the Ta Hio, now called the Great Digest, which he reviewed in 1950. From that point on, as it proceeded with its

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critical journey from Northrop Frye to Roy Harvey Pearce and many others, the phrase started being gradually disconnected from its Confucian background and consequently increasingly mistaken for Pound’s own injunction to be inventive back in the 1910s. Michael North analyzes the fluctuating value of the modernist slogan: In the course of this remarkably brief transformation, Pound’s three-word phrase loses its ancient Chinese context, its debt to the devotional program of Legge, and its involvement in Mussolini’s Fascism. The bibliographical facts of its appearance in Pound’s work are so thoroughly obscured that it becomes possible for scholars such as Peter Gay and Alfred Appel to misplace it to 1914, where it can seem influential and even foundational instead of obscure. In the process, the role of novelty in the development of aesthetic modernism is distorted, and the nature of novelty itself is simplified. The vast array of different positions that can be identified among the practitioners of modern art and literature shrinks to the size of a simple, three-word slogan, and the complex history of novelty is subtracted even from that, so that modernism loses a crucial part of the debt to tradition that it owes, paradoxically, through its devotion to the new. (North, “The Making of ‘Make It New’”)

11 Very much in line with Michael North’s enlightening use of context and painstaking analysis of vocabulary, the articles gathered in this issue all seek to avoid oversimplified statements about the New, the experimental tradition in modernist poetry and the revolutionary rhetoric of the avant-garde. They all share a common concern, which consists in enquiring into the complex history of “Modernisms” (to echo the title of Peter Nicholls’ seminal book) with regard to adding nuance and new forceful arguments in their personal reading of modernist works and/or their critical reception.

The New “New”: Restoration v. Revolution

12 The history of novelty in twentieth century poetics is suffused with various tensions stemming from competing forms of discourse, especially rivaling uses of key words such as “modernism” or “new.” The conflict between the two main sides of the poetic field was suitably summed up by David Antin in his influential essay “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry” published in the inaugural issue of boundary 2: a journal of postmodern literature in 1972. In this essay, Antin argued that the work of the modernists had largely been stifled by the ingrained antimodernism of the New Critics (C. Brooks, R. Penn Warren, I. A. Richards), whom he then dubbed the champions of “the Metaphysical Modernist tradition” (120). For Antin, there were indeed two (poetic and critical) traditions trying to pass for Modernism: the official, institutionalized, Southern Agrarian tradition (Later Eliot, Auden, Ransom, Tate, then Lowell, Jarrell, Schwartz, Snodgrass), as opposed to the other tradition, which claimed Pound, Early Eliot, Williams, H.D., Stein, and later Zukofsky, Oppen, Rexroth, Ginsberg, Olson, Duncan, Creeley, etc. David Antin’s stance would later be taken up by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg in their luminous introduction to the first volume of the behemoth anthology Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry: With regard to twentieth-century poetry, a new look has long been overdue. In the American instance, views of “modern poetry” established at midcentury have largely continued to the present and, as they entered the standard anthologies and literary

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histories, have tended to play down the more revolutionary aspects of modernism in favor of the recognition of a handful of “major” figures, many of whom are celebrated precisely for their antiexperimental and antirevolutionary positions or for their adherence to a relatively conventional view of poetic traditions and formal possibilities. (1995, 11)

13 Their analysis would be made even clearer in the preface to the second volume of Poems for the Millennium: In the United States, where experimental modernism had yet to make its ineluctable breakthroughs, the first postwar decade was marked by an ascendant literary “modernism”—hostile to experiment and reduced in consequence to a vapid, often stuffy middle-ground approximation. It was in that sense the Age of Eliot and the new critics, as they were then called—not as an extension of Eliot’s collage-work in The Waste Land, say, but as a dominant and retrograde poetics in which the old ways of the English “great tradition” were trotted out and given privilege. (1998, 3)

14 Yet, with hindsight, Antin was also taking his cue from Robert Duncan, who had largely mapped the tension-fraught poetic field in various essays, namely those collected posthumously in The H.D. Book (2012). In an unpublished essay fragment tracing “The Influence of Ezra Pound’s Cantos” written while he was briefly teaching at Black Mountain College in 1956, Duncan wrote: In the 30s a critical reaction took many paths. But in large the influence of Auden […], of Rilke and Lorca (toward passionate fantasy), of the English (Empson) and the Southern Regionalists (Eberhart, Ransom, Tate, Laura Riding) toward metaphysical conceit meant even an hostility toward metrical invention and complexity, and an open disregard for objectification. In the present usage [1956], the poetics of The Cantos has few adherents. Certainly the dominant aesthetic is that of the critical reaction: Shapiro, Wilbur, Horan, Bishop, Roethke, Bogan, Garrigue, Lowell (who does however have strength in his measure) all exhibit disinterest and even ignorance of form and invention. Hence recourse to convenient traditions.3

15 Duncan indeed engaged with the “poetics and polemics” (Rothenberg, 2008) of his generation, having not only to deal with the difficult Modernist legacy of barely legible works but also to deconstruct the claims of the poets and/or their powerful devotees within the literary institution. The poet was quick to identify the inner contradiction underlying the whole modernist aesthetic: “They were—Pound or H.D. or Joyce—most modern in their appropriation of the past” (The H.D. Book, 229). Reflecting on the paradoxical nature of modernism’s modernity, Jean-Michel Rabaté has notoriously argued that the Anglo-American modernists were concerned with primitivism in ways unequaled by the European avant-gardes: “the modernity of high modernism lies above all in its main proponents’ heightened awareness of the primitive nature of ritual . . . Their ‘modernity’ remains caught in the dialectics of the avant-garde, with its load of culturalist, pedagogical and exhibitionistic impulses attempting to make up for its failure to think the archaic” (1993, 199-200, my translation). In other words, modernism’s modernity lies in its staunch archaism and fascination for primitivism.4 Here is Rothenberg and Joris’s excellent synthesis on this point: Thus, if an awareness of the “new,” say, seems central to these projects, it is often balanced, sometimes overbalanced, by an obsession with old and the ancient. This represents a problematic and an issue, as do polarities of high and low (in language, in diction), of symbolism and realism, lyric exuberance and “objective” precision,

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hermetic condensations and epic expansions, minimals and maximals, verses and proses, sacred and secular, maleness and femaleness. While the predilections of the work is to push things to their limits, even those limits (and that predilection) may be called into question—as in the Dada poet’s turning on the Dada work: “The true Dadas are against Dada.” Or put another way: at the core of every true “modernism” is the germ of a postmodernism. (1995, 3)

16 Much less consensual was Marjorie Perloff’s introduction to 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (2002). Published in the Blackwell Manifesto series, the controversial essay incurred a critical storm within the wider field of experimental poetry, with reactions in notable review-essays by Jennifer Ashton and Stephen Fredman, among countless others.5 Among the reasons for the fiery debate surrounding Perloff’s polemical statement was the author’s choice of polarizing vocabulary, essentially drawing on the revolution-restoration opposition. Let us take two examples, among the many bold and thought-provoking claims. The first deals with Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 (1960, reed. 1999), and more specifically literary history’s treatment of the Black Mountain poets and the Beat movement: Allen’s anthology introduced the literary public to some of the most exciting poets coming of age in the late fifties: Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoy Jones) and Jack Spicer. Compared to the “closed verse” poets featured in the rival anthology, Donald Hall’s New Poets of England and America (1957), the “New Americans” were indeed a breath of fresh air. But from the hindsight of the twenty-first century, their fabled “opening of the field” was less revolution than restoration: a carrying-on, in somewhat diluted form, of the avant-garde project that had been at the very heart of early modernism. (Perloff, 2002, 2)

17 With its judgmental ring and devaluing innuendo, the binary revolution-restoration is intentionally antagonizing. Perloff deliberately reproduces the rhetoric of rupture6 which had been so efficiently foregrounded by the avant-gardes themselves, starting with the Futurists, the Vorticists and Dada. Here came the main thrust of the argument, aimed at downplaying the significance of the role and/or value of the “New American Poets,” and strengthening as a result the Language Poets’ aptitude for radical change and true innovation: [W]hat strikes us when we reread the poetries of the early century, is that the real fate of first-stage modernism was one of deferral, its radical and Utopian aspirations being cut off by the catastrophe, first of the Great War, and then of the series of crises produced by the two great totalitarianisms that dominated the first half of the century and culminated in World War II and the subsequent Cold War. (Perloff, 2002, 2-3)

18 In an earlier and yet equally seminal article entitled “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” (1982), Perloff argued: “Modernism, in this context, means rupture—not, of course, with the distant past which must be reassimilated, but with all that has become established and conventional in the art of one’s own time” (1985, 14).

19 The second example taken from 21st-Century Modernism dealt with T.S. Eliot: I am merely suggesting that between Eliot’s radical poetry of the avant guerre and its postwar reincarnation, a decisive change had taken place. The Waste Land, in this scheme of things, emerges as the brilliant culmination of the poetic revolution that

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began with “Prufrock” in 1911 rather than as itself a revolutionary breakthrough or rupture. (Perloff, 2002, 39)

20 Although a number of critics voiced their disagreement with Perloff’s use of polarization and sometimes scathing rhetoric, needless to say, the author’s goal was brilliantly achieved. It reignited a much-needed debate about the “fate of modernism” (Nicholls), and for all its idealizing of the moment of “revolutionary breakthrough or rupture,” it also raised the pivotal question of the ongoing Modernist impulse across the twentieth-century and into the twenty-first. About the continuity of a radical movement running through the past century, Hélène Aji further argued in “Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams’s Romantic Dilemmas: From Obliteration to Remanence”: One would however be tempted to expand Perloff’s outlook and question the idea of a wholly new era to begin in the 1910s, especially as one tries to read through the layers of the Modernist intertext to its poetic claims of didacticism, commitment and intellectual leadership. Conceiving of innovation only in terms of rupture tends naively to endorse the poets’ claims and their sometimes-willful concealments (…). (Aji, 2005, 50)

21 While it seems clear that the revolutionary assertions of the early modernist avant- garde had indeed been cautiously staged by the authors and overemphasized by a number of critics taking the poets’ statements at face value, a reappraisal of the ongoing verve of the modernist impulse across over a century of writing seemed rather timely.7 As the articles in this special issue testify, modernist poetry projected itself as an instrument of change. The renewal of poetic language now calls anew for rewriting the history of modernism through its relation with novelty.

22 The first three articles are primarily focused on the first wave of modernism, thus from the 1910s through the 1930s. “(Women Writing) The Modernist Line,” penned by Cristanne Miller, opens the field of investigation with a reassessment of the modernist canon through a study of a range of key female protagonists: Mina Loy, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore. How these writers experimented with the line—understood both as poetic lineage and semiotic unit—is key to this essay that invites readers to venture into the feminine margins of modernism so as to fully apprehend radical experimentation with formal invention. Aurore Clavier’s piece entitled “‘Radical’: Marianne Moore and the Revision of Modernism” offers an excellent sequel to the opening article, as it provides ample historical contextualization before zooming in on Marianne Moore’s poetry through the lens of her practice of textual emendation (erasure, crossing out, compression, correction), a poetic practice which is at the core of modernist poetics and yet whose ambivalent scope and significance is fully reappraised. Ezra Pound’s drastic editing of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land provides a link to the following article, authored by Viorica Patea, whose goal is to cast a fresh glance at “Eliot’s Modernist Manifesto,” his classic of modernist theory entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). The full controversial potency of the text is made clear through a study of its reception across a century. The opening sentence “In English writing we seldom speak of tradition” now sounds almost ironic in light of the critical output elicited by Eliot’s groundbreaking outlook. Yet Eliot’s unprecedented approach of the contemporary poet’s relation to the Western canon was also a catalyst for his inner contradictions as the tension between his theory of impersonality and his use of avant-garde rhetoric receives more critical attention.

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23 The three following essays share a concern for critical theory, with an emphasis on the poetic language of the Objectivist legacy. In “Beyond the American Difficult Poem: Paul Celan’s ‘Du liegst,’” Xavier Kalck adopts a comparative approach to inquire into the mechanics of one of modernism’s defining features, its difficulty. By taking the reader through the experience of a German text and its subsequent translations into English, not to mention Celan’s crucial influence on philosophy and theory, the author’s intent is to examine what truly makes up our literary knowledge beyond the stakes of radicalism and the claims of innovation. Also concerned with a poetics of translation, Abigail Lang tackles American poetry from a foreign vantage point, that of “The Ongoing French Reception of the Objectivists,” thereby closely reexamining over forty years’ worth of transatlantic literary history through the “complex dynamics of textual circulation, reception and canonization,” namely of Zukofsky and Reznikoff’s influence on French experimental poets. Purposefully located at the boundary of creative and critical writing, Elizabeth Willis’s contribution is entitled “The Open Boat and the Shipwreck of the Singular: American Poetry and the Democratic Ideal.” As a poet herself, Willis addresses a core contradiction within American poetry’s counter- tradition: “How is it that vanguard works of poetry and prose repeatedly re-enact foundational narratives of Americanness?” Through such enquiry into the roots of American poetry, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein and George Oppen are given a fresh glance.

24 The last two contributors explore the contemporary poetic scene through two traditions that are usually opposed. Following the critical concept of sincerity from Romanticism through Objectivism and Language poetry, Nicholas Manning inquires into the premises of the revolutionary v. conservative opposition in “The Rhetoric of the Rearguard? Sincerity in Innovative American Poetics.” The author raises the following fundamental question: “How did the criterion of poetic sincerity transform, in the space of a half-century, from a fundamental tenet of radical modernism to an incarnation of lyrical and expressive orthodoxy?” To conclude, Marjorie Perloff’s “Spectral Telepathy: the Late Style of Susan Howe” examines the latest works of one of the major voices in contemporary poetry. The author delineates an evolution in Susan Howe’s skillful blending of criticism and poetry from My Emily Dickinson (1985) and The Birth-mark (1993) through The Quarry and Tom Tit Tot, both published in 2015, and shows how her experimental take on American history allows her to “reanimate literary texts and make them new.” AJI, Hélène, “Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams’s Romantic Dilemmas: From Obliteration to Remanence,” Cercles, no. 12, 2005, 50-63.

ALLEN, Donald, ed., The New American Poetry: 1945‑1960, New York, Grove Press, 1960 (new ed. 1999).

ANTIN, David, “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” boundary 2: a journal of postmodern literature, no. 1, Fall 1972, 98-133.

ASHTON, Jennifer, “Modernism’s ‘New’ Literalism,” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 10, no. 2, 2003, 381-390.

DAVENPORT, Guy, “Postscript,” Twelve Stories, Washington, DC, Counterpoint, 1997, 233-239.

DAVIDSON, Michael, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid‑Century, Cambridge, CUP, 1989.

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DUNCAN, Robert, “The Influence of Ezra Pound’s Cantos” (1956), notebook 19, Robert Duncan Collection, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

---, The H.D. Book, ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2012.

FREDMAN, Stephen, “21st-Century Modernism: The ‘New’ Poetics (review essay),” Symploke, vol. 7, no. 1, 2005, 340-342.

FURLANI, André, “Postmodern and After: Guy Davenport,” Contemporary Literature, vol. 43, no. 4, Winter 2002, 709‑735.

---, Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2007.

NICHOLLS, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

---, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, Oxford, OUP, 2007.

NORTH, Michael, Novelty: A History of the New, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013.

---, “The Making of ‘Make It New,’” Guernica: a magazine of global arts and politics, 2013 https:// www.guernicamag.com/the-making-of-making-it-new/ (last accessed January 15, 2017).

OUDART, Clément, Les Métamorphoses du modernisme de H.D. à Robert Duncan : vers une poétique de la relation, Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010.

---, ed., “Tailor-Made Traditions: The Poetics of U.S. Experimental Verse from H.D. to Michael Heller,” Caliban: French Journal of English Studies, 35, 2014 https://caliban.revues.org/215 (last accessed January 15, 2017).

PERLOFF, Marjorie, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition, Cambridge, CUP, 1985.

---, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, rpt. 2003).

---, 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2002.

---, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry By Other Means in the New Century, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010.

POUND, Ezra, Make It New, London, Faber & Faber, 1934 (Yale UP, 1935).

---, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, London, Stanley Nott, 1935.

---, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, New York, New Directions, 1996.

RABATÉ, Jean-Michel, La Pénultième est morte. Spectrographies de la modernité, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, coll. “L’or d’Atalante,” 1993.

---, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism, Oxford and Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2007.

ROSENBERG, Harold, The Tradition of the New, New York, Horizon Press, 1959.

ROTHENBERG, Jerome, Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005, ed. S. Clay, Tuscaloosa, AL, University of Alabama Press, 2008.

--- and Pierre JORIS, eds., Poems for the Millennium. The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, 2 vols., Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1995-1998.

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NOTES

1. Guy Davenport, “Postscript,” Twelve Stories (1997), 236: “A witty Frenchman has said that I am a writer who disappears while arriving. I would like to misunderstand him that I come too late as a Modernist and too early for the dissonances that go by the name of Postmodernism” (quoted in Furlani, “Postmodern and After: Guy Davenport,” Contemporary Literature, vol. 43, no. 4, 2002, 709). 2. Cf. Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry By Other Means in the New Century (2010). 3. Robert Duncan, “The Influence of Ezra Pound’s Cantos,” notebook 19, Robert Duncan Collection, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. 4. In The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid‑Century (1989), Michael Davidson writes: “The postmodernism of the San Francisco Renaissance, ironically, is its primitivism” (32). 5. Cf. The feud was chronicled in my own Les Métamorphoses du modernisme de H.D. à Robert Duncan (2010). 6. See Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, reed. 2003). 7. Several of the articles gathered in this issue were originally written for the “Modernist Revolutions” international conference organized at the University of Toulouse in 2014. I wish to express heartfelt thanks to all contributors and sponsors, especially to Prof. Nathalie Cochoy for making this event possible. On a related topic, see Oudart (ed.), “Tailor-Made Traditions: The Poetics of U.S. Experimental Verse from H.D. to Michael Heller” (Caliban, 2014).

AUTHOR

CLÉMENT OUDART Université Paris-Sorbonne

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(Women Writing) The Modernist Line

Cristanne Miller

1 In his “Revolution of the Word” manifesto (Transition, 1929), Eugene Jolas writes that “the literary creator […] HAS THE RIGHT TO USE WORDS OF HIS OWN FASHIONING AND TO DISREGARD EXISTING GRAMMATICAL AND SYNTACTICAL LAWS.”1 Jolas does not mention any aspect of poetic structure or “laws” as part of his revolution—perhaps because by 1929 free verse was so dominantly the poetic mode. One structural aspect, however, distinguished the modernist revolution in poetry from earlier free verse— namely the line. Of the five English-language poets who experimented most radically with the poetic line in the 1910s, four were women: Mina Loy, H.D., Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. The crucial moves away from Whitman’s nineteenth-century aesthetic had to do with the line as seen, as independent of syntax and meter, as restructuring the possibilities of rhyme, and as a unit in tension with other aspects of form, narrative, and voice in a poem. In the hands of these women, by the end of 1917 the modernist line had appeared in almost every radical configuration it would reach throughout the period of high modernism.

2 Pound is the fifth of these innovators, and while his work undoubtedly had an impact on these women, their innovations also influenced his Cantos (first published in Poetry in 1917) and they certainly influenced William Carlos Williams’s visually disjointed and later “triadic” line.2 In his multiple books published before 1916, Pound wrote a variety of kinds of lines but most of his lines were phrasally determined; he sometimes indented words or phrases but typically maintained both minor phrase boundaries and stanzaic or flush-left line groups. T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens never left the phrasal line behind, and e.e. cummings first published his radically vertical verse in 1920. Of primary interest here is not who first used any particular line structure. Were that the case, one could say that the modernists invented nothing: prose poetry, free verse, and concrete poetry or other verse forms using the visual space of the page can all be found well before the turn of the twentieth century. Instead, I am interested in the work of poets who developed particular uses of the line in primary ways as an aspect of their attempt to write a poetry appropriate to the new century such that these formal

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elements could not be ignored or overlooked by others engaged in similar experiments with meaning and form.3

3 Loy, H.D., Stein, and Moore redefine the line by altering its length, relation to syntax and pauses, and its visual form. The fact that women are primarily responsible for initial reconceptions of the modernist poetic line is rarely noticed, however—perhaps because they did not publish manifestos that touted their own contributions to modernism, instead focusing their essays on other issues or on modernist poetry generally. While Pound wrote multiple essays extolling the do’s and don’ts of modernist verse, and Williams described his variable foot as his “solution of the problem of modern verse” (Williams in Berry), Loy, H.D., Moore, and Stein wrote mostly obliquely about their formal verse structures. Loy’s most important polemical essays, for example, are on Futurism, Psycho-Democracy, and Feminism, and Moore’s most important essays are on rhyme and gusto in other writing, or on other writers.4 At the beginning of their poetic careers, however, these women in fact “solved” one of the “problem[s] of modern verse” by creating signature forms for the articulation of their ideas. And because (as we know—and as Rachel Blau DuPlessis has argued) form does not occur in a vacuum (DuPlessis, 2001), in talking about the line I will talk at least briefly about the social, historical, and political terrain engaged by these women’s reconception of this element of form. A line is a unit of verse but also of general communication—structurally and rhetorically crafted. In common parlance, a “line” is often mistrusted: “What’s his line?” we ask, “Don’t feed me a line,” we warn. Or a line can be a kind of signature or by-line. In these women’s verse the modernist “line” is redefined both as structure and perspective.

4 These variations in the conception and form or the poetic line are not gender- dependent or gender-oriented. At the same time, it is unlikely to be a matter of accident that most of the individuals responsible for repeated experimental and developmental use of new forms of the poetic line written in English are women. As I have argued elsewhere, in the U.S. more than anywhere else in the world, women took leadership roles in shaping the development and circulation of modernism across the spectrum of the arts in the 1910s and 1920s. They were editors, museum founders, and organizers of groups or loosely conceived communities.5 The women engaged in such leadership were well educated, ambitious, and enjoyed sufficient independence financially and in relation to familial responsibilities to afford at least periodic sustained focus on their art (although this independence was more precarious and harder won for some than for others). Moreover, these women may have felt weaker ties to traditional institutions and forms than their male contemporaries because they for the most part stood outside those institutions. The focus of this essay, however, is not on the question of gender in relation to the development of the modernist line; nor is it on who or what influenced Loy, H.D., Stein, or Moore’s experimentation. I focus on the particularities of these women’s innovative, and typically overlooked, contributions to the development of Anglo-American modernism and ways that their deployment of a new poetic line was compatible with larger (often feminist) goals of their poetics.

Loy’s Line

5 Although H.D. is the earliest of these writers, Mina Loy approaches the question of the line with the greatest variety of placement on the physical page, perhaps not

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surprisingly given that she both began and ended her career with serious work in the visual arts. For that reason, this essay begins with Loy’s line.

6 Mina Loy’s most famous (or infamous) lines are those beginning “Songs to Joannes,” the first four sections of which were published as “Love Songs” in 1915: Spawn of Fantasies Silting the appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage “Once upon a time” Pulls a weed white star-topped Among wild oats sown in mucous-membrane (1996, 53)

7 While most attention has focused on Loy’s shockingly comic representation of male participation in intercourse as a pig-like penis “rooting erotic garbage,” it is equally significant that by 1915 her widening of the line to include white space between words was already a recognizable feature of her verse. Pound uses this technique (to my knowledge) only once, in “In a Station of the Metro” as published in Poetry in 1913: The apparition of these faces in the crowd : Petals on a wet, black bough .

8 In contrast, this was a repeated aspect of Loy’s verse and hence one she brought insistently to the attention of other modernists.

9 Loy writes in “Modern Poetry” that “the structure of all poetry is the movement that an active individuality makes in expressing itself” (1996, 157). Loy’s lines “move” individualistically; they are characteristically short, often organized by syntactic repetition or sound play rather than by syntactic units, and they either eschew punctuation or use it as a visual as much as a rhetorical marker. As Suzanne Churchill notes, however, her use of white space mid-line is her “signature formal device” from her earliest publications (118). In the 1914 poem “Parturition,” Loy writes: Locate an irritation without It is within Within It is without

The sensitized area

Is identical with the extensity

Of intension (1996, 4, stanza 3)

10 In this poem about the labor of birthing, Loy marks the visceral materiality of pain and the mother’s simultaneous experience of wonder with disorienting spatial placement of words on the page. The fetus within will soon be the child “without.” It is and is not a part of the mother’s body. “Intension” puns on the painful tension of labor and “intention,” or what the mother intends; “extensity” similarly puns on extent and tenseness. Given that “intension” is also a linguistic term signifying any quality connoted by a word or symbol, or that which makes the word signify, one can read this phrase of Loy’s as pointing at her own use of language. “The sensitized area / Is identical with the extensity / Of intension”: Loy’s poetic “intensions” have extensity and are inseparable from them; they also give birth or bear fruit. Perhaps this combined sensitivity and fertility of extensive intension defines Loy’s “line.”

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11 A 1915 poem, “The Effectual Marriage, Or the Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni” may be Loy’s first use of what Williams later develops as a “triadic line”—that is, a diagonal extension of the line across the page. Loy writes: Of what their peace consisted We cannot say Only that he was magnificently man She insignificantly a woman who understood Understanding what is that To Each his entity to others their idiosyncrasies to the free expansion to the annexed their liberty To man his work To woman her love Succulent meals and an occasional caress So be it It so seldom is (1996, 37-38)

12 Loy rarely uses this device, more frequently extending the line through line-internal spacing rather than diagonally, but (like Pound) she has several unique or occasional experiments with the spacing of lines. In “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” (1922), lines are flush left, except that a single line is printed 6 spaces further to the left than any other; appropriately, that line consists only of the words “As if.” “Apology of Genius” (1922) begins with the flush-left line “Ostracized as we are with God” and the rest of the poem’s lines begin further to the right—as it were ostracizing the first line by constituting a new margin. In “Poe” (composed 1917-18), Loy sets two lines further to the left than others: the first constitutes its own stanza and the second is a one-word line in stanza 3. a lyric elixir of death

embalms the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves on moon spun nights

sets icicled canopy for corpses of poesy with roses and northern lights

Where frozen nightingales in ilix aisles sing burial rites (1996, 76)

13 The poem contains only one capital letter—beginning what is apparently an internal modifying clause near the end of the poem—and it has no punctuation. Its line lengths vary from the one syllable “sets” to the iambic pentameter “Where frozen nightingales in ilix aisles,” and its stanzas vary from one to four lines. In the 1917 “Songs to Joannes” Loy writes whole sections that are only a line long—most prominently at the poem’s conclusion: “Love - - - the preeminent litterateur” (XXXIV, 1996, 68).

14 As this line indicates, Loy’s punctuation similarly redefines the page as a visual canvas; one might even think of this as a geometrical line filling the space of poetic lineation. In “Songs to Joannes,” dashes function in standard parenthetical fashion but they may also constitute an entire line: “Our souvenir ethics to / — — — — — — — (XXX, 1996, 66). In section XXXII, dashes replace ellipses to indicate an unfinished thought and, in this case, unfinished sentence: “where the Mediterranean — — — — —” (1996, 67). Even

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more strikingly, Loy sometimes begins a line with dashes: “Unthinkable that white over there / — — — Is smoke from your house” (XXVIII, 1996, 65). Because there are no extant manuscript copies of most of Loy’s poems, it is not possible to know just how she intended these geometrical lines, or dashes, to appear on the page.

15 Although Loy occasionally writes a one word line, this is not a typical feature of her verse; hence the passage she centers in “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1925), giving each word its own line, calls dramatic attention to her protagonist’s discovery of the lucent radiance of “the word” or aesthetic understanding (141). And instantly this fragmentary simultaneity of ideas

embodies the word A lucent iris shifts its irradiate interstice glooms and relumes on an orb of verdigris6

16 Loy uses line breaks, white space within lines, punctuation, and other visual elements of the page as guides to reading: for rhetorical, aural, and rhythmic effect.7

17 As an art student and painter, Loy knew avant-garde art and artists and her stylistic features borrow from its patterns. Loy’s poems combine the aggressive visual elements of Futurism and the baroque detail of Decadence with a feminist commitment to representing a woman’s perspective and celebrating female sexuality. In “Summer Night in a Florentine Slum,” Loy even refers to a print by English Decadent Aubrey Beardsley. In his work, she would have found an ostentatiously contrived artificiality, blurring so-called natural categories of gender and sexuality and eroticizing the depiction of all embodiments. Like Beardsley’s drawings, Loy’s language is contrived, artificial, and excessive. It combines various registers of experience and favors obscure or highly specialized vocabularies—often juxtaposed with slang or multilingual wordplay (see Perloff and Reid). Loy also manipulates alliteration at times with such exaggeration as to all but cancel its lyrical effects—as it were, de-naturalizing even the aesthetics of sound. For example, in “Café du Néant,” a woman “Prophetically blossoms in perfect putrefaction” (1996, 17). Loy’s satires of life and relationship in England, Paris, and Florence represent her critique of a patriarchal social, economic, and religious system in which women’s lives are restricted by structures privileging men. In “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” Loy writes: “Nobody shouts / Virgins for sale” yet “Marriage [is] expensive”—a painful reality for women trapped “behind curtains” watching “men pass / They are going somewhere” (1996, 22). Loy highlights both women’s delusional faith in fictions of romance and what Alex Goody calls “the double bind of dominant ideology and economic hegemony” (Goody, 108; see also Kinnahan). The visual and verbal patterns of Loy’s poetry suggest that her rewriting of the line is of a piece with her feminist satire of social norms.

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H.D.: Words and Sounds

18 Loy’s extravagantly mannered style stands in distinct contrast to the language play of her female American contemporaries, but her experiments with the line and impatience with entrenched structures and attitudes of male privilege have much in common with theirs. Like Loy’s, H.D.’s line is in part defined by sound-play. Beginning in 1912, H.D. was developing a use of repetition and syncopated rhyme to produce a line of radical brevity and extraordinarily full sound.8 The crisply intense lucidity of presence embodied in her brief lines is strikingly different from Loy’s archaic and erudite profusion of words and images. In “Hermes of the Ways” (1913), H.D. writes in lines that are frequently only one or two words, or even one or two syllables, long: Wind rushes over the dunes, and the coarse, salt-crusted grass answers.

Heu, it whips round my ankles!” (42)

19 The brevity of these lines is intensified by the fact that H.D. writes primarily in monosyllables. In the 1915 “Garden,” her speaker addresses a rose: “If I could break you / I could break a tree. / If I could stir / I could break a tree— / I could break you” (24-25). The line H.D. defined in her early Imagist poems remained the core line of her verse—just as Loy’s early line did.

20 H.D.’s line is typically syntactically defined, monosyllabic, Anglo-Saxon in word base, and involves extensive repetition. It is often anaphoric, but the effect is strikingly different from Whitman’s earlier anaphora because her lines are so short. Hence the words that differ from one line to the next are at times fewer than the repeated words: “I could break a tree. / . . . I could break a tree— / I could break you.” H.D.’s innovations focus not on manipulation of visual space per se but on the line as a tool for the nuanced, measured process of thinking (or articulating thought as a process) through repetition of words and sounds. Hence the syntactic and visual elements reinforce each other in calling attention to the smallest units of this process. Her line gives utmost weight to individual words and sounds, in relation to longer patterns of sound and meaning.

21 H.D.’s verse is distinctive for its one-word lines. “The Wind Sleepers” begins: “Whiter / than the crust / left by the tide, / we are stung by the hurled sand / and the broken shells.” The third stanza similarly begins with one word: “Tear— / tear us an altar, / tug at the cliff-boulders, / pile them with the rough stones—.” Here the initial isolation of “Tear” is emphasized through the repetition of the word followed by the anaphora of other imperative verbs: tear, tear, tug, pile. “Red Roses for Bronze” begins with internal rhyme (take/weight/sate), emphasized by its very short second line, and then plays with rhyme and repetition throughout the opening passage:9 If I might take a weight of bronze and sate my wretched fingers in ecstatic work, if I might fashion

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eyes and mouth and chin, if I might take dark bronze and hammer in the line beneath your underlip (the slightly mocking, slightly cynical smile you choose to wear) if I might ease my fingers and my brain with stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke at—something (stone, marble, intent, stable, materialized) peace, even magic sleep might come again.

22 The long a rhymes give way to the strong assonance or slant rhymes of the repeated “I might” with “eyes,” “line,” “slightly,” “slightly,” and “smile,” and (among other sound echoes) the concluding words repeating a long e or phonetic /i/ sound: “beneath,” “slightly,” “ease,” “something,” “materialized,” “peace,” “even,” “sleep.” Visually and aurally, however, this section foregrounds the five repetitions of “stroke,” with three of these repetitions constituting an entire line. The exceptionally long line beginning with the fifth repetition of stroke, followed by the again monosyllabic line “peace,” similarly dramatizes the simultaneous urgency and uncertainty of the speaker’s desire. The visual pattern resembles a Sapphic torn fragment, but the syntax and sound pattern are full and complete. This first section of “Red Roses for Bronze” depends largely on echoes for its progression from the opening conditional “if” to the first manifestation of what the speaker “might” desire and for the hypnotic or incantatory effect of the speaker’s conditional wishing: “If I might . . . if I might . . . if I might.” H.D. here bypasses opportunities for end-rhyme or traditional rhyme schemes to create a more complex and nuanced interweaving of sounds and sense. In this poem, the density of the aural texture belies the speaker’s claimed weakness.

23 In Trilogy, H.D. rewrites the rhyming couplet as an unrhymed sequence of two lines of varying length as its defining structure. These lines range from a single word to repeated 8-syllable, 4-beat units. This variant of the traditional syntactically closed and rhyming couplet form is strikingly effective in its nimbleness for the reflections of this long poem on war and spiritual survival. As feminist criticism on H.D. has long established, especially in her later poems the poet takes on masculinist genre constructions as well as patriarchal assumptions and institutions, reconceiving the epic as well as the couplet.10 H.D.’s line in this long series of couplets composing a narrative- lyric psychological-historical mythology of maps for surviving human destructiveness could not be more different from Pope’s couplets, Miltonic blank verse, or Homeric narrative, but it has equal force in its incantatory intensity constructed through its spiraling repetitions of concept and sound. Lines epitomizing this new couplet’s tensile flexibility and sound play occur in an italicized section at the end of “The Walls Do Not Fall”: We know no rule of procedure,

we are voyagers, discoverers

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of the not-known,

the unrecorded; we have no map;

possibly we will reach haven, heaven. (543)

24 Rather than structuring her couplet by meter and end-rhyme, H.D. creates structural units through internal rhyme or sound play and repetitions of words or ideas. For example, we hear the full or slant rhyming of “know no . . . procedure,” “are voyagers, discoverers,” “not-known,” “unrecorded . . . no,” “have . . . map,” “possibly we . . . reach,” and “haven, / heaven.”

25 Later in Trilogy, H.D. uses longer lined couplets to represent the meaningless repetition of men’s excuses for violence and war: Yours is the more foolish circling, yours is the senseless wheeling

round and round—yours has no reason— I am seeking heaven; . . . . but you repeat your foolish circling—again, again, again; again, the steel sharpened on the stone; (582)

26 Here the same sound brilliantly distinguishes men’s “wheeling” without “reason,” “repeat[ing]” the sharpening of “steel” while the female speaker is “seeking” a place free of this repetition of violence. H.D.’s redefining of the line as a stage for sound-play, syncopated with repetitions and the variable length of her line, gives form to her interest in physical embodiment or intensely felt presence and to the politics of her radical rewriting of masculinist values and ontology. At the level of genre and the line, H.D. rethinks relationships between history, violence, the nation, the individual, and poetry. As with Loy’s visual experiments with white space and punctuation, H.D.’s breaking of the line into very short units that combine sparse syntax, repetition, and lush sound play now seems so much a part of the formal vocabulary of free verse that we do not easily recognize its newness in the 1910s.

Stein’s “difference”

27 In Tender Buttons, in 1914, Gertrude Stein rejected the poetic line altogether, writing prose poems that foregrounded grammatical innovation. A typical example occurs in the first poem of the first section of this volume, “A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS”: A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading. (1990, 461)

28 In this passage, Stein uses tools of repetition, sound play, juxtaposition, and abstraction similar to those of Loy and H.D. but her paragraph form calls more attention to the conceptual unit than to any formal element associated with verse. Here and in her later writing, Stein uses language as a medium to destabilize thought, particularly the kind of thinking associated with patriarchal logic and categorization. Her provocative, illogical or even non-sensical definitions and combinations of distinct fields of meaning were meant to stimulate thinking of all kinds—including about language itself. This

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opening of mental doors through the playful destabilization of grammar and meaning also functions in Tender Buttons to provoke new thinking about the structures, materials, and activity of ordinary women’s lives (the primary sections of this book are titled “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms”)—and even more specifically about the domestic and sexual economies of lesbian life.

29 Unlike Loy, H.D., and Moore, Stein did not continue to develop her early experimentation with prose poems as poetic form, instead focusing on her new deployment or re-conception of grammatical categories in all genres. Even in her later verse, the line receives little attention as a formal unit. In Stanzas in Meditation (written in the 1930s), Stein writes in stanzas, beginning each line with a capital letter, and making all lines coincide with syntactic boundaries—although the syntax itself is distinctive and Stein’s line breaks call attention to her repetition.11 For example, in Part 3, she writes: It is remarkable how quickly they learn But if they learn and it is very remarkable how quickly they learn It makes not only but by and by And they can not only be not here But not there Which after all makes no difference After all this does not make any does not make any difference

30 Structurally, these lines are as much Whitmanian as modernist, given their line-initial capitals and syntactic definition. The form of the poem is not for Stein its most exciting element. In fact, in “Poetry and Grammar,” Stein writes at greatest length about the “exciting thing happening” with her “sentences and paragraphs” in a novel. When she does define poetry, it is in terms of what she calls “vocabulary”: “Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. . . . poetry [is] really loving the name of anything” (231-232). It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the serendipities of Stein’s prose-poetry lines and complications of her grammar became influential on the formal development of poetry.

Moore’s Art ifice and Equalities

31 While Stein’s rejection of the line as a determining unit of verse in Tender Buttons may have been the most radical gesture of this decade, Marianne Moore most radically reconceived the poetic line as such. Rather than experiment with free verse, Moore developed a syllabic stanza and line—that is, a form in which lines are organized by numbers of syllables, not by patterned accents or syntax. Like her peers, she played with rhythm, sound, conceptions of naturalness and artifice, and the visual space of the page, but by 1916 she was also calling into question the still lingering expectation that a line be a unit of meaning. In her verse, prose syntax is disrupted by ostentatiously arbitrary lineation, creating patterned static visual forms. Through her syllabic stanzas, Moore may be the first poet to develop seriously the practice of imposed constraints. In “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto,” Moore encourages poets to reject “anything that might cloud the impression, such as unnecessary commas, modifying clauses, or delayed predicates” (1986, 421). What matters is “honest[y],” “concentration,” “impassioned explicitness”; “gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom

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in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves,” she claims (1986, 422, 426). Art is artifice and it has to do not just with freedom of form but with will, intention, values, and therefore implicitly with the largest questions one can ask about history and culture.

32 Moore’s syllabic verse highlights the artificiality of all formal choice by juxtaposing shorter and longer lines without accentual meter within exactly repeated stanzas, visually arranged. For example, she repeats a sequence of lines of 6, 12, 8, 10, and 14 syllables in “In This Age of Hard Trying Nonchalance is Good And”—a title that simultaneously functions as the poem’s first line. Some of Moore’s syllabic lines are as short as one syllable, as in “The Fish.” Others are as long as 24-syllables—as in “Roses Only,” where the stanza repeats lines of 21, 24, 17, 24, and 8 syllables, consecutively:

(2002, 83)12

33 As this poem demonstrates, in Moore’s syllabic verse, lines and even stanzas may end in the middle of a minor syntactic phrase on a word like “an” (as the first stanza does here) and often no stanza in the poem both begins a new sentence and concludes with the end of any major syntactic unit, let alone a period. The concluding line of “Roses Only,” has particular force because it is so surprising to find a line that functions as an independent syntactic unit. Many of her poems contain no such line, and this is the only one in “Roses Only.” In a poem where Moore instructs women to attend less to their petals and argues that beauty without “brains” or “co-ordination”—like a rose without thorns—would be a “mere // Peculiarity,” it is fitting that the final line can stand alone. It demonstrates the “Self-dependent” quality and the “brilliance” she attributes to women, whether or not they value them above their more conventionally praised features. Although, as she says, thorns “are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew,” they do guard against the “predatory hand”— a telling metonymy pointing toward a culture that had long romanticized male aggressive possessiveness and in which marriage is figured as the woman’s giving her “hand” to her husband; as a symbol of “brilliance” and independence, “Your thorns are the best part of you.”

34 Moore’s titles often function as a first line: they do not announce a topic or guide the reader toward comprehension of the following text. “The Fish” is not about fish but about the delicate beauty and versatile strength of natural ecologies in the face of human destructiveness caused by thoughtless acquisitiveness and war; the title simply places us in the first phase of the scene she maps in the poem (The Fish // wade . . .).

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Beginning a poem with the first line/title “In This Age of Hard Trying Nonchalance is Good And” departs from traditional and free verse form even more strikingly by ending with “and”—that is, ending in a way that is obviously in the middle of some thought. This “And” is particularly inconclusive because there is no obvious connection between the title’s relatively formal proposition about “Nonchalance” and the next line’s (also unfinished) quoted colloquialism (“’Really, it is not the / business of the gods . . .’”). Such an opening suggests that every aspect of poetry has equal consequence or inconsequence: a title may not announce a primary theme; a line’s end may not mark a point of emphasis; a rhyme may not have significant consonance or contrast in meaning with its partner. All syllables are counted the same. Her line calls striking attention to itself as a visual unit but can rarely be understood as a unit of meaning independent of its sentence, or more often of the poem, since Moore’s most easily comprehensible phrases may be ironic in the play of the poem as whole.

35 According to Charles Olson, the line “comes […] from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes” (“Projective Verse”); in contrast, Moore constructs a line of no predictable length or relation to syntax, hence no predictable relation to the sentence, the breath, or any other property of constructed meaning or natural being.13 Just as physical appearance gives body to the performance of selfhood without determining it, Moore’s structures give a poem’s language distinctive, even delightful, form while forcing a reader to recognize its idiosyncrasy and find what is of value in it. In the decade that saw the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan (1915) and the increasing popularity of eugenics, Moore’s quiet insistence on the arbitrariness of embodiment and radical forms of equality was entirely consonant with her feminist politics (see Miller, 1995, 135-36).

36 The need for individual social responsibility, condemnation of egotism, and attention to the unnoticed or marginalized are articulated through formal structures in Moore’s 1916 “In This Age of Hard Trying.” In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance is Good And

“Really, it is not the business of the gods to bake clay pots.” They did not do it in this instance. A few revolved upon the axes of their worth as if excessive popularity might be a pot;

they did not venture the profession of humility. The polished wedge that might have split the firmament was dumb. At last it threw itself away and falling down, conferred on some poor fool, a privilege.

“Taller by the length of a conversation of five hundred years than all the others,” there was one, whose tales of what could never have been actual— were better than the haggish, uncompanionable drawl

of certitude; his by- play was more terrible in its effectiveness than the fiercest frontal attack.

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The staff, the bag, the feigned inconsequence of manner, best bespeak that weapon, self protectiveness.14

37 Here, Moore condemns all those who set themselves up as “gods” too important to be useful and too lazy or arrogant to take advantage of the tools at their disposal (“the polished wedge”). By implication, they speak with “the haggish uncompanionable drawl / of certitude.” In contrast to such over-determined self-importance, she places the figure of the “fool” or hobo (with “staff” and “bag”), who tells “tales” and whose “conversation” is worth attending to both because of its “terrible […] effectiveness” and because it is “[…] companionable.” Those with privileges and power begin with tools “that might have split the firmament,” but they neither “bake clay pots” nor make any other use of what they have. Nor do they participate in conversation, like that implied in the exchange of story telling. Consequently, it is the conversational nobodys, those who do “profess […] humility” and “bake clay pots,” who may change the world.

38 This poem was written during World War I, before the U.S. entered the conflict in 1917. While in principle a pacifist, Moore was distressed at the suffering of the British and French and at apparent U.S. callousness in the face of their need. In this poem, she seems to claim for artists and other “fools” professing “what could never have been actual” a greater and longer-lasting power than that of the reigning “gods.” The historical moment of this poem’s publication and the military language of its conclusion (fiercest frontal attack, terrible, weapon) suggest that Moore’s “gods” may stand in for political leaders caught up in their own self-importance rather than using their tools to aid countries under attack or promote other communal good. The “weapon” of “by / play” or conversational interaction, in this reading, protects the self from its own potential god-like arrogance and inactivity rather than protecting the self against others—aggressively or defensively.15 Such “self-protectiveness” could not be more different from that based on defensive weaponry, the desire for “excessive popularity” (winning elections?), or maintaining the status quo in an “Age of Hard Trying.” For Moore, the principle of “by- / play” destabilizes meaning as well as stances of certitude. Appropriately, the word “by- / play” is divided by a line break: its very appearance on the page celebrates structures open to idiosyncrasy, the deviant, that which does not attack to reconfirm certitudes.

39 The “by-play” of carefully crafted “nonchalance” also appears in Moore’s development of unaccented rhyme. Moore’s lines are full of sound-play but rarely have the aural lushness of H.D.’s because Moore gives no accentual, aural, grammatical, or syntactic prominence to her rhymes. In “In This Age,” for example, she rhymes “the” with the mid-line “humility” in stanza 2 (“they did not venture the / profession of humility).16 Moore often indents rhyming lines the same distance from the left margin, but one often cannot hear the end-rhyme one sees because so many other words occur between the rhyming syllables and the syllables themselves are so minor (note the rhyme of “effectiveness” with “protectiveness” in the final stanza of “In This Age”). Moore even occasionally rhymes on an internal syllable of a polysyllabic word divided by a line break. To return to her 1917 poem “The Fish,” the first syllable of “ac-cident” concludes a line and rhymes with “lack.” All external marks of abuse are present on this

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defiant edifice— all the physical features of

ac- cident—lack of cornice dynamite grooves, burns, and hatchet strokes, these things stand out on it . . . (2002, 86; lines 31-9)

40 This is a stunning example of the way Moore’s lineation constructs her argument. The unusual line-break would seem only accidentally to split the word “accident”—in a poem calling attention to human destructiveness, wrongly dismissed as accidental (like what is now called “collateral damage” in situations of war), as though the destruction of people and the environment did not need to be acknowledged or considered in advance.

41 Like H.D.’s poetry and formal structures, Moore’s verse demands attention to that which might easily be overlooked. Formally, for example, because in syllabic verse all syllables have the same value, nothing promotes a monosyllabic noun as a candidate for rhyme above the least-stressed, least semantically significant syllable. Similarly, the repetition of stanzas on the page creates a repeated and static visual design. In contrast, Moore’s sentences demand dynamic, sequential interpretation, in dependent relation to what precedes and follows them. In them, there is nothing fixed or predictable. Moore’s sentences wind through her stanzas, in dynamic counterpoint to their fixed visual structures and patterned rhymes. As Linda Leavell points out, this synthesis of the “verbal and the visual, the dramatic and the spatial” is “one of [Moore’s] greatest achievements as a modernist” (57).17

The Feminist Modernist Line

42 Loy, H.D., and Moore each develop a dynamic line: without accentual meter or regular rhyme, their lines do not breathe but they express a corporeality of movement and a pleasure in beats, sounds, and rhythms that demand our attention and call us to similar alertness or nimbleness of thought. H.D.’s lines are the most easily excerptible as units of meaning, and her repeated “I have had enough” from “Sheltered Garden” would be a strong candidate for the modernist “line” as a rallying cry of these early feminist innovators. All three of these poets redefine concepts of beauty as well as of the line. Later in “Sheltered Garden” H.D. rejects “beauty without strength,” seeking “to find a new beauty / in some terrible / wind-tortured place.” In Loy’s “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” Ova makes “moon-flowers out of muck,” and in her “Apology of Genius” artists “forge the dusk of Chaos / to that imperious jewellery of the Universe / —the Beautiful —” (sic; 1996, 78). For all three of these poets, poetry appropriately includes the mundane, the daily, the difficult, the serendipitous. As previously indicated, in “Roses Only,” Moore reminds women/roses that “it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered too violently,” concluding “Your thorns are the best part of you.” In “The Monkey Puzzle” (1925), she similarly redefines aesthetic value: “This porcupine-quilled, complicated starkness— / this is beauty” (1981, 80). And in the poem called “Poetry” (1919) she defines it as above all “a place for the genuine”; the poem should consist of

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or include “the raw material of poetry in / all its rawness,” “imaginary gardens with real toads in them’” (2002, 72).

43 At the same time, the repetitions, intricate sound play, and interlinking syntactic structures of H.D's, Loy’s, and Moore’s verse suggest that their feminist line rebels against the idea of poetry as the result of an isolated act of solitary genius. Loy’s artist may be “ostracized” but that artist is not alone: “we are” together in attempting new ways to create and conceive art. As Moore says, “truth is no Apollo / Belvedere, no formal thing” but something that develops in complex ways among people of various cultures, feelings, and needs. In “Marriage,” Moore writes that “’no truth can be fully known / until it has been tried / by the tooth of disputation” and in “People’s Surroundings” she admits that the evidence we look at to inform us about others in fact produces “questions more than answers.” For these poets the modernist line is about seeking, building from the fragments of what is known,—as Loy puts it, in a one- sentence poem titled “Gertrude Stein,” about “crush[ing] / the tonnage / of F0 F0 consciousness 5B …5D to extract / a radium of the word” (1996, 94). And perhaps after all Stein says it best in Tender Buttons, in the section called “A Long Dress” and concluding “A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BERRY, Eleanor, “Triadic-Line Verse: An Analysis of its Prosody,” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 35, no. 3, 1989, 364-388.

BISHOP, Elizabeth, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, ed. Alice Quinn, New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007.

CHURCHILL, Suzanne, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of American Poetry, London, Ashgate, 2006.

COLLECOTT, Diana, “H.D.’s transformative poetics,” Cambridge Companion to H.D., ed. Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina Mackay, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 95-112.

DOOLITTLE, Hilda [H.D.], Collected Poems: 1912-1944, New York, New Directions, 1983.

DUPLESSIS, Rachel (BLAU), Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetries, 1908-1934, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

---, H.D.: The Career of that Struggle, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986.

--- and Susan Stanford Friedman, eds., Signets: Reading H.D., Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

FRIEDMAN, Susan Stanford, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D., Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1981.

GOODY, Alex, Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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JANUZZI, Marisa, Reconstr[uing] Scars: Mina Loy and the Matter of Modernist Poetics, unpublished dissertation, Columbia University.

JOLAS, Eugene, “Revolution of the Word,” transition 16-17 (June 1929).

KINNAHAN, Linda, “Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore,” The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson, New York, Oxford University Press, 2012, 143-72.

LAITY, Cassandra, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

LEAVELL, Linda, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

LOY, Mina, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.

MALLARMÉ, Stéphane. Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Bertrand Marchal, Paris, Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1998.

MILLER, Cristanne, “‘By-Play’: The Radical Rhythms of Marianne Moore,” Foreign Literature Studies (Wuhan China), vol. 30, no. 6, December 2008, 20-33.

---, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Else Lasker-Schüler, Gender and Literary Community in New York and Berlin, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2005.

---, “Distrusting: Marianne Moore on Feeling and War in the 1940s,” American Literature, vol. 80, no. 2, 2008, 353-379.

---, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 1995.

---, “Marianne Moore and the Women Modernizing New York,” Modern Philology, vol. 98, no. 2, 2000, 339-362.

MOORE, Marianne, The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, New York, Macmillan/Viking, 1981.

---, Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907-1924, ed. Robin Gail Schulze, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002.

---, The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia C. Willis, New York, Viking, 1986.

OLSON, Charles, “Projective Verse,” 1950, (last accessed January 30, 2014).

PERLOFF, Marjorie, “English as a ‘Second’ Language,” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, ed. Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma, Orono (ME), National Poetry Foundation, 1998, 131-148.

POUND, Ezra, “Marianne Moore and Mina Loy,” Selected Prose 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson, London, Faber & Faber, 1973.

REID, Colbey Emmerson, “Mina Loy’s Design Flaws,” Florida Atlantic Comparative Studies Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, 2007-08, 109-49.

F0 F0 STEIN, Gertrude, Lectures in America 5B 19355D , Boston, Beacon Press, 1985.

---, Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems, Los Angeles, Sun and Moon Press, 1994.

---, Stanzas in Meditation. The Corrected Version, ed. Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina, New Haven (CT), Yale University Press, 2012.

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VETTER, Lara, Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

WILLIAMS, William Carlos, “Interview with Stanley Koehler,” The Paris Review, no. 6, April 1962, (last accessed January 30, 2014).

NOTES

1. My thanks to the participants in the “Modernist Revolutions” conference for questions and presentations that have helped me clarify parts of this essay, especially to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Elizabeth Willis, Clément Oudart, and Nicholas Manning. 2. Williams defines his “variable foot” in his “Interview with Stanley Koehler.” It in effect makes each line into a three-part stanza, spaced both vertically and horizontally across a page rather than only vertically. As is frequently mentioned, Pound first develops his concept of logopoeia in his 1918 essay “Marianne Moore and Mina Loy,” a concept that becomes the foundation for his later poetry. 3. To give just one example, Mallarmé uses a tripartite line in L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1876): I hold the queen! O certain punishment… No, but the soul In this rhymed and metered poem, however, lines are overwhelmingly written flush left or at most indicate indentation for a new sentence or aspect of speech (“Je tiens la reine !/Ô sûr châtiment…/Non, mais l’âme,” Mallarmé, 165-166). This is markedly different from Loy’s or Moore’s repeated use of particular features throughout their early work. 4. Moore published reviews of most major poets and publications in the 1910s and several essays with implicit relation to her verse, but none calling for particular formal structures, making claims about her own achievement, or espousing a new movement; see “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto,” “Feeling and Precision,” and “The Accented Syllable.” In 1927, H.D. founded the first journal of film criticism Close-Up (with Bryher and Kenneth MacPherson) but published relatively few essays in her lifetime and nothing like a manifesto. Neither Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism,” “tenets” on “International Psycho-Democracy,” “Modernist Poetry,” and (posthumously published) “Feminist Manifesto” nor her few other published essays define a new model of verse or call upon others to adhere to particular principles of verse. Stein’s 1927 “Patriarchal Poetry” and 1935 “Poetry and Grammar” have functioned together with Tender Buttons in establishing the basis of Stein’s influence on late twentieth-century LANGUAGE and other experimentalist poetry, but they were not influential on early developments of the line. In fact, with the exception of Stein’s, the essays of these poets were largely ignored for most of the twentieth century—unlike essays by Pound and Eliot, which were frequently reprinted, quoted, and taught—and even Stein’s essays began circulating actively only in the late 1960s. 5. See Miller, Cultures of Modernism (2005) and “Marianne Moore and the Women Modernizing New York” (2000). 6. Quoted from Januzzi, Reconstr[uing] Scars, 141. There is currently no copy of the complete “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” in print, although a text modifying Loy’s punctuation and spacing is available in the 1982 Last Lunar Baedeker. 7. Again, because there are no extant manuscripts for several of Loy’s poems we cannot know exactly how she wrote them out—with what kinds of dashes and gaps. We also cannot be certain where spatial gaps have been entirely edited out of printed poems. Marisa Januzzi notes that many spaces between words are closed or reduced in typescripts for her 1958 Lunar Baedeker &

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Time Tables edition; it is likely, however, that Others and The Dial published her lines as she wrote them, or at least with careful attention to following the author’s “extensity” and “intension” (199). 8. H.D.’s first publication of poetry was in Poetry, January 1913. 9. Lara Vetter points out H.D.’s extreme use of repetition, often in one or two-word lines, in her volume Red Roses for Bronze, arguing that here she experiments with ways to “model poetry on incantation” (101). Diana Collecott also writes about H.D.’s vibrantly “kinetic” line as stemming in part from her use of monosyllabic lines and repetition (95). 10. Early and groundbreaking feminist criticism on H.D. includes work by Susan Stanford Friedman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Cassandra Laity. 11. Stein’s Stanzas were first published in Poetry in 1957; I quote here from Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems. See also the recently published Stanzas in Meditation. The Corrected Version. 12. First published in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (Knopf, 1917), ed. Alfred Kreymborg. 13. Moore is no closer to Elizabeth Bishop’s claim that “Writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural” (207); Moore does not want to give the impression of naturalness in the poetic act or form. 14. First published in Chimaera in 1916; I quote from the version published in Observations 1924 (Moore, 2002, 70). The source of Moore’s quotations is Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, in which a manipulative character tries to persuade another to join him by representing the two of them as “gods” above the “louts.” 15. I have written about this aspect of Moore’s poetic in Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority and “Distrusting: Marianne Moore on Feeling and War in the 1940s.” 16. See Moore’s essay “The Accented Syllable” on this aspect of her verse (1986, 31-34). 17. Leavell further notes that Moore developed her syllabic stanza as early as 1915, when her peers were “looking to the painters—or, more accurately, looking with the painters—for new forms. The adulation Moore received from other poets in the late teens indicates that her stanza did represent what they were all in various ways seeking” (80).

ABSTRACTS

Of the five English-language poets who experimented most radically with the poetic line in the 1910s, four were women: Mina Loy, H.D., Marianne Moore, and to a lesser extent Gertrude Stein, since she rejected the poetic line altogether in Tender Buttons. The crucial moves away from Whitman’s nineteenth-century aesthetic had to do with the line as seen, as independent of syntax and meter, as restructuring the possibilities of rhyme, and as a unit in tension with other aspects of form, narrative, and voice in a poem. In the hands of these women, the modernist line had appeared in almost every radical configuration of high modernism by the end of 1917. This paper explores the particular innovations of these women in relation to the structures of the modernist poetic line.

Des cinq poètes de langue anglaise ayant mené les expérimentations les plus radicales avec le vers dans les années 1910, quatre furent des femmes: Mina Loy, H.D., Marianne Moore et, dans une moindre mesure, Gertrude Stein, puisqu’elle décida d’abolir entièrement la notion de vers dans Tender Buttons. Visant à se défaire de l’esthétique whitmanienne et, d’un même geste, du XIXe

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siècle, ces innovations reposèrent sur le vers en tant qu’objet visuel, détaché de la syntaxe et du mètre, permettant ainsi d’ouvrir le champ des possibles de la rime, mais aussi en tant qu’unité mise en tension avec d’autres aspects formels, la dimension narrative et le rôle de la voix dans le poème. Placé entre les mains de ces femmes, le vers moderniste aura ainsi apparu dans les configurations les plus expérimentales du premier modernisme, ce même avant 1917. Cet article analyse les innovations de ces femmes en lien avec les modalités et les structures du vers moderniste.

INDEX

Keywords: modernist poetry, innovation, the poetic line, form, Mina Loy, H.D., Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein Mots-clés: poésie moderniste, innovation, vers, forme poétique, Mina Loy, H.D., Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein

AUTHOR

CRISTANNE MILLER University at Buffalo, SUNY

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“Radical”: Marianne Moore and the Revision of Modernism1

Aurore Clavier

1 “Omissions are not accidents.” Few epigraphs have tantalized readers as consistently as Marianne Moore’s defying opening to her 1967 Complete Poems. Originally sent as a reply to her editor’s concerns about the spectacular cuts she had imposed on her last collection, the quip has come to crystallize, in its placement as well as its form, the ironical contradictions at work in the author’s “final” opus. As a lapidary comment on the art of writing, it appears to condense, in one short formula, the language of rupture and compression defended by the first modernist manifestoes more than half a century earlier. Yet, as a threshold partially barring access to what it opens onto, the sentence also seems to undermine, through its terseness and negative construction, the artistic achievement seemingly claimed by the title, if not the very inscription of the poet’s oeuvre into the “tradition of the new” (Harold Rosenberg, 1960). While pointing to the many latent corrections of the work, the corrective therefore provides a clue that is also a riddle ; within the space of its four words, it draws up a reading grid working towards its own unraveling and silence and invites the reader to locate the interstices left by verbal excision, as much as the poet’s authorial position within her corpus and the canon at large. One is therefore led to wonder : are Moore’s erasures mere radical breaks that seek to perpetuate the poetics of “violence and precision” beyond “the futurist moment” (Perloff, 2003) ? Or could it be that her revising practice rather creates a space for alternative literary histories, dissenting from the revolutionary dynamics of rejection and renewal ? While entailing a wide range of gestures such as correction, compression, drastic reconfiguration, or even the more paradoxical conversion of text into endnotes, Moore’s revisions often stemmed from a common act of striking out, earning her a reputation as a radical poet. Yet it seems equally tempting to read such emendations as obeying the more normative bias of linguistic—if not moral—correction. However, reading between the lines of the blue pencil, one might perceive her emendations as neither subversive, nor conservative, but rather adaptive. Indeed, whether they respond to writing and publishing circumstances or correspond to the author’s own idiosyncrasies, these alterations have enabled endless

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refashionings of the texts, thereby unsettling the very notion of a constituted corpus. As a consequence, Moore’s revisionary mode of writing does not only raise stylistic issues while providing a wealth of variations and issues to the geneticist, but also invites us to reassess the history of modernism along the lines of an evolutionary rather than revolutionary paradigm.

Blue-Pencil Modernism

(Un)making it New, or the Slashed Preamble

2 If Moore’s resistance to categorizing and generalization were not better known, one might be tempted to first read Moore’s epigraph as a distant echo to the history of modernism itself, and to its beginnings in particular. As Hannah Sullivan has shown in her 2013 study The Work of Revision, modernist authors integrated textual emendation to their creative and editorial practices more than ever before—and more visibly than ever after in the word-processor age—to the point where, in the contemporary literary culture inherited from the period, “heavy and intensive revision has become an indicator of authorial integrity and the difficulty and seriousness of the revised artwork” (2). This mutation was certainly made possible by the deep material changes occurring at the turn of the century, including the increased availability of paper, the use of the type-writer as a supplement to handwritten drafts, the multiplication of proof-reading stages prior to publication, and a system of patronage that showed rather favorable to the ever-revising artist. However, Sullivan argues, these modernized working conditions were inextricably linked to a broader aesthetic turn, which saw the rise of a new conception of the artist’s creative process and revolutionary ethos. While romantic genius was believed to surge in a spontaneous flow of inspiration that could only fade or tarnish with subsequent revision, its modernist counterpart thrived on endless tinkering, which often led to enhanced opacity despite the authors’ claims to immediacy, a sign Bob Perelman analyzes as the source for their “aura of illegible authority” and “lure for endless study” (1).2

3 If, the latter’s critical focus on boundless pieces of “life-writing” suggests, modernist revising often meant virtually unlimited accretion, as in the case of Joyce’s Ulysses, it could also be, just as frequently, synonymous with drastic cuts and reductions. Most strikingly, the genesis of the movement is commonly perceived through a series of foundational acts of crossing-out. In her memoir of Ezra Pound, H.D. thus reminisced his elisions to her manuscript of “Hermes of the Ways”—up to her very signature—a pruning famously equated to the invention of Imagisme : “I was 21 when Ezra left and it was some years later that he scratched ‘H.D. Imagiste,’ in London, in the Museum tea room, at the bottom of a typed sheet, now slashed with his creative pencil, ‘Cut this out, shorten this line.’ H.D.—Hermes—Hermeticism and all the rest of it” (H.D., 1979, 40). Less than a decade later, the same blue pencil would again work its way through “the manuscript of a sprawling chaotic poem called The Waste Land” which would “leave [Pound]’s hands, reduced to about half its size, in the form in which it appears in print” (Eliot, 1946 ; quoted in Sullivan, 121). Even before the publication of the facsimile edition of Eliot’s emended drafts, traces of the legendary collaboration would thus gape here and there in the implicit voids left among the decaying waste and “roots that clutch,” announced by the slightly more visible hallmark of Eliot’s dedication to “Ezra Pound, il

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miglior fabbro,” a neatly brief stitch covering up—along with a quotation from Petronius’ Satyricon—a former, longer epigraph removed at the better craftsman’s suggestion. And as Sullivan reminds us, while playing the “Sage Homme” for his peers, handling his literary scalpel in order to practice “the Caesarean operation[s]” he deemed necessary for the perpetual birthing of the new, Pound endlessly edited his own beginnings, from the reduction of his thirty-line description of a Parisian subway vision to the famous haiku known as “In a Station of the Metro,” from the dense historical layering of his “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” to its condensed translation as “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,”3 or more broadly, from the derivative “collection of stale creampuffs,” as he once described his early poems, to A Draft of XXX Cantos, which, though hardly shorter, placed the process of elision and on-going composition at its core.

4 Whether one then chooses to view 1913 as “the cradle of modernism,” in the wake of Jean-Michel Rabaté’s synchronic study (Rabaté, 2007), to start anew in 1922—year one in a Poundian calendar published in The Little Review, and set for Michael North’s “return to the scene of the modern” (North, 1922)—or to get caught in the whirl of unprecedented -isms that burst in-between, everywhere the contemporary reader is invited to gaze at retrospective piles of paper scraps and ruled-out lines, as if the discarded fragments of rough drafts were meant to show through polished corpuses, and the blots of literary creation should be made visible in order to give their very shape to revolutionary poetics, in a close entanglement of the tentative and the definite. Read in this light, striking through would not only express “a preference for a reduced, dieted-down style rather than intrinsic brevity,” meaning, according to Sullivan, that “‘excess of adjectives’ may be allowed in the first draft, but surplus material must be winnowed before the final version” for the full effect of brevity, ellipsis and clashing to be felt (Sullivan, 2013, 105 ; emphasis mine). Rather, crossed-out words, like the visual transcription of Pound’s “don’ts” or Williams’ “no ideas but in things” would seem to spell out a negative manifesto in which left-out fragments turn out to be as significant as the remaining body of the work in the process of informing “the new.”

Scrapings of Poetry, Chips of History : the Transmuted Material

5 As Pierre-Marc de Biasi explains in his genetic typology of crossing-out, the French rature, even more than its English equivalent, is expressive of this material survival, since it is also a technical term deriving from the close form raclure (scraping), which designates the metal grains and shavings produced by the craftsman’s chiseling, filing and polishing, particles that could even be used by goldsmiths to test the value of the alloy making up an object, through a process beautifully called “l’essai à la rature” (the scraping test) (De Biasi, 2-3). Precisely, similar material operations profoundly shaped early modernist poems and criticism, fascinated as they were by the techniques of sculpture and carving, or by extension, by the geological, archeological and mining metaphors of digging and unearthing. Not only do these images actuate the modernist wish to excavate the historical depths lying beneath the complex surfaces of modernist texts, whose revised forms therefore appear “deeper and more fundamental than the original version” (Sullivan, 34 ; emphasis mine), but they also tend to transmute written language into hard and raw substance, left for the poet to chip off and chisel into. Such was, for example, the quality Pound kept looking for, from Imagisme to the

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work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, before he attempted to describe its literary value and genesis in an essay entitled “The Hard and the Soft in French Poetry” : By “hardness” I mean a quality which is in poetry nearly always a virtue—I can think of no case where it is not. By softness I mean an opposite quality which is not always a fault. Anyone who dislikes these textural terms may lay the blame on Théophile Gautier, who certainly suggests them in Emaux et Camées ; it is this hardness that I had first in mind. He exhorts us to cut in hard substance, the shell and the Parian. (Pound, 1918, 264-65)

6 As these introductory lines suggest, and as the rest of the essay confirms, the sculptural categories of “the hard and the soft,” and the corollary opposition between carving and modeling the material out, do not only serve as creative principles guiding composition but also become critical criteria for Pound to sort out artists and styles, comparing French and English poetry, or evaluating various degrees of solidity in their respective authors. It was neither the first nor the last time Pound resorted to such a method of assessment, and sculpture was certainly not the only metaphor to enable critical exclusions. From the explosive rejections listed up in the pages of Blast to “How to Read” and its occultation of scientific failure in the name of historical teleology,4 one can recognize Pound’s propensity to select and discard, both as poet and critic. If indeed, in the early stages of literary creation, the blue pencil becomes the visible mark of the sought-after ideals of textual hardness, compression and efficiency, the strokes it draws across previous writings do not fail to materialize a larger desire to shape the great narrative of modernism by ruling names out as well as the words inherited from them, bypassing artistic forebears in order to invent new lines of continuity. One only needs to proceed a little deeper into “The Hard and the Soft in French Poetry” to observe how Gautier’s art also provides a technique to cut into the hard material of literature at large : We have in English a certain gamut of styles : we have the good Chaucerian, almost the only style in English where “softness” is tolerable ; we have the good Elizabethan ; which is not wholly un-Chaucerian ; and the bad, or muzzy, Elizabethan ; and the Miltonic, which is a bombastic and rhetorical Elizabethan coming from an attempt to write English with Latin syntax. […] We have Pope, who is really the Elizabethan satiric style, more or less born out of Horace, and a little improved or at least regularized. […] And after that we have “isms” and “eses” : the pseudo-Elizabethanism—i.e., bad Keats ; and the romantics, Swinburnese, Browningese, neo-celticism. And how the devil a poet writing English manages to find or make a language for poems is a mystery. (Pound, 1918, 267-8)

7 Surely, this mode of literary revaluation and exclusion is not limited to the poet or his epoch, but typifies any (re)construction of the canon. However, the revisionist practices of modernist authors give particular acuteness to the scoring through exemplified by Pound’s method, a technique of reading, pencil in hand, that would only harden with time, evolving from the deductive pedagogy of his first essays to the cultural imperialism of the 1930s, as Catherine Paul has shown in her analysis of “Italian Fascist Exhibitions and Ezra Pound’s Move to the Imperial” (2005). As is well known, literary history would long bear the mark of such slashes, shaped as it was by subsequent hackings of the modernist canon, from the critics’ election of a reductive male “modernist quartet” (Lentricchia), to the limiting debates over Pound’s or Stevens’s era called into question by Marjorie Perloff, not to mention the amnesia that

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often caused critics to bypass after-war poetry in their mapping out of artistic legacies, as denounced by Clément Oudart (2010).

Crossing Out or Setting Right ? The Double Edge of Correction

The Art of Removing : Miss Moore’s “Various Scalpels”

8 Alternatively counted among the central fashioners of modernism or as a mere parenthetical oddity in literary history, Marianne Moore has not escaped the aberrations imposed by such literary reconfigurations, “caused in part,” Cristanne Miller suggests, “by her own publishing and behavior patterns” (21). Before she started unstitching and reshuffling her own corpus though, few doubted her association with the language of rupture at its most radical, as the early critical assessments of her work indicate. Among her first admirers, H.D. praised the poet’s solid craftsmanship in an article written soon after she recognized her former Bryn Mawr classmate among The Egoist contributors : Miss Moore turns her perfect craft as the perfect craftsman must inevitably do, to some direct presentation of beauty, clear, cut in flowing lines, but so delicately that the very screen she carves seems meant to stand only in that serene palace of her own world of inspiration—frail, yet as all beautiful things are, absolutely hard—and destined to endure longer, far longer than the toppling sky scrapers, and the world of shrapnel and machine-guns in which we live. (H.D., 1916, 118)

9 Discovering her poems, along with Mina Loy’s, in the pages of the 1917 Others anthology, Ezra Pound, identified a similar “arid clarity, not without beauty” which he attributed to “le tempérament de l’Américaine [sic]” (1918b, 58), before sifting her work through his long tested critical sieve. “Laforgue’s influence or some kindred tendency is present in the whimsicalities of Marianne Moore and Mina Loy,” he wrote, then adding : The gentle reader accustomed only to glutinous imitations of Keats, diaphanous dilutations of Shelley, wooly Wordsworthian paraphrases, or swishful Swinburniania will doubtless dart back appalled by Miss Moore’s departures from custom ; custom, that is, as the male or female devotee of Palgravian insularity understands that highly elastic term. (Pound, 1918c, 188-9)

10 Ironically, it was not long before Moore corrected Pound’s assumptions, dryly, though politely, ruling out the influences he had attributed to her—including his own—to substitute them with a more personal canon, thereby circumventing his emendations while imposing hers.5 Eliot was more cautious in his analysis of Moore’s literary inheritance, though approving of the same “quite new rhythm,” ironical use of language, and “almost primitive simplicity of phrase” (Eliot, 1923 ; quoted in Gregory, 44). A few years later, William Carlos Williams took the general appreciation of “Miss Moore” one step further, in a comment that probably summed up her assumed ties with radical revision better than any other. After observing how her “break through all preconceptions of poetic form” made “destruction and creation […] simultaneous,” he attempted to transcribe the disorientation provoked by her texts through a series of heterogeneous metaphors : “a crack in the bowl,” “a multiplication, a quickening, a burrowing through, a blasting aside, a dynamization, a flight over,” “an anthology of

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transit,” “a brittle, highly set-off porcelain garden,” or “primitive masonry” all formed a catalog of unconnected images of separation for which Williams nevertheless offered the one reading clue Moore had ever accepted to share : “The only help I ever got from Miss Moore toward the understanding of her verse was that she despised connectives.” (Williams, 1925 ; quoted in Gregory, 67-73). Most enlightening of all was certainly the process of “acid cleansing” the doctor described at length, famously examining the various steps necessary to poetic correction and the purification of language : Miss Moore gets great pleasure from wiping out soiled words or cutting them clean out, removing the aureoles that have been pasted about them or taking them bodily from greasy contexts. For the compositions which Miss Moore intends, each word should first stand crystal clear with no attachments ; not even an aroma. As a cross light upon this, Miss Moore’s personal dislike for flowers that have both a satisfying appearance and an odor of perfume is worth noticing. With Miss Moore a word is a word most when it is separated out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed, dried and placed right side up on a clean surface. (Williams, 1925 ; quoted in Gregory, 72)

11 Just like H.D.’s craftsmanship metaphor and the departures from Georgian custom celebrated by Pound, Williams’s chemical analogy seemed to presuppose a thorough set of revisions as an indispensable preliminary to the clarity and directness of Moore’s art, a critical assumption which undoubtedly coincided with the themes and style exhibited by Moore’s early poems. While indeed her choice of moral, artistic or natural subject is usually bent on the ironical correction of easy prejudices and distorted perceptions, her elaborate forms rest on carefully chiseled syllabic patterns, introducing strong visual cuts against the natural flow of sentences, and studding the lines with hyphens and dashes that open up spaces for potential elision, dissociation or silence, into the continuity of the poetic material.6 First published in 1917, “Those Various Scalpels” thus constructs a complex female portrait, taking the analytical logic of the blazon to a climax when the sharpness of similes—scalpels, scimitars, bundle of lances—is relayed by the surgical anatomizing of lines, before questioning the pointedness of the feminine weapons previously listed, if not the accuracy of the very images conjured up by the speaker : […] —are they weapons or scalpels ? Whetted To brilliance by the hard majesty of that sophistication which is su- Perior to opportunity, these things are rich Instruments with which to experiment. We grant you that, but why dissect destiny with instruments which Are more highly specialized than the tissues of destiny itself ? (Moore, 2002, 262)

12 In a similar way, “The Fish,” selected in The Egoist a year later, confronts the fluidity of aquatic movement and the hard opacity of the mineral, piercing the surface of the sea only to display the “chasms” and cutting edges of a scarred submarine landscape : The Fish

Wade through black jade, Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one Keeps adjusting the ash-heaps : Opening and shutting itself like

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An injured fan, The barnacles undermine the Side of the wave—trained to hide There—but the submerged shafts of the

Sun, split like spun Glass, move themselves with spotlight swift- Ness into the crevices— In and out, illuminating

The turquoise sea Of bodies. The water drives a Wedge of iron into the edge Of the cliff […]

All external Marks of abuse are present of This defiant edifice— All the physical features of

Accident—lack Of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns And hatchet strokes, these things stand Out on it ; the chasm side is

Dead. Repeated Evidence has proved that it can Live on what cannot revive Its youth. The sea grows old in it. (Moore, 2002, 234)

13 Reproducing the hindered transition between the title and the first line, the stanza pattern, for all its regularity, imposes jutting angles which keep interrupting the natural flow of the sentences, thus putting into relief clusters of hard consonants (“split like spun/glass,” “the water drives a wedge/of iron through the edge/of the cliff”), turning the prepositions, conjunctions and copulas into breaks rather than links (the suspension of “like” at the end of the first stanza thus reveals the potential artifice of the comparison for example), or betraying irreducible fractures beneath the deceivingly unifying rhymes, whether in meaning or in sound (the internal eye rhyme of “dead” and “repeated” in the last stanza echoed by that opposing “live” and “cannot revive” forbids any definite resolution of the poem in a celebration of resilience). Though rooted in a more terrestrial milieu, “Radical,” the description of a carrot possibly hiding a self-portrait of the red-haired avant-garde poet herself,7 rests on a comparable pattern where the indentation of gradually expanding lines, corrected by a return to the left margin every seven lines, maintains a subtle balance between growth and containment, freedom and constraint, writing and crossing out : Tapering to a point, conserving everything, this carrot is predestined to be thick. The world is

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but a circumstance, a mis- erable corn-patch for its feet. With ambition, imagination, outgrowth, nutriment, with everything crammed belligerent- ly inside itself, its fibres breed mon- opoly— a tail-like, wedge shaped engine with the secret of expansion, fused with the intensive heat to the color of the set- ting sun and stiff. […] (Moore, 2002, 239)

14 Machine-like, the poem, as much as the vegetable it observes, is shown in the process of its development, as it slowly ingests the linguistic nutriments that seem to come in its way, adding up strings of Latinate polysyllables to its compact, “stiff” and “tail-like” “fibres,” feeding on each new prefix, suffix or -ing endings which aggregate with its root, radix. However, while the rhythmical and visual scheme seem to follow the same mode of expansion, they rapidly contain any tendency to anarchic growth. Faithful to the “radical” principle summed up in its title, guided by a “wedge shaped” pattern that seems at once naturally encoded and fixed by poetic choice, each new line follows a predetermined course and regular syllable count, at times stopping short and splitting words in order to correct possible excrescences, and regulate, if need be, the adverse influences of the surrounding environment.

15 Ironically enough, control over exterior contingency was not infallible. When it first appeared in a 1919 issue of Others, the text included a type-setting error, a duplicated line which, because of the magazine’s financial and editorial difficulties, was only crossed out by hand on each published copy. Nevertheless, however circumstantial and ill fitted it may seem, the correction unwittingly reveals the care with which Moore continuously emended her own work. Any survey of the poem drafts, kept at the Rosenbach Museum and Library along with the rest of Moore’s archive, will quickly reveal the importance of revision at all stages of her creative process, including abundant preliminary note taking, handwritten composition, type-written pages and carbon copies often comprising manuscript alterations, and emended editorial proofs. No doubt this series of stages, common to many modernist writers, as we have seen, was particularly encouraged by Moore’s secretarial training and professional experience as a teacher, librarian, and editor. Nonetheless, the poet’s typing and classifying skills cannot entirely account for her obsessive reworking of texts. As Moore scholars know all too well, her revisions were far from being limited to the genetic prehistory of texts, but continued long after publication in magazine or even book form. Of the poems mentioned above, all three were thoroughly altered before even appearing in Moore’s first authorized collection, Observations. After featuring in The Lantern, Bryn Mawr’s alumni periodical, “Those Various Scalpels” was republished in William Carlos Williams’s and Robert McAlmon’s Contact magazine—which in turn served as the basis for the Observations version—, not without including a few linguistic and visual alterations, most significantly in the concluding lines. Similarly, “The Fish” is much less known and studied in its original form than in a later version, revised for the 1919 Others anthology and showing a different syllabic pattern which accentuates

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the ruptures at work in the poem. Replacing the four-line presentation, the new text was thus arranged in eight indented six-line stanzas causing the first and third lines of each to split, after the model of the first stanza : The Fish

wade through black jade. of the crow blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps opening and shutting itself like […] (Moore, 2002, 85)

16 In the same vein, Moore did not hesitate to alter the “radical” version of her carrot portrait, first cutting off a reference to slavery, before turning the seven-line original to a more clearly spaced ensemble of four six-line stanzas, the first three ending in longer nineteen-syllable lines, while the newly arranged conclusion to the whole poem strikingly reworked the final equilibrium, reading “that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible / to hinder” instead of “that which it is impossible to force, it is im- / possible to hinder” (Moore, 2002, 90).

17 Such a practice was by no means reserved to Moore’s own texts. As editor of the prestigious Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929—a role she fulfilled with such dedication that she stopped writing poems during the interval—Moore was renowned for her meticulous readings, if not her finicky comments according to some unsuccessful contributors. This four-year period is filled with professional mail—internal letters, acceptance or rejection slips, proof sheets—which all betray the strongly reductive and corrective tendency of her editorial style. Despite the house policy, which stipulated that a selected text should not be modified, Moore did not hesitate to suggest some extremely precise changes, in an epistolary style that was not any less acute. Some exchanges remained cordial, as when, for instance, Moore politely submitted some changes to Robert Hillyer’s poem “Remote” : “May we, however, make so bold, despite the exactions of symmetry, as to ask if you would permit us to publish it without the last line—and would the sequence, to you, be irreparably impaired if the third stanza were omitted ?” (Moore, 1997, 212 ; emphasis mine). Other discussions took a less friendly tone. Maxwell Bodenheim who would complain about “the harshly exacting, complete- perfection-or-rejection attitude of a magazine which offers a leniently appreciative eye and persistently numerous acceptances to anything written by Mr. E. E. Cummings, Mr. Malcolm Cowley, and other poets” (quoted in Moore, 1997, 213), would receive the following type of falsely neutral response : Dear Mr. Bodenheim : I was not aware of your having published work other than that which you have deemed worthy of preservation. In respect to my concept of your concept of woman, I would say that although the words quoted in my review were those of a character in your book rather than your own, you in no way made it apparent that the view expressed was at variance with your own. If I have misled any person, I am glad to think that he may revert to you, yourself, and to your books for his final concepts. In returning your “Poetic Essay,” The Dial congratulates you upon lines nine to fourteen inclusive. (Moore, 1997, 218 ; emphasis mine)

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18 But the most famous case of editorial contention has certainly remained the one opposing Marianne Moore and Hart Crane over the publication of the latter’s poem “The Wine Menagerie,” which title The Dial editor suggested changing to “Again” while requesting a number of alterations Kenneth Burke would later sum up by declaring she had taken all the wine from the menagerie. Crane reacted with less humor : though his financial situation forced him to accept the revisions, he privately complained that between Moore and Margaret Anderson, poetry was in the hands of two “hysterical virgins.”8

“Propriety” : Revision as Rectification

19 Biased and severe as they might seem, Bodenheim and Crane’s criticisms would seem to inflect Moore’s portrait as a radical reviser. From her dedicated allies to her more cautious critics, from her early champions to her late year protégés, most of her contemporaries have expressed their bafflement at the peculiar association of unconventional poetics, progressive ethics and yet conservative manners embodied by Moore, and even more clearly crystallized by her mother’s omnipresent influence. While Bryher’s 1925 roman à clef West could feature Moore as Anne Trollope, a XIXth century British-looking poet reminiscent, along with her mother, of an “engravin[g] from an early Victorian novel,” (Bryher, 40) if not a “prehistoric creature, half bird and half dinosaur” (ibid.), Elizabeth Bishop, in her fond memoir of her mentor, recalled the two women as “what some people might call ‘prudish,’” though “it would be kinder to say ‘over-fastidious,’” likely to chide the young author for writing such “improper” words as “spit” or “water-closet” (478), thus showing the persistence of Moore’s anachronistic style. In light of such testimonies, revision therefore appears as a conservative tendency, as much as a revolutionary practice. Although Moore’s radical use of the blue-pencil is undeniable, her corrections also need to be read as a means of adjustment and rectification, meant to set the text right by striking it through, along the lines fixed by moral and linguistic propriety alike. Unlike Stein, Williams, Reznikoff or Zukofsky who, according to Charles Bernstein, managed “to create a new world in English, a new word for what they called America” precisely because “they were second speakers of English or children of second-language speaker” (147), Moore, it would seem, managed to negotiate a writing space within the very bounds of her genteel American education, under the corrective influence of her mother, a former English teacher and devout Presbyterian who consistently interfered with her daughter’s attitudes and language : [Mrs Moore’s] manner toward Marianne was that of a kindly, self-controlled parent who felt that she had to take a firm line, that her daughter might be given to flightiness or—an equal sin, in her eyes—mistakes in grammar. She had taught English at a girls’ school and her sentences were Jonsonian in weight and balance. (Bishop, 1984, 477)

20 Left to her own means though, Moore proved as scrupulous as her mother. Typographic exactitude was obviously crucial to a poet who could remark about Henry James : “Our understanding of human relations has grown—more perhaps than we realize in the last twenty years ; and when Henry James disappoints us by retaining the Northerner’s feeling about the Confederate, we must not make him directly contemporary, any more than we dispute his spelling ‘peanut’ with a hyphen” (Moore, 1986, 316 ; emphasis mine). Her own verbal combinations seemed almost meant to put the type-setter to test, when

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an expected punctuation sign was withdrawn (“What Are Years” was thus supposed to be written without a question mark, despite her editors’ wishes), or when minute permutations were introduced into the text, challenging readers to carefully discriminate between “pin-swine” and “swine-pin,” “bell-boy” and “buoy-ball” or “glass-eyes” and “eye-glasses,” a tendency the author herself would later deride : Annoyances abound. We should not find them lethal—a baffled printer’s emendations for instance (my “elephant with frog-colored skin” instead of “fog-colored skin” and “the power of the invisible is the invisible” instead of the “power of the visible is the invisible” sounding like a parody on my meticulousness, a glasshopper instead of a grasshopper. (Moore, 1961, 269)

21 Far from signaling the revolutionary liberation of signs on the page, her use of typography was the most visible expression of the poet’s linguistic meticulousness, and of her broader intellectual concern for exact perception, whether in the field of scientific inquiry or that of philosophical reflection. Just as in “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks” she could celebrate the rigorous protocol guaranteeing exact time transmission as a counterpoint to the falsifications of speech in troubled times of war, she insistently commented on the need to remedy the faults of imprecise language, weighty syntax, inappropriate vocabulary, or excessive rhetoric. Her lasting defiance for hyperbole and verbal waffling was for instance crystallized in a late piece, published successively under the titles “Ocasionem Cognosce” and “I’ve Been Thinking” before being collected as “Avec Ardeur” in the Complete Poems : Avec Ardeur

Dear Ezra, who knows what cadence is.

I’ve been thinking—mean, cogitating :

Make a fuss and be tedious.

I’m annoyed. Yes ; am. I avoid

“adore” and “bore” ;

am, I say by

the word (bore) bored.

I refuse to use

“divine” to mean

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something pleasing :

“terrific color” for some horror. […] Without pauses, the phrases

lack lyric force, unlike

Attic, Alcaic,

or freak calico-Greek.

22 Under the aegis of Ezra Pound, master in revision, the poem presents a defense of poetic fussiness along with a lesson in stylistic correction. The long column of tight couplets, interspersed with a few single lines and tercets, each line no more than five-, or more rarely six- and seven-syllable-long, forbids any stereotyped rhythmical pattern, while transposing into the space of the page the remedy it proposes against cliché and verbal inflation. At the scale of each stanza, the abundant typographical signs—dashes, parentheses, or quotation marks—manifest the continuous emendations at work within the flow of a seemingly spontaneous and spoken confession, mimicking the twists and turns of the speaker’s cogitation in progress. The poem therefore unfolds along a series of lexical adjustments and rejections, against the excesses and devaluation of trite language—those hyperbolic “word diseases” which plague conversation. Paradoxically though, the speaker rapidly contradicts her own statement as she turns her catalog of stale phrases into a vivid repertoire of rhyming and musical words, displaying her own mastery of cadence, while denying the piece any poetic value, in an ultimate revising gesture : “This is not verse / of course.”

23 Thus cracked with irregularities and ironies, the prescriptive surface of the poem finally enables a subtler grasp of the poet’s corrective bias, hinted at by a reversal in the revisionary structure of the text. After discarding one verbal cliché after another, and before concluding on a twice negative apothegm (“nothing mundane is divine ; / nothing mundane is divine”), the poem proposes a brief series of more positive counter-examples, listing up several odd-sounding words obviously immune to overuse. If, the poem tells us, they “do not lack / lyric force,” “Attic,” “Alcaic,” or “Freak / calico-Greek” mostly evoke Moore’s taste for collections of exotic species and rare objects, be it in real or paper form. Read more closely, the words do not sound alike so much as they introduce a principle of discordance within their very network of meaning : while “Attic” sends back to Athens’ ancient civilization, and by extension, characterizes the purity and refinement of style, “Alcaic” refers to a more complex manner, since it points to “a complicated variation of a dominant iambic pattern” (Webster). The twist is further accentuated in the next couplet, as the whimsicality of

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“freak” finds expression in the compound-adjective “calico-Greek,” a fanciful coinage combining the sobriety of classical arts and the variegations of an Indian printed fabric. Wildly departing from regular lexical and poetic patterns, the text ends up following its own erratic path, correcting its trajectory to wander off onto more unexpected roads. It therefore turns out that if Moore’s style is normative, the norm it complies with is more personal and contingent than established by pre-existing conventions.

24 By no means limited to the realm of poetic invention alone, this reassessment touches upon the very question of language and its rules. Certainly, English, for Moore, was far from representing the negative horizon against which Isabelle Alfandary suggests American authors needed to invent their own tongue, even if it meant twisting, unraveling, and crossing the root out to better mark off the difference of their own “litté-rature” (111-119). As we have seen, Moore’s family background and education seemed to exclude any internal conflict with the “mother tongue,” be it literary English or genteel American, and many critics have indeed underlined the propriety of her speech and writing, from Glenway Wescott who recognized the signs of an “aristocratic” art in her verse, to T.S. Eliot who rather identified the influence of superior college education. However proper her language might have sounded though, Moore was as fascinated by the peculiarities of regional, social or individual languages as she was by standard English, as she later confessed in an interview with Donald Hall : The accuracy of the vernacular ! That’s the kind of thing I am interested in, am always taking down little local expressions and accents. I think I should be in some philological operation or enterprise, am really much interested in dialect and intonations. (Moore, 1961, 254)

25 Starting in the first decades of the century, at a time of harsh linguistic and cultural debates, where the value of a specifically American tongue had to be asserted by such initiatives as H.L. Mencken’s full length study of The American Language (1919) or the collaborative tracts issued by the Society for Pure English for the promotion of a more inclusive, though rigorous, exploration of English, Moore’s enduring fascination for the variety of idioms took her even further. Not only was she an assiduous reader of Mencken’s or the Society’s works, more or less directly alluded to in texts like the poem “England” or The Dial’s editorial comments, but she also pursued her own “philological operation,” keeping a “conversation notebook” in which she jotted down felicitous remarks or particular turns of speech that would regularly find their way into her texts, spangling the fabric of her speech, calico-like, with pieces of regional dialects, specific sociolects, or more individual peculiarities.

26 Oddly enough, this incorporation of difference, though it invalidates the notion of a standardized norm underlying Moore’s revisions, does not exactly eliminate any corrective instinct. Rather, it almost seems to turn it back against the poet’s own tongue, highlighting the very oddities that make it depart from common language. So Robert Pinsky suggests, when gently mocking the “effect of conceivably deliberate distortion” separating Moore’s words from the baseball jargon she tries to imitate in her poem “Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese” (Pinsky, 20). So does Elizabeth Bishop confirm, as she exposes the “unscientific theory that Marianne [Moore] was possessed of a unique, involuntary sense of rhythm, therefore of meter, quite unlike anyone else’s” and “from birth, had been set going to a different rhythm” (139-140) which had not sought to shape the radical poetics of Modernism so much as it had found an opportune field of expression in it. And so did innumerable critics, who

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would try to pinpoint, admiringly or grudgingly, Miss Moore’s innumerable idiosyncrasies, a notion the poet herself would study consistently, in animals and men alike, in behavior and speech, through particular author’s works or from a more theoretical angle. In her essay “Idiosyncrasy and Technique” for example (Moore, 1986, 506-518), she thus significantly associated patient craft and artistic know-how to what Robert Pinsky defines as the identity (“sameness”) of one’s constitution (“crasis”), or in other words, the artist’s ungraspable but perfectly distinctive signature.

The Vanishing Line of Elision

“Tapering to a Point” ? The Never-Ending Finishing Touches

27 Evolving from a sign of normative meticulousness to the idiosyncratic expression of style, Moore’s revisionary practice would therefore seem to bring us back to the figure of the craftsman or the modernist genius, endlessly tinkering her work in a tongue and to an end that only she would truly know. One might then be tempted to read emendations, thus set to the norm of individual creation alone, as striving for an ideally finished masterpiece, enacting, as Pierre-Marc de Biasi explains, “a teleological simulation that projects the ambition of the definitive at the very heart of incompletion” (4 ; translation mine). In this light, Moore’s work could possibly recall the ideal collection projected by Wallace Stevens, a poet she deeply admired and whose writing was obsessively directed towards the achievement of a final, irreversible opus, as Juliette Utard demonstrates in Wallace Stevens, le vers et l’irréversible (2005). But while Stevens, who consistently destroyed his drafts, multiplied the finishing touches with a view to actually finishing his work, completion, for Moore, seems to have known no end. Publication meant neither the form of renunciation that Paul Valéry regretted when he confided that one never finishes a work, but abandons it, nor the “total masterpiece” the Mallarmean Book aspired to become, but a simple grouping of pages, a series of proofs the writer never ceased to emend. When errata seemed necessary, no “correct version” of the text was ever established, systematically and once and for all. Rather, revisions remained diffuse and progressive, not unlike the operations of an artisanal process, through which no (re)creation is made to look like another, as a glance at her annotated publications quickly shows. If indeed, as we have suggested, her texts were frequently reworked before a new edition, it was not unusual for Moore to alter, by hand and on the very book or magazine page, an already published poem. A copy of her 1921 Poems, signed for the Williamses and kept at the University of Pennsylvania, bears a strikingly high number of revisions, from crossed-out titles to modified punctuation. Behind this gesture, Moore certainly sought to compensate for the editorial role she had not been able to play in the composition of the volume, released in England by H.D. and Bryher, without her full consent. However, the alterations she made did not exactly express any firm preference, since they would keep changing well after the publication of the poet’s first authorized collection, a few years later. Printed periodicals could easily undergo the same fate : by a mysterious course, a revised contribution to Close-Up would end up on the shelves of a second-hand bookstore, before being discovered by Joseph Cornell who, in a 1943 letter, would marvel at the “published article […] corrected like proof in handwriting of such exquisite precision and delicacy that it gave [him] the feeling that it belonged to it’s [sic] author” (Rosenbach Museum and Library, V :12). Not even the final act of the

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Complete Poems, and the seemingly irrevocable elisions they contain have fixed the author’s corpus once and for all, since there is not one but two versions of them, the second, published in 1981, integrating new pieces and corrections added by the author after 1967. In this perspective, the Complete Poems do not really differ from her previous Selected or Collected Poems, whose titles manifest the arbitrary choices of the grouping with less ambiguity, but rather inscribe themselves within the long line of books in which Moore usually combined new and already published poems, as if they all formed one single, continuous and endlessly revised collection.

28 One then realizes how complex the task is for anyone facing such a relentless proofreader, unable to decide which version to fix his attention on. Confronted to such an unstable corpus, Robin Shulze has suggested reading Moore’s evolving work along the lines of “textual Darwinism,” a notion adapted from Stevens Parrish’s criticism of the Whig teleological interpretations of Romantic literature, and which, applied to the poet, seems more than an editorial metaphor : Certainly, in terms of textual and editorial theory, we still have our creationist critics who, despite historical, physical evidence to the contrary, cling to the romantic belief that texts have a single perfect and special creation at the hands of their authors. Unconcerned with any historical record of textual changes, such critics trust that the text that they have in hand is the text that has always been and always will be. We also still have our textual Christian evolutionists, critics who freely admit the physical evidence of textual change and diligently record substantive variants. Looking at the paleontology of the text, however, they see evidence of directed, intended change for the better. The author’s final—or latest—version stands as the perfected fruition of a gradually unfolding design. […] Last, but not least (or best), we have our textual Darwinists who look at the evolutionary record of a text and see, not progress toward a predetermined goal, but a series of local adaptations—the text adjusted again and again, to suit the author’s sense of its fitness in relation to the pressures of the author’s changing social, cultural, and textual conditions. […] Texts do not become better or worse, they simply become different as the world around them changes ; each version achieves its own kind of fitness “in relation to conditions.” (Schulze, 274-5)

29 If the evolutionist paradigm therefore concentrates on the minute variations of each text, without privileging any original or final intention, one understands what Moore’s revisionary practice entails for the constitution of any corpus and, more broadly, for her integration into Modernism’s revolutionary project at large. When Pound urged the modern artist to “make it new,” the relative indeterminacy of his terms certainly allowed for flexible adaptations and continuous renewals, but it seemed to exclude neither the idea of a fixed referent—language, literature, history—, nor the horizon of a definitive modernist monument beyond its successive reworkings, as the relentless elaboration of The Cantos suggest. Conversely, when Moore “makes it new,” her corpus, like an ever-changing organism, does not start afresh so much as it varies, mutates and ramifies, on an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary mode, excluding historical ruptures and teleological readings. Her works form no more of a modernist opus than a stabilized corpus, and they are no more complete than they are unfinished, which would already presuppose a guiding line, however tentative. Quite to the contrary, they discreetly shatter preexisting patterns of literary history, confronting radical breaks with continuous variations, and stabilized chronologies with multiplying time lines.

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“A Note on the Notes” : the Corpus as Appendix

30 Looking back at Moore’s editorial revisions however, one cannot but recognize the ominous signs of a brutal catastrophe in the evolutionary course of her works. One remembers how the title of her last collection was immediately contradicted by a discreet yet resolute epigraph, establishing elision as the true guiding principle behind the “complete” poems. The discomfort felt by readers accustomed to her works and by critics in search of extensive texts, has inspired many thorough studies, among which Andrew Kappel’s synthesis “Complete with Omissions : The Text of Marianne Moore’s Complete Poems.” As he explains, the structure of the collection rests, like several others before it, on the order proposed by Eliot’s edition of Moore’s 1935 Selected Poems, starting with the early 1930s publications, before coming back to a selection from her 1924 Observations—from which many poems had already undergone severe cuts—, then proceeding in chronological order up to the most recent texts. If a few former pieces were restored, the disappearance of many others, including early poems such as “Radical,” cut surprising holes into the expected progression of her works, more particularly affecting her avant-garde beginnings. And if some more fortunate poems have made it into the final selection, it is sometimes only to find themselves amputated of copious amounts of lines, if not whole stanzas. Most emblematic is certainly the much studied example of “Poetry,” Moore’s closest equivalent to an ars poetica, not only because it exemplifies her predilection for the most instinctual definition of poetical writing, but also because of the innumerable revisions the piece was reshaped by. As Robin Schulze summarizes, the poem was first published in a 1919 issue of Others, as a thirty-line poem, organized in five syllabic stanzas, before turning into a four-stanza poem of twenty-nine lines for the first edition of Observations in 1924. One year later, the second edition of the collection contained a much altered piece, reduced to thirteen lines of free verse. The 1930s would mark a return to longer syllabic versions of the poem, though with a still unfixed pattern, including a modified form of the 1924 poem published in the 1935 Selected Poems, then again in the 1951 Collected Poems. After two more decades of editorial changes and restored versions, Moore would finally deal the final blow by cutting off the near entirety of her piece, reducing it to its paradoxical three-line introduction : I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine. (Moore, 1981, 36)

31 Under the effect of this ultimate and most radical slash, Moore’s ars poetica does not so much reiterate long tested techniques of compression and efficiency, as it enacts the author’s refusal to achieve a poetic oeuvre. Though perfectly audible in her reply to William Butler’s notebook remark “I don’t greatly like poetry myself,” the persona seemingly orchestrates the author’s withdrawal, behind the figure of a critical reader, evoking Moore’s claimed reluctance to call herself a poet—“I’m not Columbus discovering America. I’m a worker with words, that’s all,” she declared on receiving the National Medal for Literature in 1968 (Sprague, 185)—or even to identify her texts as poems—“Avec Ardeur” has given us a sample of her customary dodging of the term. And yet, the poem suggests, it is only once one’s preconceived definitions of the genre and conditioned respect for high-flown art have been ruled out, that “genuine” poetry can arise, within the margins of an elided text, or in the space lying between cast-off words and remaining lines. Precisely, the final version of “Poetry” cannot quite be

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separated from the 1951 twenty-nine line version Moore agreed to place in an appendix, transferring part of her writing into the recesses of the peritext, a gesture that, though it was recommended by her editor, Moore finally recognized as “consistent with her poetics” (Schulze, 279). The inclusion of a body of notes was not a late invention of Moore’s. Partly inspired by T.S. Eliot’s additions to The Waste Land, Moore had started to develop her own system of endnotes as early as 1924, with the publication of Observations. More than a biographical apparatus acknowledging the sources of Moore’s abundant quotations, with more or less authentic scrupulosity, the notes were to become a creative space in itself, allowing for further developments as well as ironical discordances, as would be revealed, for instance, by a poem like “Tom Fool at Jamaica,” in which a horse-race only provides a pretext for the author’s own tom-foolery, subverting the apparent seriousness of the critical appendix through proliferating notes—longer than the poem itself—undermining its claim to brevity through endless gloss or mixing academic references and low-brow culture. As if to add one final ironical revision to her notes, Moore inserted a cautionary “note on the notes” in her 1951 Collected Poems, which she would later reproduce in the Complete Poems, provokingly advising the reader to “disregard the notes.” Just like her epigraph, “the note on the notes” therefore plays an ambiguously revisionary role. If the former invites readers to accept the poet’s elisions as voluntary while spurring them to look for the missing parts, it would appear that the latter deflects their attention from the notes only to encourage them to proceed further into the appendix and even possibly, to venture into the layers of papers, notes, drafts, revised versions Moore patiently accumulated and classified, before bequeathing them, along with her full living-room, to the Rosenbach Museum and Library. Viewed in the light of these critical and archival additions, Moore’s revising practice finally appears as more positive and talkative process than it seemed at first. As the corpus is drained into its own margins, elisions act as invisible footnotes, drawing “the serious reader,” as Moore hoped hers to be, into the periphery of the text, be it within or without the book. Displacing the authority of an impossible opus towards the more secretive and flexible space of its margin, Moore’s unstable work therefore provides an alternative to the “hard” monumentality of such a foundational oeuvre as Pound’s and invite us to redefine our very methods of reading Modernism at large, breaking up the straight line of the revolutionary project to embrace the more layered and playfully reticent temporality of revision.

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H. D., End to Torment : A Memoir of Ezra Pound, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King, New York, New Directions, 1979.

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NOTES

1. The choice of typography in the title is intended as a reference to Moore’s own use of emendation (a poem entitled “Radical” was deleted from her Complete Poems, among other famous revisions), but it also aims at suggesting that the paradigm of revolutionary radicalism may not be the most significant in her case. 2. “[T]he labor required to make The Cantos, Ulysses, “A,” and Stein’s writing legible has to be justified, ultimately, by the value that the writing embodies, but that value has most often to be transmitted through hearsay as the writing remains illegible or semilegible for any reader who is not a Poundian, Joycean, Steinian, or—if such a category exists yet—a Zukofskian. Unlike, say, Dickens, where criticism disturbs the consumable clarity of the surface to reveal additional meaning beneath, with these four, unreadability is the raw material that is turned into the finished product of significance, which then gives the works their social importance.” (Perelman, 1994, 1) 3. This interpretation was suggested by Pound himself, in a 1932 letter : “I wonder how far the Mauberley is merely a translation of the Homage to S.P., for such as couldn’t understand the latter” (quoted in Sullivan, 291). 4. “When studying physics we are not asked to investigate the biographies of all the disciples of Newton who showed interest in science, but who failed to make any discovery. Neither are their unrewarded gropings, hopes, passions, laundry bills, or erotic experiences thrust upon the hurried student or considered germane to the subject” (Pound, 1954, 15). 5. After writing his first reviews on Moore, Pound sent her a personal letter in which he suggested a series of emendations to Moore’s poem “Old Tiger,” offered editorial help, and questioned the intriguing new author on her geographic, familial and artistic backgrounds. In

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her reply, Moore happily complied with most of his suggestions, though she added : “The resemblance of my progress to your beginnings is an accident so far as I can see. I have taken great pleasure in both your prose and your verse, but it is what my mother terms the saucy parts, which have most fixed my attention. […] I like a fight but I admit that I have at times objected to your promptness with the cudgels. I say this merely to be honest. I have no Greek, unless a love for it may be taken as knowledge and I have not read very voraciously in French ; I do not know Ghil and Laforgue and know of no tangible French influence on my work. Gordon Craig, Henry James, Blake, the minor prophets and Hardy, are so far as I know, the direct influences bearing on my work” (Moore, 1997, 122-3). 6. Other critics were less enthusiastic about Moore’s radical cuts, which they deemed too contrived and unpoetic. In a tepid review of the poet’s work, Harriet Monroe thus synthetized the more negative assessment of her technique : “What I do find in these poems is a brilliant array of subtly discordant harmonies not unlike those of certain ultra-modern composers, set forth in stanza-forms purely empirical even when emphasized by rhyme, forms which impose themselves arbitrarily upon word-structure and sentence-structure instead of accepting happily the limitations of the art’s materials, as all art must. When Miss Moore sets the first syllable of the word accident as a whole line to rhyme with lack, or the article a as a line to rhyme with the end of Persia ; when she ends a stanza in a split infinitive, or in the middle of the swift word very —indeed, anywhere in the middle of words or sentences, she is forcing her pattern upon materials which naturally reject it, she is giving a wry twist even though her aim is a grotesque ; and when her aim is more serious, such verbal whimsicalities strike at once the intensely false note of affectation” (Monroe, 1922 ; quoted in Gregory, 35). 7. For interpretations of “Radical” as a feminist avant-garde self-portrait of the poet, see Robin Schulze (189-192) and Linda Leavell (126-127). 8. For more details on the relationships between Moore and Crane, see Evan Hughes, 54-91. If the episode suggests her revisions were only moralistic and inspired by excessive modesty, Moore often made an explicit—although neither revolutionary, nor reactionary—connection between moral virtue and a precise, compact, if not terse writing style, as can be seen in the poems “To a Snail,” “Silence,” or “Avec Ardeur” for example.

ABSTRACTS

From the editorial birth of Imagism to the preliminary pruning of The Waste Land, the dominant narratives of Modernism have often been built on foundational acts of crossing out, whether self- imposed, collective or allographic. Since they combine the erasure of past verbal excesses and the endeavor of compression on the page, such slashes of the “creative pencil” (H.D.), aptly seem to enact and materialize the revolutionary dynamics of rejection and renewal that most writers and critics have chosen to foreground over alternative paradigms of change. Leading us from the working manuscript to the little magazine, from the individual collection to the endlessly emended magnum opus, from the anthology to the text-book, the practice of revision, then, retraces the historical construction of literary revolution(s), highlighting lines of rupture and continuity as certain names are marginalized or simply deleted. Because, among them, Marianne Moore was herself a relentless editor of her own or others’ words, yet has remained a shifting figure in the “great narrative” of Modernism, her work allows us to re-examine the claims of artistic radicalism, in the light of more complex modes of revision.

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Although she may indeed have styled herself as a “radical” (as the title of an early hidden- portrait in verse suggests), and was rapidly hailed as such by her peers, her revising practice opens up the spectrum of transformations to more ambiguous models. While her textual experiments betray a secret pull towards correction and propriety, her tinkering with words evokes the patient chiseling of the craftsman rather than the stroke of genius, or the fanciful errata of natural evolution over historical catastrophe. Wavering between abundant working notes and notoriously truncated publications, between exhaustiveness and silence, between endless starts and the ever-receding horizon of completion, Moore’s unstable corpus thus contributes to the redefinition of creative revolution.

De la naissance éditoriale de l’Imagisme à l’élagage préliminaire de The Waste Land, les récits dominants du modernisme se sont souvent bâtis sur l’acte fondateur d’une rature, qu’elle soit personnelle, collective ou allographique. Combinant l’effacement d’excès littéraires passés et la recherche de compression à l’échelle de la page, de telles entailles paraissent matérialiser de façon idéale la dynamique du rejet et du renouveau préférée, par nombre d’auteurs, à des paradigmes du changement moins drastiques. Du manuscrit au petit magazine, du recueil au grand œuvre sans cesse retravaillé, de l’anthologie au manuel universitaire, la correction rend ainsi visible la construction même des révolutions littéraires, traçant en filigrane des lignes de rupture et de continuité dans l’histoire, non sans en écarter, voire en escamoter, certains noms. Parce qu’elle fut elle-même, à l’image de ses contemporains, une correctrice implacable de ses propres textes comme de ceux des autres, mais demeura longtemps une figure inclassable du « grand récit » moderniste, tantôt célébrée comme ouvrière incontournable du mouvement, tantôt considérée comme l’une de ses curiosités marginales, Marianne Moore nous permet de réexaminer les présupposés du radicalisme artistique, à la lumière de modes de révisions plus complexes. Bien que la poète se fût elle-même dépeinte en « radical(e) », et eût été rapidement saluée en ces termes par ses pairs, sa pratique de la correction ouvre en effet le champ des transformations à des modèles plus ambigus. Tandis que ses expériences textuelles trahissent parfois un retour latent au « bon usage » de la langue, son travail des mots évoque quant à lui le patient ciselage de l’artisan, sinon les erratas fantaisistes de l’évolution naturelle, contre tout catastrophisme historique. Oscillant entre l’exhaustivité et le silence, l’abondance des notes et la violence des coupes, les départs sans cesse réitérés et l’horizon asymptotique de l’achèvement, le corpus instable de Moore nous aide ainsi à redéfinir la notion de révolution créatrice.

INDEX

Keywords: revision, Modernism, radicalism, conservatism, idiosyncrasy, corpus, canon

AUTHOR

AURORE CLAVIER Université Paris 8 – Vincennes – Saint-Denis

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Eliot’s Modernist Manifesto

Viorica Patea

1 Published in the final two issues of The Egoist, in September and December of 1919, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was soon destined to become an “instant classic.”1 By mid-century, this essay was accepted as the “gospel” of literary theory (Schuchard, 73). Eliot famously proclaimed: “Tradition […] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour” (SE 14). 2 Since then, generation after generation of writers and critics have attested to the importance of this essay not only in Eliot’s works but also in the development of modern literary criticism. Eliot, the young American expatriate, tried to forge a grand new poetic idiom that embraced nothing less than “the mind of Europe.” His new poetics consisted of a constant revival of timeless values that he believed had a regenerative effect on the human spirit and needed to be reasserted. Eliot’s “monuments” were invested with a normative character that reminds us of Gadamer’s “eminent texts.” It seems that a poetics spanning the world’s heritage, whether to revive or simply to overcome the past, was mainly an American enterprise, as in the case of another cosmopolitan expatriate such as Pound

2 While reconsidering concepts such as history, time, and literary tradition, Eliot questioned the nature of the creative process and of artistic renewal, and the relationship between novelty and tradition, change and permanence, and art and life or history. Comparable in its significance to Wordsworth’s Preface (1800) to the Lyrical Ballads, Eliot’s essay was to become the modernist manifesto. As such, it has exacted a tremendous amount of labor from an array of scholars who have tried to decipher its many paradoxical formulations.

3 As Stan Smith rightly observes, Modernist newness is characterized by the tension between novelty and origins (Smith, 2). “Making it new” meant in Anglo-American modernism a return to the origins, a recovery of that which has been forgotten, a dialogical confrontation with the burden of the past, which led to transformative acts of translations, re-adaptations, and re-recreations.3 Artistic creativity drew on a dialectical exchange between tradition and innovation, the recovery of past forms and the forging of new voices. Eliot’s restorations are visionary explorations of the mind of

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Europe that for him stretches from the classical fathers (Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare) back to the Magdalenian draughtsmen.

4 In essence, Eliot’s argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is that great artists are indispensable and that poetry has to be written with a “historical sense” which, different from mere nostalgia, has to be inherited “by great labour,” an endeavor that “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” (SE, 14). Therefore, a poet is compelled to write “not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (SE, 14). In connection with the idea of tradition, Eliot elaborates on the doctrine of impersonality according to which the poet must continually surrender “to something which is more valuable. The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (SE, 17). He supports his argument with a number of paradoxical statements: “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates” (SE 18) only to conclude with the same conundrum: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion, it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (SE 21).

5 Eliot witnessed the end of the theoretical vogue he had inaugurated in the pages of The Egoist, and at the end of the twentieth century, his theories seemed no longer fashionable. His erudite idiom was taken as a privileged and exclusive form of discourse of the dominant ideology. Poet critics such as Karl Shapiro made a plea In Defense of Ignorance (1960). 4 Inimical to change, the concept of tradition itself seemed to go against the grain of the intellectual framework of modernity keen on progress and newness. Modern literary criticism became suspicious of value judgments and used theory to assault the assertions of tradition (Graff, 1987, 247-62). Post-structuralist critics, such as Harold Bloom, considered Eliot a forefather to be misread, mistrusted and deconstructed: he had “enslaved” literature with his “insights,” “preferences and prejudices” (1). From feminist quarters, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar interpreted Eliot’s essay as the paragon of the patriarchal modernist canon that subjugates female women by means of a “sexualized idiom,” and “exclude[d] them from the literary canon” along with Pound’s The ABC of Reading (1934), William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), and Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought-Urn (1947) (154). The essay was also subjected to a severe ideological critique by scholars with a Marxist bias: Terry Eagleton scornfully derided Eliot’s legacy, reducing it to a mere authoritarian cultural ideology in the spirit of Orwell’s “two legs good, four legs bad”: “Eliot’s own solution is an extreme right-wing authoritarianism: men and women must sacrifice their petty ‘personalities’ and opinions to an impersonal order. In the sphere of literature, this impersonal order is the Tradition. […] This arbitrary construct, however, is the paradoxically imbued with the force of an absolute authority.”5

6 Postmodern critics have often misunderstood or even resented Eliot’s theoretical presuppositions. If at present, the essay is being criticized because it makes a plea for order and stability, in 1919, when it was published, it sounded deeply subversive. Eliot’s new formulations of tradition were taken as something that provoked originality, not as something that holds it back. Like Wordsworth almost a century earlier, Eliot had

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called for the necessity of a revolution in which “a violent stimulus of novelty is required” (TCC, 184) and announced that “culture,” although “traditional […] loves novelty.”6

7 Eliot’s most influential essay has a degree of complexity that goes beyond the ideological criticism to which it has been subjected. The aim of this paper is to explore Eliot’s manifesto from the point of view of both the romantic and the modernist aesthetics, and to revisit the great disparity between Eliot the experimentalist avant- garde poet who advocates the aesthetics of fragmentation and the critic who pleads for self-surrender and the wholeness of tradition. My intention is, first, to relate Eliot’s concepts of tradition and impersonality to the revolution that took place in the visual arts in the first decades of the twentieth century, whose experimental language he tried to transfer to poetic practice; and second, to show the way in which his theories go beyond romantic limitations and present strong affinities with modern trends of philosophical thinking, such as historicist hermeneutics, relativism and pragmatism, which continue to condition our current postmodern debates.

8 Part of our current misunderstanding of Eliot’s essay is due to our imposition of postmodern concerns on another time and context. Back in 1919, the romantic aesthetics of direct expression of emotions created a sense of déja vu. Eliot’s great contribution consisted in doing away with the obsolete romantic language and in reconceiving literary criticism as something different from mere biographical studies. Eliot’s bookishness and culturally charged poetic idiom challenged the prevailing literary standards of the Arnold Benetts of his time who had brought about a moment of cultural stagnation by claiming that “technique” was a sign of decadence caused by the “professionalism in art.”7 Conversely, by mid-century, during “the tranquilized fifties,” the prevailing formalist techniques of the New Critics, whom Eliot had inspired, but had never unequivocally acknowledged, seemed hollow and self-deluding. Reviled in the 1920s as “a drunken bolshevik” (Spender, 11), Eliot gradually acquired the status of a god-fatherly institution, and by the late 1950s, he was considered rather like a literary dictator. In 1945 Delmore Schwartz hailed Eliot as the “International Hero,” the poet of the postwar age, whose work, of all the moderns “had direct and comprehensive concern with the essential nature of modern life” (126-28). Four years later, Schwartz refers to Eliot as a “literary dictator” (313). Eliot’s connection to the Church of England and his later conservative views on culture make us forget his advocacy for change and novelty in both poetry and criticism.

9 On both sides of the Atlantic, the new poetic idioms experienced a disaffiliation with Eliotic modernism. Eliot’s interest in transcendental orders and timeless wholeness seemed foreign to the postmodern sensibility. In the U.S., the postwar poetics of groups such as the Beats, the Confessionals, and the “Deep Image” poets or those of “The Movement” in the U.K., notably Philip Larkin or Kingsley Amis,8 envisaged a new aesthetic of personal breakthrough to more intimate experiences formerly considered taboo, grounded in the psychological disturbance and emotional distress of a troubled self enmeshed in a disquieting family history. They participated in the revolt against impersonality by reinstating the autobiographical first person, and the cult of the spontaneous unmediated moment. The stage was set for a new poetics of openness, rawness and nakedness and Eliot represented, as Marjorie Perloff affirmed in her influential The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981), a moment of closure. The postwar generations of poets irrupted with accessible, rebellious, and shocking confessions of

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psychological exposure while engaging in an Oedipal drama of deconstructing their predecessors. Helen Vendler infamously excluded Eliot from her edition of The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985) which, nevertheless, opened with the poems of Wallace Stevens, already dead by 1955. Other modernists, who died after him, like Williams (1963) and Pound (1972), were also excluded.

“The Mind of Europe”

10 To go further, it seems crucial to turn to the revolutions in the visual arts, since this dimension of Eliot’s work is one of the least analyzed aspects, despite the fact that early reviewers linked his poems to the visual avant-garde (Cianci, 128; Brugière, 2005). In London, Eliot frequented both the Bloomsbury and Vorticist circles and, mostly via Pound, became exposed to the ferment of the artistic avant-garde at a moment of intense interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. In his first letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner, the art collector and founder of the museum in Boston that bears her name today, Eliot gave a detailed chronicle of the current artistic milieu. The letter documents his familiarity with the works of Edward Wadsworth, Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, and Jacob Epstein, and his admiration for the new theories of T.E. Hulme (L, 94). Eliot became the assistant editor of The Egoist in 1917, replacing Richard Aldington who enlisted in the army. In its pages he crystallized his sense of tradition. The Egoist, as the refashioned New Freewoman was now called, was clearly not a stronghold of authoritarian or patriarchal values, but a forum for radical individualism. As Jason Harding remarks, the term, “Egoism,” introduced by Joseph Addison from the French in 1714 with derogatory connotations, had a strong Nietzschean ring threatening the notions of Victorian morality, which professed the virtues of altruism (92). The journal also actively popularized Max Stirner’s rejection of all previous philosophical, intellectual and political systems in favor of a consummate egoism whose only reality is the individual ego.9

11 Wartime London witnessed the confrontation between the English and Italian avant- garde over the role of tradition. Although Vorticism had a strong affinity with Cubism and Futurism, the Vorticists violently rejected the Italians’ intention of making a tabula rasa of the past and destroying all museums and libraries. Eliot’s novel articulation of tradition was a response to the impasse of the vanguards in the crisis after the Great War. The modernists had launched a fierce assault on the conventional complacencies of a stagnant culture, yet when confronted with the actual violence of the war, they felt that art had to provide a sense of coherence, order, and control necessary for survival. Eliot reinvented tradition as a remedy against loss and postwar trauma. He refashioned it as an antidote to the collapse of a culture that had to be saved from anarchy and nihilism, (and also from DADA aesthetics). In the midst of his own personal wreckage and that of his civilization, he relied on tradition, that is, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” as he wrote in The Waste Land (l. 430).

12 His reformulation of tradition was a compromise between the innovative stimuli of both the prewar tumultuous phase of artistic avant-garde and the need for general reconstruction. In this sense, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” combined experimentalism with the general postwar tendency towards order, evident in the work of many other European avant-garde artists between 1917-1920, a period in which

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artists such as Picasso, André Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, Gino Severini also return to figuration.

13 Giovanni Cianci (124-27) documents the way in which key terms in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” are steeped in the art terminology typical of most avant-garde controversies of the time. Eliot’s reference to “significant emotion” is reminiscent of Clive Bell’s “significant form” in his aesthetic theory Art (1914). The “existing monuments” that form an “ideal” and “simultaneous order,” (SE, 15) and the reference to the poet’s “programme for the métier of poetry” (SE, 16), belong to the same semantic field of the rappel à l’ordre aesthetics in France and Italy, “Ritorno al mestiere,” a call launched by Giorgio de Chirico in the art journal Valori Plastici in 1918.

14 Another relevant repercussion of the visual arts on Eliot is to be found in his reference to “the rock drawings of the Magdalenian draughtsmen”—which he visited on August 9, 1919 on a walking tour in Southern France—as fundamental elements that define the mind of Europe. All avant-garde artistic movements celebrated “primitive” art and emphasized the continuity between modernity and prehistory. T.E. Hulme’s conception of art was to have a lasting influence on the evolution of modernism and its wavering between subjectivism and objectivism. Influenced by Worringer’s treatise, Abstraction and Empathy, Hulme (227) discerned in abstract art the impulse of primitive art to transcend nature and achieve the “monumental stability and permanence.”

15 One year before the publication of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot declared in “Tarr,” the review of Wyndham Lewis’s novel: “The artist is more primitive, as well as more civilized, than his contemporaries, his experience is deeper than civilization” (106). In “War-Paint and Feathers” (1919) he insisted on the relevance of primitivism and urged the poet to explore “the stratifications of history that cover savagery” (1036), since the pre-logical regions out of which myth emerged constitute the unconscious foundations of our psyche. Until the end of his life, Eliot was to remain a strong advocate of primitivism, which he regarded as the fountainhead of modern art: “[P]rimitive art and poetry help our understanding of civilized art and poetry” (Eliot, 1919, 1036). The artist had a privileged role in the exploration of the unconscious depths of the psyche to which he alone had access: “the pre-logical mentality persists in civilised man, but becomes available only to or through the poet” (UP, 148). He proclaimed that “poetry begins […] with a savage beating a drum in a jungle, and it retains that essential percussion and rhythm;” for that reason, “one might say that the poet is older than other human beings” (UP, 155). Eliot conceived of the process of poetic creation as visionary incursions into the past and searched for anthropological origins that were explored by the language of depth psychology. Later in life, he understood the creative process as an act of “sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end” (UP, 119). Furthermore, in “The Three Voices of Poetry,” he grounded the wellspring of the process of composition in the “unknown, dark psychic material […] with which the poet struggles” (OPP, 100).

16 When defining tradition, Eliot refers to “a simultaneous order,” and “a simultaneous existence” (SE, 15) in which the temporal and the timeless coexist. As Assmann aptly remarks, Eliot was exorcizing the “demon of chronology” inherent in linear and evolutionary conceptions of time, in order to articulate a new discourse in art, history and literature (11-13). Simultaneism was a specific artistic movement inaugurated by

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Robert and Sonia Delaunay in 1911, which introduced a prominent strategy of avant- garde experimentation in Cubism and Futurism that broke down the barriers of time and space. Eliot’s poetic strategy in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or The Waste Land also consisted in breaking down spatial and temporal boundaries, a method by which he tried to rescue art from its mimetic representations. Furthermore, simultaneity is also a fundamental dimension of Jung’s collective unconscious and of Bergson’s conception of time as a category in which past, present, and future coexist. Studying under Bergson at the Collège de France (1910-11), Eliot was conscious of the impact his philosophy had on the revolution in visual arts and he realized that “[d]iscussion of Bergson was apt to be involved with discussions of Matisse and Picasso” (Eliot, 1934, 451).

17 Eliot’s theoretical pronouncements and poetic practice parallel the experimental techniques of visual artists such as Wyndham Lewis, Charles Wadsworth, or Jacob Epstein who went beyond the limitations of nature in their non-representational compositions. Eliot appropriated these techniques and transferred them to his poetic experiments: his theory of impersonality, formulated in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “the objective correlative” in “Hamlet” (1919), are inseparable from the experiments that had taken place in the non-figurative visual arts.10 Like the avant- garde plastic artists, Eliot learned to distance himself from experience, to present reality as a series of points of view, distorting and decomposing it in simultaneously shifting perspectives, fragments, broken narratives by means of juxtapositions, fragmentations, and collages. The theory of impersonality enabled him to drop the convention of a stable lyric voice and to replace direct self-exposure by a series of dramatizations of the conflicts of a consciousness at odds with itself. Eliot brought about “a new immediacy, a new literalness, and a new abstract intimacy for poetry” that run counter traditional notions of selfhood and “provide richer imaginative alternatives” (Altieri, 198). Eliot’s technique of “depersonalization” allowed him to dislocate discourse, to break down temporal continuity and narrative sequence, to conceive personality as a “zone” or a “field of consciousness” (Kenner, 35-36). The “I” is composed of a collage of voices, masks, registers and points of view that articulate an assemblage of many psychic registers and historical and cultural identities. As Altieri magisterially argued, by these strategies, Eliot invented a new means for dramatizing psychic forces and inner conflicts while recomposing subjectivity into a new geometry that shapes the non-discursive, nonlinear space of interior life (189–209). While the objective correlative unites subjectivity with its objects, impersonality, Eliot’s via negativa, offers the literal representation of the interplay of psychic forces free from the impositions of a univocal interpretive strategies: “Poetry then had to be impersonal and complex—not because such attributes secured the authority of culture but because the poet needed means of resisting the illusory authority of both the poet’s descriptive capacities and his or her seductive personality” (Altieri, 198). By means of impersonality and the objective correlative Eliot overcame the dead end of solipsism translating the self’s inner conflicts into larger symptoms of one’s culture. To Confessional poets like Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Roethke, Eliot showed how to take on victimizing stances in such a way as to go beyond autobiography and make intimate suffering culturally representative. Berryman’s Henry and the dialogue between his id, ego, and libidinal self are fashioned on Prufrock. Plath, Lowell, Roethke take Eliot’s model by which the extremities of voice articulate the many dynamic aspects of the self. Their projections of selfhood are the result of a detached consciousness that

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objectively faces its own antagonistic dynamism. Moreover, despite their personal disclosures, neither of the Confessional poets actually relies on autobiography for success. Berryman was outraged by his identification with Henry. In an interview with Peter Stitt in 1972 he reacted “with rage and contempt” at the label “confessional.” Lowell avowed that his persona was fictional and required of a poem, as he manifested in his praise of Frost, to have “the virtue of a photograph but all the finish of art” (Seidel, 1988, 71). Plath’s “Daddy” is a constructed persona that combines autobiography with historical trauma. In 1962 she declared in an interview to Peter Orr: “I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured […] with an informed and an intelligent mind.” (Web) To Confessional poets Eliot set the example of how to embody a fragmented mind in a fragmented world. To some, like Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Robert Lowell or Seamus Heaney he showed how to confront the ghosts of history and to others he provided antidotes against the contemporary dissociations of sensibility.

18 As a modernist manifesto, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” engages in a conversation with two other seminal texts: Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800) to which Eliot refers directly, and Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” (1846), more indirectly so. These two essays lie at the origins of modernity, representing signposts of opposite traditions, one foregrounding the primacy of feelings and emotions, the other the preeminence of artistic control.

19 Reflecting on Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility” (SE, 21) Eliot formulates what was to become the modernist campaign against romantic aesthetics.11 Taking exception to Wordsworth’s “inexact formula,” Eliot begins by advocating the poets’ absolute control over his material, but while doing so, he turns his argument on its head only to emphasize the unpredictable, unconscious basis of the artistic process. Eliot counters his romantic predecessor and contends that the creative process “is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor […] tranquility” (SE, 21). Instead, he substitutes Wordsworth’s concepts with “a concentration that does not happen consciously or of deliberation,” “a passive attending upon the event” (SE, 21). Eliot’s overt critique of Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads might suggest that he might have been in agreement with Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” (1846), which debunks the poetics of romantic sensibility and privileges the artist’s complete aesthetic control over his work. Poe was the originator of a tradition whose motto, “art for art’s sake,” extends from Gautier, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry to Eliot. He was the first to discard the Romantic notion of artistic creation as an organic, spontaneous growth for the sake of form, design, intention, and above all “effect.” He stressed the autonomy or self-sufficiency of the work of art, of the “poem per se,” “written solely for the poem’s sake,” and foregrounded the formal and rational craft of the artist (700). For Poe the process of composition unfolded “with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (677). One might read Eliot’s essay as another treatise that offers a glimpse of the process of artistic composition, an alternative to Poe’s explanation of the way in which he had written “The Raven.” At the outset, Eliot seemed to subscribe to Poe’s claims about the poet’s mastery and control. Yet, paradoxically, in his quarrel with Wordsworth, Eliot, the theorist of impersonality, far

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from debunking emotions as one might expect, only deepens the sense of the unconscious in the process of poetic creation.

20 In the end, Eliot succeeds in countering both Wordsworth and Poe. Although Eliot never forsakes control as he proves in the passage in which he distinguishes between “the man who suffers” and “the mind which creates” (SE 18), he in fact comes to the conclusion that the act of poetic creation is something the artist has no control over. It does not depend on his deliberate intention. The creative process is nothing more than a long wait for a flash of unexpected intuition from the unconscious.

The Doctrine of Impersonality

21 Steeped in a quasi-mystical language, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” makes a strong case for the poet’s self-surrender and his total commitment to his art. Although it addresses the concerns of contemporary history, Eliot “proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism” (SE, 21) and concentrates on “the process of depersonalization” (SE, 17). Eliot did not invent the notion of “depersonalization,” but rather modernized an older romantic concept. In 1830 as a reaction to Keats and Shelley’s immediate immersion in selfhood, Tennyson and Browning, each on their own, developed the dramatic monologue12 as a means to objectify the Romantic self in the imagined speech of poetic personae who reveal themselves in dramatic soliloquies. Eliot’s “escape from personality” is an allusion to Keats’s notions of indeterminate, self- effaced and chameleonic nature of the poet, corroborated by his explicit reference to the “Ode to a Nightingale” in his essay (SE, 19). His individual talent, fashioned as an impersonal catalyst, harks back to Keats’s notion of “negative capability,” of dwelling, “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (79).

22 From the French symbolists who saw art as a form of artistic self-purgation, Eliot took the filter of irony. Laforgue’s monologues introduced the ironic dédoublement of the personality. Split into the subject and object of its own reflections, the poetic persona became a self-observing voice unfolding in interior monologues in which ideas, voices, and feelings were played off against each other. Laforgue’s characters were especially appealing to the modernist spirit. Trapped in the dreary space of the quotidian, conscious of their romantic aspirations yet ridiculing themselves, and being ridiculed by the surrounding world, they longed for an ideal reality that was grotesquely undermined by real conditions.

23 Yet how does one succeed in escaping one’s own personality ? Eliot uses a series of archaeological and chemical metaphors and visualizes the poet in various stances: as sacrificially surrendering his personality, and also as a passive “catalyst,” the latter image being the Eliotian version of Joyce’s invisible and indifferent artist God paring his fingernails.13 He envisages the poet as a “finely perfected medium,” endowed with “inert, neutral” perception. His mind, “only a medium not a personality” (SE, 20) “has, not ‘a personality’ to express” (SE, 20), is described by a series of metaphors, “a catalyst” (SE, 18), “[a] receptacle,” “[a] shred of platinum.” Stan Smith (2007, 28) aptly argues that Eliot’s metaphor of the mind as catalyst, unchanged by the changes it effects, is a modern, pseudo-scientific version of the Neo-Platonic metaphysical concept that refers to the divine creative power of Aristotle’s unmoved mover, cited in the

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cryptic epigraph, “mind is, no doubt, something more divine and impassible” [De Anima Book I:4 (408b29)], which introduces the third part of Eliot’s essay (SE, 21).

24 Eliot’s artist is a divided self: a mind imprisoned within the walls of personality, which blindly reacts to external and internal stimuli, and a mind, which, free from the immediacy of emotions, “digest[s] and transmute[s] the passions that are its material” (SE, 18). Eliot takes his thesis further, and asserts that the greater the cleavage between the two, the more perfect the artist, since “the difference between art and events is always absolute” (SE, 19). For him, art is essentially an insurrectionary force, a kind of “anti-destiny,” to use André Malraux or Gilbert Durand’s formulations. The poet’s mind takes on the role of a receptacle intent on “seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images” (SE, 19), until an unexpected “fusion” takes place. The “new compound” (SE, 19) that emerges out of this unexpected “concentration” is radically different from the original emotions. This fusion itself is a sudden transfiguration into something new which brings together the personal and the impersonal, the concrete and the universal, and the time and the timeless.

25 The creative act is for Eliot a form of annihilation of the poet’s will and personality: “What happens is a continual self-surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (SE, 17). This escape from will is a release from rational control (Brugière, 2007, 87) which propitiates, as he was to explain in 1933, a quest for the “deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate” (UP, 155).

26 For all his theory that the poet is a deliberate master of his craft, in virtue of the cleavage between “the man who suffers” and “the mind which creates,” the process of poetic creation is ultimately unpredictable, a long wait for something to happen, comparable to the rhapsod’s helpless wait for the Muse’s song that will inspire him. Eliot’s “concentration,” “fusion,” “new combinations” do not happen consciously or deliberately at the poet’s command. The intensity of the artistic process, the pressure under which the fusion takes place, does in no way depend on the poet’s active intervention.

27 It turns out that Eliot, the impersonal poet par excellence, advocates a poetics premised on the quest for the unnamable, the unaccountable, and the unspoken. Eliot’s process of composition draws heavily on the unconscious. Later on in life, he continued analyzing the process of composition in a series of essays “The Music of Poetry” (1942), “The Three Voices of Poetry” (1953), and “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956). Eliot affirmed: “there is in all great poetry something which must remain unaccountable however complete might be our knowledge of the poet, and that is what matters most” (OPP, 112). A poem “may be something larger than its author’s conscious purpose, and something remote from its origins” (OPP, 30). Poetry is born of an “unknown, dark psychic material” (OPP, 100), an “obscure impulse” (OPP, 98) or “inert embryo” (OPP, 97) active in “the unconscious mind” (OPP, 101), which takes the form of a haunting “demon,” an oppressive “burden” against which the poet “feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing.” And the poetic word is “a kind of exorcism of this demon” (OPP, 98). Meanwhile, the poetic composition is a mysterious coming into being: “When the poem has been made, something new has happened, something that cannot be wholly explained by anything that went before. That, I believe is what we mean by ‘creation.’” (OPP, 112) In “The Music of Poetry,” Eliot

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affirmed that “the poet is occupied with the frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meaning still exists” (OPP, 30).

28 Artistic creation spells a reiterative semantics of rupture and metamorphosis into a new whole (Brugière, 2007, 87). The poetic quest is always a striving for something larger and higher than the individual. It is a sudden process of transfiguration during which the particular and finite attain the universal (Corti, 155). Eliot’s great poet, be it Shakespeare, Yeats or Valéry, “is occupied with the struggle […] to transmute his personal and private agonies into […] something universal and impersonal” (SE, 137). Yet, the impersonality of art does not mean a divorce “from personal experience and passion,” but an expansion or intensification of “personal emotion” which “is extended and completed in something impersonal” (Eliot, 1924, 14). Eliot solves the clash between tradition and the individual talent by transforming the poet into a medium that becomes the intermediary between two realms, the particular and the universal, the personal and the impersonal, the transient and the permanent, the specific and the general.

Tradition and History

29 Now what does it mean to have “a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” (SE, 14) ? And what does Eliot mean when he says that “interest in the past, and […] interest in the present are one” ? (Eliot, 1918b, 4-5). Like Stephan Dedalus, Eliot also tried to escape the nightmare of history14 and his historical sense was in no way a form of “archaeological reconstruction” (SE, 13).

30 There are many new lines of thought in Eliot’s conception of tradition. His stance on literary understanding and interpretation brings him close to new hermeneutic historicism, Gadamer’s relativism, and the pragmatists’ emphasis on contextual limitations and function of knowledge. Eliot’s essay is on the same line as the new hermeneutic interpretations of history by philosophers like Bradley, Dilthey, Croce, Bergson, Ortega, Burkhardt or Collingwood for whom historic truth depends on the interpreter’s own historicity and contemporary prejudications. Historical re- construction did not rely on a cumulus of data but on aesthetic intuition. Similar to the poetic quest it presupposed a kind of existential encounter across time, the rediscovery of a present “I” in the “Thou” of the past (Longenbach, 16). Except for the brief positivistic objectivist phase at the beginning of his career, which was a rejection of the Hegelian idealist tradition represented by Bradley, Eliot believed that our understanding is limited by our concrete historical situation.

31 For one thing, by reconceiving tradition as a compendium of “systems in relation to which, and only in relation to which, individual works of literary art, and the works of individual artists, have their significance” (SE, 23-24), Eliot introduced a new paradigm for wholeness, which is no longer “organic”—like the traditional nineteenth-century model premised on attributes of life, soul, spirit, etc.—but “systemic,” that is, indebted to Saussurean structuralist theories (Assmann, 18-22).

32 Eliot conceived of tradition in philosophically idealistic terms as a universal unifying reality, “a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written” (SE, 17), yet he did not give up consensus as a standard of validity. In his analysis of the Bradleyan philosophy, Eliot affirmed the relative character of knowledge.15 His point of departure was the awareness that “there is no absolute point of view” (KE, 22) and that reality was

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“a selection and combination of various presentations to various viewpoints” (KE, 142). All interpretations were inherently subjective statements, and truth did not reside in a statement’s correspondence with an object of reality, but in consensus, in its position relative to other statements within a system.16 Indebted to Bradley for whom no fact has its own meaning alone, Eliot explained that just as facts cannot be disentangled from the systems of interpretations that contain them, “no poet, no artist of any art has his meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone, you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead” (SE, 15).

33 Tradition presupposed a process of mutual readjustments and refashionings. “[T]he past,” Eliot said “is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (SE, 15). Subject to the dialectics of continuity and change, fixity and flux, tradition was a consensual construct predicated on unity and tensions.17 Moreover, for Eliot, consensus was not synonymous with cultural uniformity, but on the contrary, it had to be challenged and refashioned by the needs of the present.

34 With his theorization about tradition, Eliot, as Levenson brilliantly affirmed, revised the “habit of modern mind,” and advanced a new theory of understanding (186). He substituted the notion of a metaphysical absolute with that of tradition, and hereby opted for a relative and secular principle of authority that avoided the pitfalls of solipsism without transgressing the empiricist constraints of verifiability (Levenson, 185-6). His goal was to overcome the existence of absolute immutably fixed meanings while rescuing literary tradition from the ravages of time and oblivion. Eliot’s important contribution consists in going beyond the backbone of historicist thinking by overcoming the classic opposition between contingent historicity and tradition’s atemporality. He did not do away with these categories but integrated them into a vectorial field in which they could coexist and interact. Simultaneity and synchrony become the guarantees of a “holistic framework” that enlarged the scope of meaning and human understanding. There is little doubt that Eliot’s ideal order and sense of tradition are essentially Western and foremost Christian. Yet, his notion of tradition retrieves the immemorial past of the archaic culture of “Magdalenian draughtsmen.” Through his literary allusions and the “mythical method” by which he established a comparison between “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (Eliot, 1923, 483) and a mythicized antiquity, Eliot went against the very elements that define Western culture: linear conceptions of history, evolutionary optimism and rationalist prejudice. In his theory of a “unified sensibility” he defied modern positivistic thought which deprived existence of spiritual values and feeling. In the two major poems that mark the beginning and end of his literary career, from The Waste Land (1922) to Four Quartets (1942), Eliot’s poetic work attempted to articulate the universal language of the common spirituality of East and West, Hinduism, Platonism and Christianity. Furthermore his bookishness and literary allusions do not reflect an exclusive sense of superiority, but they foreground the existence of a common cultural perspective that cuts across cultural, geographical, historical divides. In consequence, Eliot’s tradition is not a closed, static system encapsulated in the past, but a flexible structure, open to change, refinement and innovation. It extends into the future and requires both imaginative creativity and critical interpretive discernment from each generation of readers.

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SHUSTERMAN, Richard, T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988.

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---, “Proper Frontiers: Transgression and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding, 2007, 26-40.

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NOTES

1. I am indebted to Walter Baumann for his generous feedback, assistance and support. This study is part of a research project funded by the Regional Ministry of Culture of the Regional Autonomous Government of Castile & Leon (ref. number SA342U14). 2. The following abbreviations are used in this paper for Eliot’s works: OPP, On Poetry and Poets; SE, Selected Essays; TCC, To Criticize the Critic; L, The Letters I (1898-1922); UP, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism; KE, Knowledge and Experience. Unless stated otherwise, all italics belong to the original texts. 3. On the tension between origin and novelty, see also Ezra Pound “The Tradition,” Poetry, vol. 3, no. 4, January 1914 reprinted in Literary Essays, 91-93. 4. See especially “T.S. Eliot: The Death of Literary Judgment,” 35-60. 5. “A literary work can be valid only by existing in the Tradition, as a Christian can be saved only by living in God, all poetry may be literature but only some poetry is Literature, depending on whether or not the Tradition happens to flow through it. This, like divine grace, is an inscrutable affair: the Tradition, like the Almighty or some whimsical absolute monarch, sometimes withholds favour from ‘major’ literary reputations and bestows it instead on some humble little text buried in the historical backwoods… Membership in the Tradition thus permits you to be at once authoritarian and self-abnegatingly humble” (Eagleton, 39-40). 6. T.S. Eliot made these statements in 1917 and 1921: “Reflection on Vers Libre,” The New Statesman, vol. 8, no. 204, 3 March 1917, 518-19 (TCC, 184); and Eliot, “London Letter,” The Dial vol. 74, no. 4, April 1921, 451. 7. “Professionalism in Art,” Times Literary Supplement, January 31, 1918, quoted by Longenbach, 178.

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8. For a perceptive analysis of the British poets’ reaction to Eliot, see especially Clive Wilmer, 58-73. 9. As Stan Smith (23-24) and Giovanni Cianci (119) argue, Eliot himself seems to have been aware of the incendiary nature of his essay. He mistakenly gave 1917 as the year of publication, thus evoking the Russian Revolution. He allowed this mistake to persist even in the first edition of his Selected Essays (1932), and it was repeated also in his preface to the new edition of The Use of Poetry in 1964. This misdate persisted even in authoritative publications, such as the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory as late as 1994. 10. For a more elaborate analysis of the relationship between modernist poetics and non- figurative visual arts, see Viorica Patea, “The Poetics of the Avant-garde: Modernist Poetry and Visual Arts,” 2011, 137-152. 11. For an interesting analysis of Wordsworth and Eliot see Massimo Bacigalupo’s “Tradition in 1919: Pound, Eliot and the ‘Historical Method’” (103-116). 12. The term “dramatic monologue” was first introduced in 1857 and applied to Browning’s poetry in 1859 (A. Dwight Culler, 366). 13. “The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (A James Joyce Reader, 483). 14. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” James Joyce, Ulysses, 28. 15. Eliot declared in Knowledge and Experience (1916): “Any assertion about the world, or any ultimate statement about any object in the world, will inevitably be an interpretation” (KE, 165). 16. For a discussion of Eliot’s concept of tradition in relation to Bradley’s philosophy see Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism, 187-93; Jain, T.S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 144-58, 205-243; Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History, 164-176; Shusterman, T.S. Eliot and The Philosophy of Criticism, 156-191, and “Eliot as Philosopher,” 31-47. 17. In Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, Shusterman analyzes Eliot’s concept of tradition in the light of twentieth-century philosophical pragmatism and argues that like Royce, Peirce and others, Eliot shares the pragmatists’ aim of enlarging consensus (158-62).

ABSTRACTS

This essay revisits Eliot’s seminal text “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) which has been part of the central debates of literary discussions for almost a century. Although no longer an orthodoxy in our postmodern era, Eliot’s essay continues to influence current critical debates. The goal of this article is to rethink Eliot’s manifesto from the perspective of romantic and modernist poetics, and to reconcile the great disparity between Eliot the experimentalist avant- garde poet who advocates the aesthetics of fragmentation and the critic who pleads for the extinction of personality. This article reconsiders Eliot’s concepts of tradition and impersonality in the light of the revolution that took place in the visual arts in the first decades of the twentieth century, whose experimental language he tried to transfer to poetic practice. It also analyzes the way in which his theories present affinities with modern trends of philosophical thinking, such as historicist hermeneutics, relativism and pragmatism.

Cet article propose de revisiter « Tradition and the Individual Talent » (1919), le texte critique fondateur de T.S. Eliot qui, depuis près d’un siècle, est au cœur des débats littéraires. Même si, à

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l’ère post-moderne, ce texte n’a plus une valeur de référence, il continue à nourrir les débats critiques. Le but de cet essai est de reconsidérer le manifeste de T.S. Eliot dans la perspective de la poétique romantique et moderniste, et de repenser la disparité entre Eliot, le poète expérimental d’avant-garde qui revendique l’esthétique de la fragmentation, et Eliot, le critique de l’impersonnel. Il s’agit donc de revenir sur les concepts de tradition et d’impersonnalité à la lumière de la révolution qui a marqué les arts visuels durant les premières décennies du XXème siècle et dont Eliot a essayé d’appliquer le langage expérimental à la pratique poétique. Ce faisant, on tentera de dégager aussi les affinités entre les théories d’Eliot et certaines approches philosophiques, telles que l’herméneutique historique, le relativisme et le pragmatisme.

INDEX

Keywords: T.S. Eliot, Tradition, impersonality, history, avant-garde, modernism Mots-clés: T.S. Eliot, tradition, impersonnalité, histoire, avant-garde, modernisme

AUTHOR

VIORICA PATEA Universidad de Salamanca, Spain

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Beyond the American Difficult Poem: Paul Celan’s “Du liegst”

Xavier Kalck

1 In the 2012 Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, one finds the following statement: “The one feature that all literary experiments share is their commitment to raising fundamental questions about the very nature and being of verbal art itself” (Bray, 1). Quite circuitously, the definition of the thing is that it defines itself. The conclusion follows that “[e]xperiment is one of the engines of literary change and renewal; it is literature’s way of reinventing itself” (Bray, 1). But when any attribute is deemed so fundamental or substantial that it partakes of the nature of the thing described, does it still deserve to be called an attribute? The editors later attempt a measure of clarification, observing that the adjective “experimental” may be understood either as another word for “radical” or “avant-garde,” with the expected political undertones, but may also mean “innovative” in the epistemological sense of questioning cultural traditions. Still, is there such a remarkable difference? And wouldn’t that difference commonly be subsumed under the more general “modernist” heading? In the 2007 Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, the first chapter entitled “Modernist Poetry in History” ends somewhat surprisingly with this conclusion: “We might well regard as modernist any poetry which refuses to accept its place in history” (Davis, 26). In the new Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the entry for “Avant- Garde Poetics” ends with this definitive statement: “Avant-gardism, it seems, appeals to our continuing belief that, in reconstituting the world of poetry and art, ‘It must change.’” (Greene, 113). It seems all we are missing here is yet another label, the all- inclusive modifier “revolutionary.” “Revolutionary” is the modifier; it means change, and has equally been applied to the poets of any given revolution as well as to the poets said to have revolutionized their art. It seems we must then fall back to the old “make it new,” that wedge periodically driven into anthologies—what “makes it news” within the academic market for literary scholarship. But what if the self-definition of literature or poetry as a self-determined, self-reinventing practice were but a belated version of the argument for aesthetic autonomy?

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2 In the previous edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993), the entry dealing with autonomy provides a clear picture of the debates around the evolution of a once Kantian concept into a hybrid notion, somewhere between the rational imperatives of form and the experimental contingency of historic circumstances, before concluding with the following proposition: […] a work’s emphasis on its own internal relations becomes its means of taking overt responsibility for the stance on values that it projects. Such work then offers society exemplary modes of forging attitudes which are fundamental to the ideals of moral identity and moral judgment held by the culture. (Preminger, 157)

3 How and why is a poem an exemplary mode of taking overt responsibility ? We are not told specifically. One more time in a distinctly circular fashion, it seems that what is exemplary about it is precisely that it provides examples. Yet why do the work’s own internal relations become anything at all outside itself ? How does this internal- external becoming take place, both formally and contextually ?

4 To begin to address these questions, I propose that we consider the following hypothesis: in overstating the case for the transformative features of literature, both inward and outward, we overstep the limits of our literary knowledge. To keep this debate in Kantian terms, defining literature as change allows for the question “what ought I to do?” to replace the question “what can I know?”—but not until it has been modified into “what ought I to do with words?”

5 As readers confronted with poetry are well aware, the question “what can I know?” and “what should I or what must I know” before I can read this poem can prove very pressing issues. In this paper, I will attempt to translate this problem into practical reader experience. For this purpose I have chosen a poem by Paul Celan.

6 I have done so for several reasons, but first, to show how discussion of modernism has come to blur national paradigms. For example, after studiyng Celan’s translations of Emily Dickinson, Marjorie Perloff concludes that Celan’s “distrust of ‘beauty’ and ‘musicality’” (Perloff, 49) and praise of “precision,” from his reply to a questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore in Paris (1958), may well be a Modernist (and also a Romanticist) value: one thinks of Flaubert’s mot F0 juste, Pound’s Imagist preceptsBE “Direct treatment of the thing, whether subject or object” and “Use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation” F0 (Literary Essays, ed. T.S. Eliot [Faber, 1954], p. 3)BE and Stein’s insistence that “poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything” (“Poetry and Grammar,” Writings 1932-1946 [Library of America, 1998], p. 329). (Perloff, 49)

7 Global critical perspectives such as this one (from Celan to Flaubert, Pound, Eliot and Stein) hide the fact that while on the face of it, one is adopting a transnational standpoint, one is really expressing a point of view that is deeply rooted in the history of American modernism. It should be noted that there is a considerable measure of irony in the habit of dealing with critical terms as franchises : the international critical currency of such a notion as “precision” seems necessarily questionable because when applied so broadly, it does seem less precise. More importantly, in this very text Celan goes on to say, about this language of precision, that “this is never the working of language itself, of language as such, but always of an ‘I’ who speaks from the particular angle of reflection which is his existence […]” (Celan, 2003b, 16) thus explicitly rejecting the idea that one might abstract any theoretical standpoint from particular linguistic

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and historical circumstances. I do not intend to argue, therefore, that Celan is either a modernist poet or that he can productively be seen in that light, which would mean relying on largely de-historicized notions of poetic modernism and modernity. As the critical work on Celan’s translations of Dickinson demonstrates, this is rather a limited endeavour since, in spite of critical efforts in that sense, “all speculations regarding the affinity between the two poets remain largely unconvincing” (Rosenthal, 134). Recent German scholarship on the issue has shown that Celan’s writing process should be the focus of choice in such cases, such as in Therese Kaiser’s Found in Translation : Paul Celan im Dialog mit Emily Dickinson : Eine Untersuchung übersetzerischer Arbeitsprozesse (2012).

8 My choice of Celan is therefore based on a need for a counterexample, to address the cliché of difficulty that has become the calling card of contemporary American innovative poetry. Celan seemed a more appropriate choice to underline the experience of a foreignness of meaning, when confronting a poem, which would not immediately be construed as a device pointing to a set of beliefs or values. As such, I trust that Celan’s poetry will be more directly illustrative for a methodological exposé than, for instance, the poetry of Louis Zukofsky, certainly a suitably “difficult” poet. For Zukofsky’s work too suffers from the confusion addressed by Celan between a focus on language and the role of the speaking subject. As a “difficult” poet, Zukofsky has been praised for re-staging language and challenging his readers by reconstituting possibilities for language use, remaking or expanding possibilities for world- F0 buildingBE in other words “the working of language itself, of language as such” (Celan, 2003b, 16), yet Zukofsky’s “A” could so much more accurately be defined by the phrase, “an ‘I’ who speaks from the particular angle of reflection which is his existence” (Celan, 2003b, 16).

9 So, oddly enough, through a detour via Dickinson, does Charles Bernstein introduce Zukofsky’s poetry by emphasizing “[t]he experience made possible through the crafting of the poems [which] is ‘when the meanings are’ (as Emily Dickinson puts it): the meaning is not behind the words but in the words as they unfold, and refold, in the ear” (Zukofsky, xvii). Difficulty, it seems, has become a tool designed to impress upon readers the importance of performance over print. Instead of denying access, difficulty displays accessibility by making the text a form of exhibit. As a result of the combined evolutions of poetry and the arts in Western countries, this phenomenon deserves closer scrutiny than could be provided here.

10 What this article intends to do is to call into question the notion of the reader as co- creator of the poetic text, by refusing to play the game of the endless deferral of meaning which the “difficult” poem often requires from its readers, and by engaging methodically with every aspect of the text. By suggesting that since meaning is a relational affair, it can never solidify, critics often find themselves repeating Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic commonplace about the inexhaustible meaning of the artwork and the indefinite process of interpretation, such as when the same critic states that, “There is no end to what you might need to know to read a poem and maybe no beginning either” (Bernstein, 2011, 252). It seems that the only way to see beyond the contradictions inherent in the binary characterization of poetry from either a New Historical or a New Critical perspective is to ask what world or worlds are made present for readers to experience, and so to embrace such homilies about poetry as, “It’s not a matter of what it says, but of what it is ; or, better, it is not a matter of what it is, but of what it does” (Zukofsky, xviii). Yet aesthetic autonomy, even when

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rebranded as an awareness of context-bound aesthetic processes, remains unchallenged when literary, political, social, historical subtexts merely orbit the text’s composition, and the main focus has become the event of verse itself as it is made new in every reading experience, even more so in the case of a notoriously “difficult” poem.

11 Naturally, one may object that Celan is not exactly an obscure choice, in spite of the supposed difficulty of his work. Indeed, and this is my second reason, the poem I have chosen has already been considered as the epitome of the necessarily pre-annotated poem. That poem in particular was chosen by Gadamer to ask the question, “What must the reader know?” in the few remarks added to a revised edition of his essay on Celan, “Who Am I and Who Are You?” (Gadamer, 1997, 149) and it is that poem which I have selected, the second from Celan’s last book of poems, the posthumous Schneepart or Snowpart, written between late 1967 and late 1968.

12 In Truth and Method, Gadamer argued for the “elevation of the historicity of understanding to the status of a hermeneutic principle” (2004, 268). When approaching Celan, Gadamer takes up this task once more. Others since have noted that “Celan studies are either historical or formalist-theoretical,” forever “split between theoretized text and exterior worlds” (Wolosky, 656). What I will try to do is present an instance of a reader’s abilities, confronted with such a poem as “Du liegst,” from Schneepart. In doing so, I hope I may not repeat that split between moralizing statements that rely on the poem’s historical subtext and proclamations of literary self- determination derived from a misplaced sense of autonomy. The poem reads : Du liegst im großen Gelausche, umbuscht, umflockt.

Geh du zur Spree, geh zur Havel, geh zu den Fleischerhaken, zu den roten Äppelstaken aus Schweden —

Es kommt der Tisch mit den Gaben, er biegt um ein Eden —

Der Mann ward zum Sieb, die Frau mußte schwimmen, die Sau, für sich, für keinen, für jeden —

Der Landwehrkanal wird nicht rauschen. Nichts stockt. (Celan, 2003, 315-316)

13 Here is one of the several English translations available, by Ian Fairley : You lie in the great auricle, groved round, snowed round.

Go to the Spree, go to the Havel, go to the butchers’ hooks, to the red impaled apples from Sweden —

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The table of gifts draws near, it turns round an Eden —

The man was made sieve, the woman had to swim, the sow, for herself, for no one, for everyone —

The Landwehrkanal won’t sound. Nothing’s still. (Celan, 2007, 7)

14 Here is another, by Pierre Joris : You lie in the great listening ambushed, snowed in.

Go to the Spree, go to the Havel, go to the butcher hooks, to the red apple stakes from Sweden —

Here comes the table with the presents, he turns around an Eden —

The man became a sieve, the woman had to swim, the sow, for herself, for none, for everyone —

The Landwehrkanal will not roar. Nothing stops (Celan 2005, 129)

15 Starting with first impressions, thematically speaking one is struck by the mixture of quietness, silence and coldness, then a sudden clamor, being thrust outside, the bloody imagery and the sudden burst of violence. Yet each thread divides into two parallel ones. The signs of rest and peace seem to suggest serenity or protective seclusion as well as the stillness of death. Similarly, the red meat and the candied apples connote both murder and a joyful celebration. Repeating Gadamer, one could speak of an “intensification of contrastive tension” (1997, 141).

16 Formally speaking, one may be relatively accustomed to this type of layout on the page, the irregularity in these stanzas of two, then four, then two lines again, then three, followed by the final disjunction with the suspensive line-break. The syntax itself is remarkably straightforward for this poet. The central third stanza sticks out enigmatically, the dashes allow for paratactic jumps, but line boundaries and syntactical units are essentially cogent here. A sense of coherence is even reinforced by the seven rhymes in “-en” in a poem consisting of barely twice as many lines. On a narrative level, the reader cannot escape the feeling of being told something quite specific, though uneasy to reconstruct. The repeated use of proper nouns, combined with an emphasis on motion, counters the apparently static indefiniteness of the

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protagonists’ nameless bodies. Pronominal or nominal obscurity does not appear to hinder the poem’s own process. Again, finding one’s bearings among these fragmentary particulars is nothing exceptional in twentieth century poetry—American or German. Still, the text does not yield easily. Should we then jump to the conclusion that this poem must first be telling us something about poetry? But if we did, would we not be pre-empting the poem’s own words, even if we did so in the name of language? In other words, what do we want to know about this poem?

17 If we want facts in the sense of reference, we may relatively easily find out that “Spree” and “Havel” are rivers and that this fact places the poem in Berlin, Germany. “Fleischerhacken,” less obvious, but which could be derived from context, both geographically and historically, points to the nearby Plötzensee in Berlin’s Spandau area, on the Havel River at the mouth of the Spree, and to Plötzensee prison, with its infamous meat hooks where nearly three thousand were executed between 1933 and 1945, including most famously those responsible for the attempted coup against Hitler in June 1944. The area reference could also be made to include the Spandau prison itself, which housed renowned Nazi war criminals after the Nuremberg trials. “Äppelstaken” is a relatively transparent cultural item, and a common sight at Christmas markets, which also helps clarify the table with presents in the next stanza. Finally, the words “Eden,” then “Landwehrkanal” also make perfect sense when taken together or more precisely, from the first to the second. The Eden Hotel is where Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were held before they were murdered and their bodies thrown in the Landwehrkanal in January 1919. Is all this information available for any reader to uncover? Should it be uncovered?

18 These questions have already been asked and partially answered in Peter Szondi’s invaluable essay entitled “Eden.” Szondi’s essay is remarkable in that it refutes readings of Celan’s poems as autotelic, self-sufficient windowless monads, to quote from Adorno’s remarks on Celan (Adorno, 322). In “Eden” on the other hand, Szondi is careful to open the poem up to history. Szondi introduces his account of the poem by saying that the “history of the poem’s genesis […] cannot itself constitute interpretation” (85). His highly documented reading—which I have just largely drawn from—is meant to provide access to the poem, and nothing else. But where does access end, and interpretation begin?

19 Before it was published posthumously in Schneepart, Szondi tells us the poem had appeared under the autobiographical title “Berlin, December 22/23, 1967” and Celan “had kept the title ‘Wintergedicht’ (Winter poem) when he copied out the poem for friends” (84). Still, as Szondi points out, Celan’s habit of not using titles, especially in his late poetry, does not make the now title-less poem particularly opaque compared to other poems of his. Szondi then describes Celan’s room where he stayed in Berlin that winter, overlooking the Tiergarten park “planted with bushes,” tracing the first two lines back to the view Celan had from his hotel; he mentions Celan’s actual visit to Plötzensee, to the Christmas market where “Celan saw an Advent wreath made of red- painted wood that held apples and candles,” combining in the second stanza. Szondi then reveals he lent a book to Celan at that time, a historical account of the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Der Mord an Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht: Dokumentation eines politishen Vebrechens, where Celan found the murderer’s testimonies he quotes in the penultimate stanza. Szondi showed him the “Eden apartment building, which had been constructed on the site of the old Eden Hotel” where “Rosa Luxemburg

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and Karl Liebknecht spent the last hours of their lives” (87). They drove together by the Landwehrkanal, and on another day Celan “followed this canal on his way to visit the ruins of the train station Anhalter Bahnhof,” where so many departed never to return. After having provided such incredible first-hand material, Szondi humbly wonders “whether such information can serve to support any reading at all” (88). Although Szondi has made it impossible to read this poem without his help, he is understandably at a loss when trying to identify the poem’s actual determinations, whether from within, or from without, and if for no better reason, because of that very debatable division. Asking whether we can or cannot bridge that gap between the limits of autonomy and the limitations of contingency (Szondi 94-95), Szondi nevertheless does not pursue another form of historicization one could have included, which deals with that literary outside we know as preexisting work. First printed almost ten years before Celan’s visit to Berlin, Brecht’s second poem about Rosa Luxemburg begins with the lines, “Hier liegt begraben / Rosa Luxemburg” (Owen, 2012, 129), which Celan’s address could be said to echo directly. As Ruth J. Owen has shown, the murder of Rosa Luxemburg has been the explicit topic of an impressive array of German poems. Taking that literary presence into account, the Landwehrkanal reference alone would be enough for an educated reader to know that they are dealing with what Owen even calls “Rosa poetry” (Owen, 2012, 127). Going one step further, as Owen does, we may easily invoke the figure of Ophelia as well, which is here “de-eroticized” (Owen, 2007, 785) and newly politicized. When should we stop? How inclusively should we try to trace the poem’s determinacy outside itself?

20 Looking elsewhere in Celan, in Atemwende we find the poem “Coagula,” beginning “Auch deine / Wunde, Rosa” (Celan, 2003, 203). As he wrote to his friend Petre Solomon in 1967, these words reminded Celan of Rosa Luxemburg through the prism of Kafka’s A Country Doctor, where Celan said he found the two words “Rosa” and “Wunde”—which describe the pink colored wound in the young patient’s right side, Rosa being also the name of the maid in Kafka’s story. Celan wrote of his efforts to make his meanings literally coagulate (Celan, 2003, 741). In fact, it also seems that Celan noted that Kafka’s short story was published in 1919, the year of Rosa Luxemburg’s death (Gellhaus, 174). Celan’s use of such coincidences to generate poems is well known—a recent book of essays focuses exclusively on this process of “qualitative change”—an expression used by the poet to describe the words’ journey into his poems (Felstiner, 77). But how is the reader meant to take part? For instance, since some have taken Kafka’s story to be an embedded psychoanalytical tale, should one read Celan’s condensations in this light—as if the introductory and final silence in “Du Liegst” were the sign of a specific session?

21 Now on the other hand, accepting the inside-outside division a moment longer, how far within the text then should we go? Let’s start with the table. The German word for table is not the same whether one means an ordinary table (here, “Tisch”), or the tables of the law, which would be Tafeln (as in Tafeln des Gesetzes). This table is closer to an altar for the Christmas mass. Yet it turns round, possibly suggesting something occult, the spiritualist turning the tables. As far as Christmas goes, the fall of man is traditionally connected to the salvation promised by the birth of Jesus, whereas the celebration evoked with sweet shiny red—with a possible pun on rotting—apples makes it a grotesque scene of feasting upon the bloodied Eucharistic bread impaled on a mock- crown of thorns—as Szondi reminds us, the candied apples he saw with Celan were presented on a wreath, and “red is the color of the flag for which Rosa Luxemburg and

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Karl Liebknecht gave their lives” (Szondi 92). These apples, combined with the reference to Eden, make up the text’s present of the most bloody tree of knowledge.

22 On another level, the turning table is the poet’s, whose lines turn round, line-break after line-break. The Eden, in that sense, would refer not to scripture but to the script, keeping chronicles of murders from the first Biblical sins to today’s history books. This biblical dimension in the text is underlined by the use of the specific past tense “ward” and the numerous imperatives in the second stanza.

23 The mention of a table in winter around Christmas time will also call to mind Georg Trakl’s poem Ein Winterabend (A Winter Evening), and its commentary by Heidegger in Die Sprache, in On the Way to Language. Celan rephrased some of Heidegger’s comments in that essay in his own speech for the Büchner prize, where he contradicts Heidegger’s interpretation of language itself speaking (Lyon, 129), in favor of a poetry that remains mindful to its dates and speaks on its own behalf.

24 Now the man and the woman. The hooks, the couple’s flesh compared to meat, the bodies pierced by bullets, the shooting and drowning, the murderers’ misogyny—with the specifically anti-Semitic associations of the word Sau in German, noted by Gadamer as they had been by Alfred Döblin (Owen, 2012, 135)—all these words tell of an extreme violence done by men to men but especially to a woman, standing for no one and everyone. The poem offers little mediation, beyond the introductory silent listening and the final negation that there ever was anything to hear. These are in fact headless bodies, as it were, generically identified as the man and the woman. It is as though knowledge of their identities should not hide their indeterminate universality, as humanity’s first couple fallen from Eden into that canal.

25 At the center of the poem lies the word “Eden.” Strikingly enough, when the word occurs elsewhere in Celan, it is in a similar context, twice in Niemandsrose: in “Eis, Eden,” where one dies frozen in a lost land, while for the other occurrence, in the poem “Hüttenfenster,” the line reads “geht zu Ghetto und Eden” (Celan, 2003, 158), the garden now become ghetto.

26 As Szondi acknowledges, Eden is “embedded in the rhyme sequence Schweden-Eden- jeden” (93). Repeated at the end of two lines in full (“Schweden,” “jeden”), it is also partially echoed three times in the middle of the poem, with “Fleischerhaken,” “Äppelstaken,” “Gaben.” The first echo, “jeden,” brings to the ear and the mind its phonological proximity with the word Juden, for Jew. According to the letter of the text, the decomposition of the word along the rhyme in j-eden confirms that reading as the rhyme disjoins the initial as though literally casting out the Jewish people from Eden. This separation and this connection are everywhere apparent in the use of dashes after every occurrence of words ending in -eden.

27 The reference to Sweden has received various interpretations. It may be read at the trace of a fact, Celan walking by the Berlin Christmas market that winter and seeing products from Sweden there, ultimately transformed with the rhyme into a handy structural tool. It could also be decomposed, based on the logic of the rhyme, into Schw-eden. Then that apparently incomprehensible prefix to the rhyme, schw-, would read as the phonetic sign “schwa”—the neutral vowel sound spelled with an inverted e —not so surprising in a poem that opens and shuts on the subject of silence, outlined by the internal rhyme between “Gelausche” and “rauschen”—which frames the central— monstrous—rhyme in “Frau” / “Sau.”

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28 Those who would wish to read this poem as putting forth a vision of indifference, if not apathy, conveyed by the final lines, should bear in mind that silence is very concretely written into the poem and that this silence implies the presence of the now silent dead, far more than their absence.

29 As for the last two lines, if nothing stops, is the poem meant to be endlessly prolonged, or rather brought down to size, suggesting that poetry makes nothing stop? The answer may be, some critics have said, in the penultimate scene from Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death, where Lucile Desmoulins expresses her astonishment at seeing life go on in spite of the tragedy that is occurring. She would want it all to stop—“daß […] alles stockt” (Janz 195, Bollack, 213). In his Meridian address, Celan quotes from Büchner’s Lucile’s final words—she calls out “Long live the king!” so as to quickly bring death upon herself (Celan, 2011, 3)—and compares this statement to her position earlier on in the play, when she would not take part in her husband’s discussion about art. Considering her last words the supreme form of freedom, he calls her words “the counterword” that sets her apart from “the bystanders […] of history” (Celan, 2012, 3). In comparison, Celan does not seek to duplicate that ultimate speech act, nor does he claim any special prerogatives from writing in its tracks. Celan’s rewriting of the line as a negative modulates it. The Landwehrkanal may be silent, people may be murdered into nothingness, yet the rhythmic variation from the previous negative particle “nicht” to the capitalized pronoun “Nichts” reveals the contradictions in that incremental negation: the more it silences, the more it resonates, to the point of euphemism—asking us to listen to the loud silence that does not stop echoing. In fact, stocken does not only mean to stop or come to a halt. When translating Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death,” Celan chooses the verb “halten” (Rosenthal). Stocken may imply a different form of stopping, for it is also used in expressions such as to catch one’s breath, to break off, to stop short, or when someone’s voice falters, as may be the case here. Another sense of stocken is to clot or curdle, as if Celan were implying that his coagulation of meanings prevented the blood spilled from coagulating and kept it running.

30 Gadamer comes to the conclusion that instead of asking what must we know to be able to read the poem, we must begin with the poem’s own demands upon its readers and specifically its desire to impart knowledge. “The poem […],” Gadamer writes, “wants us to know” (142), as if the knowledge we needed were the knowledge the poem was there to provide. Like the canal’s icy surface, which hid the bodies for months through that winter, the poem’s surface begs for thawing. In other words, the poem’s momentary autonomy is designed to be undercut and finally breached by heteronomous and contextual forces, which the reader and the text are a part of. What surfaces holds no redemptive qualities, either morally or aesthetically, beyond what Celan calls “the majesty of the absurd as witness for the presence of the human” (Celan, 2012, 3). After Celan’s Lucile, whom he describes as “one who is blind to art, [. . .] for whom language is something person-like and tangible” (Celan, 2012, 3), that sense of the absurd, of our vanity, seems meant to come across as fundamentally inartistic, no matter how much the reader knows.

31 By not choosing an American poet, this paper hopes to have allowed the reader to assess the difficulty of a text without the comforts of national strategies of distinction and legitimation. This was done precisely to call into question the habit of collapsing the distinction between the supposedly innovative character of a text and its so-called

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difficulty. Celan’s poem does not manufacture a veil of difficulty to impress upon the reader a sense of hyperbolic and promising self-determination, contrary to the specific paradigm of the new, in American poetry, which relies on a deliberately ambiguous definition of renewal as self-renewal, and of self-renewal as self-rule. Rather, Celan’s poem dramatizes its own occurrence as a case of tragically unsatisfactory reading and rewriting of historical and literary materials, to delineate the limits of what constitutes literary knowledge and possibly its limitations as well. Meanwhile, to say what is to become of that knowledge, what is to be made of it, or what measure of renewal may be derived from it, in terms of poetic technique, literary history, as well as historical consciousness, certainly remains, for lack of a better word, quite difficult. ADORNO, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, eds, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, London, Continuum, 1997.

BERNSTEIN, Charles, Attack of the Difficult Poems, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011.

BOLLACK, Jean, “‘Eden’ nach Szondi,” Celan Jahrbuch, vol. 2, 1988, ed. M. Speier, Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte, Dritte Folge, Band 85, Winter 1988, 85-105.

---, Poésie contre poésie, Celan et la littérature, PUF, 2001.

BRAY Joe, Alison GIBBONS, Brian MCHALE, eds., Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, New York, Routledge, 2012.

CELAN Paul, Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band, hrsg. und kommentierte von Barbara Wiedemann, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2003.

---, Collected Prose, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, New York, Routledge, [1986] 2003.

---, Selected Poems and Prose, translated by John Felstiner, New York, Norton, 2001.

---, Selections, translated by Pierre Joris, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005.

---, Snowpart / Schneepart, translated by Ian Fairley, Riverdale-on-Hudson (NY), Sheep Meadow Press, 2007.

---, The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull, translated by Pierre Joris, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2011.

DAVIS, Alex and Lee M. JENKINS, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

FELSTINER, John, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, New Haven (CT), Yale University Press, 1995.

GADAMER, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, London, Continuum, 2004.

---, “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays, translated and edited by Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski, Albany (NY), State University of New York Press, 1997.

GELLHAUS, Axel and Karin HERRMANN, eds., “Qualitativer Wechsel": Textgenese bei Paul Celan, Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 2010.

GREENE Roland, Stephen CUSHMAN et al., eds., The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition, Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press, 2012.

HEIDEGGER, Martin, On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz, New York, Harper & Row, 1971.

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JANZ, Marlies, Vom Engagement absoluter Poesie. Zur Lyrik und Ästethik Paul Celans, Königstein, Athenäum, 1984.

KAISER, Therese, Found in translation : Paul Celan im Dialog mit Emily Dickinson : Eine Untersuchung übersetzerischer Arbeitsprozesse, Shaker Verlag, 2012.

LYON, James K., Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger. An Unresolved Conversation, 1951—1970, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

OWEN, Ruth J., “Voicing the Drowned Girl: Poems by Hilde Domin, Ulla Hahn, Sarah Kirsch and Barbara Köhler in the German Tradition of Representing Ophelia,” Modern Language Review, vol. 102, no. 3, 2007, 771–783.

---, “Roses Are Red: The Peculiar Remembrance of Rosa Luxemburg in Lyric Poetry,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, May 2012, 127-145.

PERLOFF, Marjorie. “The Fascination of What’s Difficult: Emily Dickinson and the Theory Canon,” Stand, vol. 1, no. 3, June 2000, 33–51.

PREMINGER, Alex, T.V.F. BROGAN et al., eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993.

ROSENTHAL, Bianca, “Paul Celan’s Translation of Emily Dickinson’s ‘Because I could not stop for Death—,’ The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, Fall 1997, 133-139.

SZONDI, Peter, Celan Studies, translated by Susan Bernofsky with Harvey Mendelsohn, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003.

WOLOSKY, Shira, “The Lyric, History and the Avant-Garde: Theorizing Paul Celan,” Poetics Today, vol. 22, no. 3, Fall 2001, 651-668.

ZUKOFSKY, Louis, Prepositions + : The Collected Critical Essays, Foreword by Charles Bernstein, Additional prose edited and introduced by Mark Scroggins, Hanover, Wesleyan / New England University Press, 2000.

ABSTRACTS

This paper presents a close reading of a late poem by German poet Paul Celan, with a view to call into question several critical assumptions relating to modernist-derived “difficulty.” By looking in detail at what makes a poem “difficult” for the reader,a fact highlighted by a comparative

F0 approachBE , it becomes possible to move beyond such qualities as innovative, radical or avant- garde, and to consider what truly makes up our literary knowledge.

Cet article propose une lecture détaillée d’un poème tardif de Paul Celan, de façon à remettre en question plusieurs présupposés critiques hérités du modernisme en matière de « difficulté ». En observant dans le détail ce qui rend un poème « difficile » pour le lecteur (phénomène que souligne l’approche comparatiste), il est plus aisé de se défaire d’une terminologie qui repose sur les notions d’innovation, de radicalité ou d’avant-garde, afin de comprendre où commence réellement notre savoir littéraire.

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INDEX

Keywords: Paul Celan, modernism, avant-garde, poetics, Gadamer, Rosa Luxemburg Mots-clés: Paul Celan, modernisme, avant-garde, poétique, Gadamer, Rosa Luxemburg

AUTHOR

XAVIER KALCK Université Paris-Sorbonne

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The Ongoing French Reception of the Objectivists

Abigail Lang

1 The ties between French and American poetry are ancient and profound. In the introduction to his 1984 The Random House Book of XXth Century French Poetry, Paul Auster reminds his anglophone reader of the perennial contribution of the French language in general and French literature and poetry in particular to its British and later American counterparts, going back to John Gower and Chaucer. Focusing on the modern period, he claims that “American poetry of the past hundred years would be inconceivable without the French.” From the time of Baudelaire “modern British and American poets have continued to look to France for new ideas” (xxviii). From the early twentieth century, American poets have not only flocked to Paris in search of a cheap living and greater permissiveness, they “have been steadily translating their French counterparts—not simply as a literary exercise, but as an act of discovery and passion” (xxx). The reverse may not have been as entirely true, though one must immediately mention Poe’s exceptional French reception, his work championed and translated by both Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and Whitman’s early influence on the Unanimistes movement. But the late 1960s mark a turning point with now primarily the French poets turning towards American poetry not only with passion and curiosity but also with a motive, that of furthering French poetry. In the context of this surge of interest for American poetry in France since the 1960s, the reception of the Objectivist poets1 stands out for its exceptional endurance, in turn predicated on its ability for renewal. First brought to the attention of the French readers almost fifty years ago, they are still being discussed and translated.2 While the French reputation of other American poets tended to wax and wane over a decade or two, the reception of the Objectivists has been comparatively ongoing since the 1970s, each generation of French poets refashioning the Objectivist canon and critical meaning according to their different, at times antagonistic, needs. Championed by a significant number of major poets, the Objectivists have been enrolled to defend sometimes competing poetics in ardent poetic debates.

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2 The nature of the Objectivist “movement” itself can explain, at least in part, the ease with which it could be appropriated later on. Indeed, the very idea that an Objectivist movement ever existed remains contentious3 since Louis Zukofsky only came up with the term at the behest of Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, who insisted he label the eclectic group of poets he had gathered at the instigation of Ezra Pound for the February 1931 issue of the magazine. In lieu of manifesto, Louis Zukofsky expanded an essay he had devoted to the work of Charles Reznikoff, a poet twenty years his senior. Entitled “Sincerity and Objectification,” it defined sincerity as “thinking with the things as they exist” or “presentation in detail,” and objectification as “rested totality” (Zukofsky, 1931, 273-278). Some of the poets featured in the 1931 issue were subsequently represented in the “Objectivists” anthology edited by Zukofsky, published by George Oppen in 1932 and in the cooperative Objectivist Press from 1933 to 1936. When they were rescued from almost total oblivion by Black Mountain poets Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley after the war, they tended again to be lumped together for ease of reference, especially after L.S. Dembo published interviews with George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky under the title “The ‘Objectivist’ Poet,” thus establishing the idea of a core quartet.4 As Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain have convincingly argued, the Objectivists are best conceived as a “nexus” which “magnetized” a set of characteristics and “historical responsibilities” (7). Stemming from Poundian imagism and its insistence on direct presentation but developed by its Marxist proponents towards an emphatically materialist, historically and politically conscious poetics, Objectivism has often been cast as an alternative model to dominant poetic models. In his 1978 essay “The Objectivist Tradition,” Charles Altieri posits the “Objectivist style” as an alternative model of lyric relatedness in concurrence with the symbolist style (DuPlessis, 25 sqq.). Where “symbolist poets typically strive to see beyond the seeing” and value evocation, Objectivist poets “seek an artifact presenting the modality of things seen or felt as immediate structure of relations” and value direct reference. The Objectivist thinks with things rather than about them and values composition and measure over interpretation. The formalist bias of objectification (perfection, rest, totality) is balanced with the ethical imperative of sincerity, the respectful attention to minute particulars and, in Oppen’s understanding, composition out of moments of conviction and a commitment to clarity. In his 1999 afterword to his original essay, Altieri demonstrates the inherent plasticity of the movement and its key concepts by extending the concept of sincerity to indeterminacy and the concept of objectification to the anti-representational constructions of several contemporary investigative poets (DuPlessis, 18). This plasticity was to allow for similarly inventive interpretations on the part of French readers, making for an exceptionally fruitful reception.

3 As Antoine Compagnon has shown, post-war French poetry can be schematically divided between believers and skeptics, between those who have chosen to celebrate the world, to watch for signs of presence, to unveil transcendence, and to put their trust in humanism, tradition and the transparency of language on the one hand, and those who refuse poetry, give up on expressing the real, focus on language, endorse suspicion, advise distance, advocate the experience of limits and remain faithful to the modernist spirit on the other. In Oppen, the believers could recognize a predilection for rugged reality, a distrust of concepts and an aspiration to truth and silence reminiscent of Yves Bonnefoy and those poets associated with L’Éphémère (1967-1972): Bonnefoy, André du Bouchet, Jacques Dupin and Paul Celan. An assiduous reader of Heidegger

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since the 1930s, Oppen related strongly to Bonnefoy’s Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve which he first read in 1965 and which, as Peter Nicholls has shown (89), influenced his 1968 Of Being Numerous. Oppen’s serial mode, where revelation comes in shards, could also evoke René Char and his Heraclitean aphorisms, though in a muted tone. In fact, like Char who had expressed his fealty to poetry by joining the resistance during WWII and had refused to publish throughout the war, Oppen and Rakosi commanded respect for having, during the Depression, renounced poetry to organize strikes and become social workers. In 1942, Oppen volunteered for duty and was wounded in the Ardennes. Like Char who had expressed his preoccupation for a “common presence,” Oppen pursued a tormented reflection on the very possibility of community, which he also carried out on the linguistic front, wondering “whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually does exist” (Dembo, 162). The nominalism of the Objectivists, their care for singulars and their distrust of high- sounding universals, while it chimes with Bonnefoy’s rejection of Platonism, could also speak to the skeptics, who praised their early examination of language. Oppen does not renounce a poetics of celebration but pares it down at the risk of hermeticism, and he submits language to a rigorous scrutiny which leaves him using mostly the humble “little words.” Among the skeptics, formalists of all persuasions, whether Oulipians or Literalists, recognized the importance of Zukofsky’s formal and prosodic experiments. Against Sartre who had asserted that only prose could carry active political content, Zukofsky and his fellow Objectivists produced poems where literary responsibility was embodied in the form, thus legitimizing opacity at the expense of transitivity. For Literalists who aspired to the degree zero of writing but could no longer, as Barthes had originally done in 1953, recognize it in Camus, who by the 1970s sounded as stately as any grantécrivain (great writer), Reznikoff’s overwhelming Testimony offered a more convincing model of that “ style of absence which is almost an ideal absence of style” (Barthes, 217-218).

4 An Objectivist poet or text dominated each period, attuned to the current issues of French poetry. When he discovered the Objectivists in the 1960s, at a time when he was also attending to Bonnefoy’s work, Claude Royet-Journoud appeared most taken by Oppen whose poems he set out to translate. But from the 1970s onwards, when, in the wake of Jabès and in a textualist reversal, Royet-Journoud made the book the answer to the quest for the “real place” initiated earlier by the poets associated with L’Éphemère, it was Zukofsky, a more formalistic poet and an early reader of Wittgenstein, whom he set up as his principal reference. Similarly, the promotion of Testimony at the expense of Zukofsky’s “A”-9 in the 1980s signaled the end of the textualist avant-garde set on the experience of limits, and a return to narrative and the quotidian. Not all Objectivists have left a mark on French poetics. Why Carl Rakosi, the one surviving Objectivist to be invited to Royaumont in 1989, still has no book in French may partly be ascribed to his poetics which, as Marjorie Perloff has argued, are best understood in the wake of Wallace Stevens than William Carlos Williams—and Stevens’s surface Frenchness never made him a very popular poet with French poets. Finally, as Liliane Giraudon rightly pointed out, the French reception of the Objectivists has sadly repeated the original neglect for the discreet female Objectivist Lorine Niedecker by choosing to foreground “the four musketeers” (Di Manno, 1990, 67).

5 While Marjorie Perloff (1989, 1990, 2006) and Serge Gavronsky (1994), early observers of the French-American conversation in poetry, have already highlighted and analyzed the primary importance of the Objectivists, I hope to offer a more comprehensive

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historical account of their reception. Concentrating on issues of poetic theory,5 my aim is to bring out the landmarks and articulations of the French reception of the Objectivists, to show how the controversies attending the interpretations of Objectivist poetics served to further French poetics and, more generally, to shed light on the complex dynamics of reception, textual circulation and canonization. I identify three main moments of this reception, focusing more specifically on the key figures, institutions, publications and events around which these different readings of the Objectivists crystallized, and I dwell on those moments when competing readings of the Objectivists came into conflict. In particular, I show how the Objectivists helped revive formal poetry after Surrealism while also providing a model for an anti-poetic prose poetry; how they spearheaded the movement to do away with an idealistic understanding of the poetic, while providing a disciplined poetics of presence which seemed able to resist lapsing into the sublime and smuggling in transcendence; how they helped break with the hermeneutic reading model and bring about a literalist reading in the 1970s, while also providing the key text for a second foundation of literalist poetics in the 1990s; how they served as the common reference sealing the friendship between contemporary poststructuralist French and American poets, while also fueling alternative views set on reconciling formal exigency and the visionary dimension in a humanist search for a “common song;” how they helped redefine poetry at a time of crisis, providing limit-cases challenging the structuralist or formalist definitions of poetry in favor of pragmatic or heuristic definitions.

The 1970s or Radical Formalism

Serge Fauchereau: “the First Deliberately American Movement”

6 The Objectivists were first brought to the attention of the French readers by Serge Fauchereau, a French critic, professor and curator, whose 1968 Lectures de la poésie américaine gave an unprecedented view of the wealth of modern and contemporary American poetry.6 By placing the chapter devoted to the Objectivists right in the middle of the book and entitling it “La poésie en Amérique,” Fauchereau singled out the Objectivists as the first deliberately American movement (134). This central position also stressed their role as sole link between what Fauchereau calls the Pound-Williams- Cummings trinity on the one hand, and Charles Olson and the Black Mountain group on the other. In his opening paragraph, Fauchereau noted a surge of interest for the Objectivists in the 1960s and, possibly under the influence of his friend and informant Robert Duncan, stated that Louis Zukofsky appeared to be considered among the three or four greatest poets alive.

7 In Fauchereau’s characterization of the Objectivists, one recognizes several of the features that would appeal to those French poets who were going to endorse their poetics. Fauchereau insists on their refusal of metaphors, of explanation, of passing aesthetic or moral judgment. He insists on their deliberate simplicity, their familiar diction, a naturalness that American poetry had never reached before (128-130), characteristics which might well appeal in a country where literary language has always been far removed from everyday language and appeared even more strikingly so after 1968 when conversational French became more informal. Fauchereau quotes Zukofsky saying that the collaborators of the 1931 issue of Poetry believed in the

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necessity of form, in renewing form rather than resorting to inherited patterns (129), and he quotes Oppen defending “a realist art in that the poem is interested in something it did not create” (129). He contextualizes the importance of the object and likens it to a rehabilitation of objects in other contemporary arts, painting in particular. Quoting Alain Robbe-Grillet (132), he evokes a form of revelation that is not mystical but plainly photographic, thus delineating the evolution of the French poetry to come from a poetics of presence to a poetics of literality. Robbe-Grillet, of course, was the writer who exemplified what Roland Barthes had defined in 1955 as “Littérature littérale,” a literature described as “white,” “objective,” and “neutral.” Fauchereau’s conclusion is that “there are as many Objectivisms as there are Objectivists today” (135), a decisive fact in that it allowed for a variety of interpretations over the next decades.

Roubaud’s Zukofsky: An Antidote to Surrealism and Anti-Pound

8 It is through Fauchereau that Jacques Roubaud first heard about the Objectivists and in the 1977 special issue he guest-edited for Europe,7 he calls this discovery “a true revelation” (24). In the conversation with Charles Dobzynsky and Serge Fauchereau that inaugurates the issue, Roubaud says that he had known about Williams, Pound and Cummings but, like everybody else, had been under the impression that American poetry was something minor and not very interesting. When Fauchereau asks him what attracted him to the Objectivists, Roubaud answers: What struck me is that these were people who came after their elders, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, that is after people who were innovators and who, in order to continue beyond, found a solution that was not that of the Surrealists. I admire the Surrealists and Dadaists enormously but if you want to write in France you have to determine your stance in opposition to them; so seeing people who took Pound and Williams as starting-points and who went in directions that were markedly different from those we were familiar with in France, that really struck me. (Europe, 1977, 24)

9 Roubaud makes quite clear that he sees the Objectivists as a solution to a personal and a national problem, a lever to counter the moribund but still pervasive Surrealist influence. Throughout the 1970s, Roubaud was reading far and wide in search of remote poetic models to counter the Surrealist influence that he had initially suffered under: he found them primarily in the Troubadours, in Japanese medieval poetry, and in American poetry, above all in the Objectivists, in Gertrude Stein and in some of the New American poets represented in Don Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960. In the mid-1970s, Roubaud was also reflecting on French verse. In his book on the demise of the alexandrine, he criticized what he terms the vers libre standard (standard free verse) propagated by the Surrealists and increasingly popular worldwide. The alternative poetic models he turned toward are all strongly formal and, unsurprisingly, Roubaud took a keen interest in Zukofsky in whom he may have seen a predecessor, a poet who shared his concern for the renewal of form and his growing distrust for avant-garde gestures.8

10 In the 1970s, Roubaud wrote at least three introductory notes9 in which he refined his views and modulated Zukofsky’s reception. His 1973 notice begins with a grand canonizing gesture: radicalizing Fauchereau’s assertion of Zukofsky’s importance, Roubaud calls him “the most important American poet of the century.” Roubaud

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expresses his fascination for “A”: “this monumental, fascinating, off-putting, contradictory text, both attractive and difficult” (Roubaud, 1973, 12). He emphasizes some unforgettable “formal feats” and a wide range of formal poetics. He adds that no one seems capable yet of tackling critically the problem posed by Zukofsky’s poem, that most critics play down the political and technical dimension of the work (“A”-9 and “Mantis”) in favor of the merely autobiographical (“A”-12). In his 1977 presentation, Roubaud elaborates on the Zukofsky/Pound parallel and, in 1980, he goes on to call Zukofsky an “anti-Pound” who has provided opposite answers to the same questions. Zukofsky follows Pound’s injunction to make it new but he doesn’t seek modern meaning in “the solar dust of their original fragments but through a meditation of the formal seen in the formal” (Europe, 78). Stressing the political and technical dimensions, Roubaud lays emphasis on form, “a meditation on form, in form itself,” as exemplified in “A”-9,10 or “Mantis,” poems which strip formalism of its arguably reactionary overtones, flaunting a brilliant reconciliation of radical formalism with radical politics.11 Incidentally, in the battle that raged between Parisian avant-garde coteries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this represented a pointed attack against Tel Quel where Denis Roche and Marcelin Pleynet championed Ezra Pound. For Roubaud, Zukofsky offered not only an original combination of radical politics and formal experimentation but, unlike Pound, had opted for the adequate politics (Marxism) and poetics, i.e. Zukofsky’s “objectification” in which poems aspire to the condition of object, as against Tel Quel’s prescription against genres in favor of the “text” and écriture.

Anne-Marie Albiach and Claude Royet-Journoud’s Gestures: Defeating Hermeneutics

11 In the 1970s, Roubaud was the French poet who most outspokenly and discursively shaped the French reception of the Objectivists, doing so in major poetic venues: the communist-friendly magazines Action Poétique and Europe, as well as an anthology of American poetry published by Gallimard. But, just as importantly, this initial decade of reception was shaped by the gestures of two poets: Anne-Marie Albiach translated the first half of “A”-9 in 1970 and Claude Royet-Journoud entitled two of his magazines, “A” and ZUK,12 after Zukofsky, and started using objectivistically-loaded words in the titles of his own books: obstacle, objet, préposition.13 Royet-Journoud and Albiach didn’t need to learn about the Objectivists from Fauchereau. They lived in London in the 1960s, avidly reading contemporary American poets many of whom were published in England at the time; Zukofsky’s “A”-1-12 was published by Jonathan Cape in London in 1966, and three books by Lorine Niedecker were published by Wild Hawthorn Press in Edinburgh and Fulcrum in London in the 1960s. The British poet Anthony Barnett introduced them to the work of George Oppen. In each of his introductory notes, Roubaud mentions Albiach’s translation of the first half of “A”-9, calling it very beautiful in 1977 and “exemplary” in 1980. The reason why it is exemplary, I suspect, is that it replicates Zukofsky’s endeavor and formal feat: to paraphrase Roubaud, it constitutes a meditation on translation as form, in the translation itself. That both Jacques Roubaud and Anne-Marie Albiach should have initially focused on Zukofsky’s “A”-9 makes clear that, for this first generation of French poets, the appeal of the Objectivists lay in an original combination of form and politics.

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12 Albiach’s translation has been reprinted three times since 1970, most recently in 2011, and has attained to something of a mythic aura, for reasons one can try to account for. First, she translated a poem of formidable formal complexity and semantic obduracy. And she did so in a very personal way, making forceful decisions, choosing to translate the form rather than the words.14 She repeated Zukofsky’s posture, composing a prose paraphrase or commentary (“Contrepoint”) just as Zukofsky had provided a prose restatement for his own poem in a 1940 privately published pamphlet. Secondly, Zukofsky approved of the translation,15 and several French poets did too: Jacques Roubaud, Jean-Pierre Faye, Alain Veinstein, Jean Daive. To my knowledge, Albiach and Royet-Journoud are (with Fauchereau) the only French poets who corresponded with Zukofsky and Oppen. Thirdly, “A”-9 haunts Albiach’s most celebrated book, État, published in 1971, a year after her translation. État revealed Albiach as a poet and, after Jean Daive’s 1967 Décimale blanche, implemented a new poetics in French poetry, which violently defeated representation and hermeneutic reading and established a literal reading.16 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, proponents of littéralité continued exploring the Objectivists’ work and acclimatizing their poetics.

The 1980s and 1990s or Littéralité

Royaumont, 1989: Negative Modernity Meets Language Poetry

13 1989 stands as an annus mirabilis in the French reception of the Objectivists, with a three-day international seminar on the Objectivists at the Abbaye de Royaumont, the translation of Zukofsky’s theoretical essays including “Sincerity & Objectification” by Pierre Alferi, the translation of Reznikoff’s Holocaust by Auxeméry and two special issues devoted to the Objectivists by Banana Split and Java.17 1989 also marks the coming-of-age of a new generational reception and a change of emphasis.

14 Convened by French poet Emmanuel Hocquard, the Rencontres Internationales de Royaumont were held from September 29 to October 1. They featured presentations by Charles Bernstein (on Reznikoff), Michael Davidson (on Oppen), Lyn Hejinian (on Zukofsky), Michael Palmer (on Objectivism), as well as discussions with other invited poets including Objectivist Carl Rakosi, David Bromige (who chronicled the event), Stephen Rodefer, Joseph Simas, Emmanuel Hocquard, Claude Royet-Journoud, Jean- Paul Auxeméry, Yves di Manno, in addition to Pierre Alferi and Judith Crews who provided translations. The event is sometimes referred to as the first international conference devoted to the work of the Objectivists but Hocquard insisted that he “never intended an academic-type colloquium on the Objectivist movement”; his primary aim was to invite “contemporary American poets whose work I have known and valued […] to France to share with contemporary French writers their present reading of the Objectivists” (Poetry Flash, 22). Hocquard here clarifies the stakes of an Objectivist reception orchestrated by poets as opposed to academics: the focus is not on historical reconstruction but contemporary creation, the shaping of the field. In hindsight, the conference contributed to the recognition and canonization of the Objectivists, and sealed a Franco-American friendship18 on the grounds of a common lineage and a certain interpretation of these ancestors. The conference also revealed diverging interpretations of the Objectivists, indicative of fault-lines among their admirers in France and beyond.

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15 That this conference, organized in the outskirts of Paris, was discussed and denounced as far as California in several issues of Poetry Flash, an institution in the Bay Area’s literary culture, proves that its stakes were legible, and exemplifies the feedback or, in this case, backlash effect that the French reception of the Objectivists may cause in the United States. Carl Rakosi, the sole surviving Objectivist, was invited at the conference and, as he made known in a March 1990 letter to Poetry Flash, strongly disagreed with many things he heard. This included Bernstein’s stress on Reznikoff’s Jewishness and the participants’ interest in opacity and language. Clearly hostile to Language Poetry,19 Poetry Flash editor Richard Silberg characterized the Royaumont mind-set as “formalistic, extremely theory-bound and centrally concerned with language in itself and with problems of meaning” (Poetry Flash, 22) and denounced the commandeering of the Objectivists in the service of a Language Poetry agenda. The main fault line crystallized around the term “opacity,” dividing those who believed in communication and distrusted theory (Rakosi, Yves di Manno and the Poetry Flash editor) and those who embraced the “era of suspicion” and the “linguistic turn”: the Language Poets and Hocquard who, while himself a great believer in the ligne claire, expressed surprise and dismay at the idea that some still believed in the so-called transparency of language. Yves di Manno described the Objectivist meeting as a turning point in his life and a leap into the public debate. Invited to speak about his experience as a translator of Oppen’s work but angered by the “textualist clichés” he heard, di Manno rewrote his talk during the seminar and launched into “a long and rather polemical historical overview, insisting on the social dimension of the Objectivists’ work as well as the epic tradition they were part of” and denouncing “the narrowly formalistic rhetoric which had until then dominated the debates” (di Manno, 23).20

16 Di Manno’s reaction points to an interesting paradox at the heart of the Franco- American poetry connection in the 1980s and 1990s. Emmanuel Hocquard, Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach and other poets identified as proponents of poésie blanche or, in Hocquard’s term, “negative modernity”; they had kept at a safe distance from the “theoretical and polemical turmoil” (Gleize, 1992, 124) of the late 1960s and early 1970s and generally refrained from any theoretical pronouncements or jargon. But their work bears the mark of the theoretical investigations of this era of suspicion. 21 Contrasting it with the “triumphant modernity” of the pre-war avant-gardes, Hocquard defines “negative modernity” as riddled “with suspicion, doubt and questions about everything, itself included” (Hocquard, 2001, 25). It is precisely this common theoretical background that enabled a true conversation with the Language Poets. Indeed, in his preface to the 49+1 Poètes américains anthology (1991), Hocquard identifies “the shared assumptions between French and American poets of the same generation” as: [1] “emphasis on language itself, taken as the substance or material of the poem and not merely as an instrument of expression or aesthetic veneer; [2] richness and complexity of formal invention; [3] mobility, freedom and dynamism of a vigilant poetry, breaking with those formally and ideologically academic and conservative models that exist in the United States no less than elsewhere” (Hocquard, 1991, 13-14).

Reznikoff’s Testimony: a Model for the Second Littéralité

17 Although Hocquard readily quotes Oppen and Zukofsky, it is Reznikoff’s Testimony that provides him with the decisive model for littéralité. Composed over several decades and

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only published in full posthumously, Testimony: The United States (1885-1915), Recitative 22 portrays turn-of-the-century America from the statements of courtroom witnesses that Reznikoff sampled and versified. What makes this book so moving is precisely its literality, which is the contrary of literature. Duplication logically reveals the model in a new light, relentless, overwhelming. Through repetition, in that gap, that distance, which is the very theatre of mimesis, suddenly you see something else in the model, which now loses its value as original, as origin. The words are the same, the sentences are the same and yet these are no longer the same utterances [énoncés]. It is prodigious how this infinitesimal transfer of the same text, this simple passage from one form to another, produces meaning—and how violently—while operating, by means of language, a considerable cleansing. (Hocquard 2001, 28)

18 “Suddenly you see something” (Dembo, 212) is a pronouncement by Zukofsky that Hocquard often quotes. It embodies his concept of elucidation. For Hocquard, the business of poetry is the logical organization of thought or, in Wittgensteinian terms, the logical clarification of thought. As such, it has nothing more in common with literature than with any other language-based activity (Hocquard, 2001, 22). The work of Hocquard is a continuous escape from literature, from its “fuss, its sleight of hand, its meta-discourses, its simpering airs, its intimidation” (Hocquard, 2001, 448).23 As against literature, Testimony offers Hocquard a model for literality or, as he makes clear in “La Bibliothèque de Trieste” (1987), for a second foundation of literality. Both first and second literality share an awareness that the real is inaccessible and that language is bound to fail in its attempt at representation. But while the first literality, initiated by Albiach and Royet-Journoud in the 1970s, experienced the impassable gap between words and things as a form of terror or ecstasy, the second literality, predicated on differential repetition, joyfully engages in grammatical investigations of a very practical nature. The foundation on this second literality marked an important turning point in French poetry, away from mid-century Kojevian and Blanchotian negativity. It offered a theoretical frame for all the techniques of sampling and appropriation to come. It also marked a turning point in the French reception of the Objectivists. In becoming the exemplary instance for this poetics of copying, Reznikoff’s Testimony imposed itself as the emblematic Objectivist reference from the 1990s onwards.

19 Littéralité became a key word on the French poetry scene in the 1990s, which opposed the lyricists to the literalists: lyrisme contre littéralité. The Objectivists, of course, were duly rounded in the camp of the literalists. Littéralité was taken up and further theorized by Jean-Marie Gleize in A noir, Poésie et littéralité (1992), a defense of literality against la poésie—poetry as essence—, and a plea for prose en prose (prose in prose, a pun on poème en prose, prose poem).

La Revue de littérature générale: the Limits of the Objectivist Alternative

20 If Hocquard’s endorsement and interpretation of Testimony have proven so crucial for French poetry it is because his insistence on procedure made it palatable for a younger generation of poets increasingly invested in sampling, mixing media and combining high and low material. Hocquard has provided a key in articulation between the poésie blanche of the 1970s and a new generation of poets who began to publish around 1990, with Pierre Alferi and Olivier Cadiot in the forefront. The two mammoth issues of the

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Revue de littérature générale constitute a landmark in late twentieth-century French poetry. Edited by Alferi and Cadiot, these strikingly attractive 400-page volumes made a clean break with the avant-garde magazines of the 1970s by presenting themselves as cross-generational tool boxes rather than coterie-driven manifestos and works in progress. Alferi and Cadiot’s opening piece to the first volume entitled La Mécanique lyrique obliquely assesses the appeal and limits of Objectivism while couching their presentation in Objectivist terms. If only to avoid the loaded reference to genres and “texts,” they refer to literary products as “objects” and conceive of them in mechanical terms.24

21 In the closing pages of their presentation, Alferi and Cadiot single out the object as the fate and, conversely, the curse of poetry. “In poetry more than elsewhere is accomplished the ideal of the arrested object [l’arrêt sur objet; a pun on “arrêt sur image”= freeze-frame]” (RLG1, 20). And even if the American Objectivist poems, with their “literal fragmentation,” appear as a refreshingly non-precious, non-baroque alternative to “symbolist metaphors or surrealist juxtapositions,” in the end, they remain “small isolated apparatus [dispositifs] in the service of an ideal of the Object, hieroglyphs to be deciphered, baubles [bibelots], monsters.” (RLG1, 20) This fetishizing of the object portends “automutilation and seclusion” and constitutes: a limit (the limit?) of poetry. The arrest of poetry: already an old story. From Ducasse’s Poésies to Denis Roche’s dramatic exit, from the performers’ more nuanced elusions to the rejection of literary poetry in the name of “the true life out there”, etc., it is still the talk of the day and it’s turning to a farce. On the one hand, the fetishistic craftsmen, keepers of forms and savoir-faire. On the other the ex- iconoclasts who either brood over a “modern” destiny or move into ordinary prose. (RLG1, 22)

22 Having taken stock of this recursive dead end of poetry and identified the characteristic postures with which the situation is dealt with by various players of the field (the return to formal poetry or the headlong escape into prose), the young poet has little choice but to go on anyway and search for alternative routes with the following imperative in mind: “how to keep the precision of the poetic mechanism without losing speed?” (RLG1, 22). The two volumes do not offer any easy answer but a rich toolbox. In the 2000s, a new generation of poets stripped the Objectivists of these formalist, autotelic overtones and used Testimony to engineer a pragmatic poetics. But before that, we shall see how both “the fetishistic craftsmen and keepers of forms” and “the ex-iconoclasts moving into ordinary prose” vied to round up the Objectivists into their camp.

Into the Twenty-First Century, or Testimony as a Test of Poetry

Jean-Marie Gleize: Establishing a French Objectivist Tradition

23 While Alferi and Cadiot were taking stock of contemporary French poetry and putting the Objectivist model in perspective as an exotic but nonetheless recognizable model, a writer they would no doubt have identified as an “ex-iconoclast” was “moving into ordinary prose” and fostering yet another reception for the Objectivists. Part of the third-generation surge of interest for the Objectivists can be ascribed to Jean-Marie Gleize and his young associates, the post-poets. Jean-Marie Gleize is a writer, a critic,

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the chief-editor of Nioques and a professor emeritus of the École Normale Supérieure where he founded the Centre d’études poétiques in 1999, a unique research group that fostered an awareness of contemporary creation in students through the invitation of poets and artists. Through his critical writing and his teaching Gleize has effectively renewed and reshaped the interest in the Objectivists.

24 More than previous go-betweens, Gleize has sought to reveal an underestimated Objectivist tradition within French poetry and pointed to Rimbaud and Ponge in particular as indigenous proto-Objectivists (Gleize, 2009, 117): “I try to establish that there is a diffuse French Objectivism, with Ponge representing one possible manner. Like its American counterpart, French Objectivism necessarily devotes a very great attention to language” (Gleize, 2002). Already in his 1992 A noir, Poésie et littéralité, Gleize had delineated a literal current taking its source in Romanticism and going through Lamartine, Stendhal, Rimbaud, Artaud, Ponge and negative modernity. Taking up Rimbaud’s request for “an objective poetry” in a 1871 letter to Izambard, and in the wake of modernité negative,25 he called for a poetry that is objective, literal, neutral, violently simple, naked, impersonal, prosaic, couched in simple diction, a poetry that refuses images and metaphors—in other words, a poetry that is antipoetic. Pursuing the attacks on la poésie (poetry as ideal, as washed-out lyric) launched by Francis Ponge after World War II and taken up by Denis Roche in the 1960s, Gleize has called for an exit from poetry: hence the term “post-poet” that his followers have adopted.

25 Ponge’s focus on the object makes him an obvious candidate as a French cousin of the Objectivists.26 Benoît Auclerc has usefully clarified Ponge’s Objectivist leanings.27 While Ponge shares with his American contemporaries an interest in the trivial, stubbornly closed object, a certain prosaic simplicity, a distrust of verbiage (which he famously dubbed “la pompe lyrique”), a refusal of sentimentality and a generally anti-lyrical stance, he refuses objectification. Even Oppen, much less of an ostensible formalist than Zukofsky, reaffirmed the importance of objectification in his 1969 interview with L.S. Dembo and stressed “the necessity for forming a poem properly, for achieving form. That’s what ‘Objectivist’ really means […]. It actually means the objectification of the poem, the making an object of the poem” (Dembo, 160). But after 1940 Ponge increasingly refused to objectify his writing, to indulge in what he called “a poetic abscess,” preferring various forms of notes or drafts. He also refused to call himself a poet. In the wake of Ponge and Roche, many contemporary French poets refuse the term “poet,” and call themselves “writers” instead. The stance for or against poetry as an independent genre creates a sharp line of demarcation in the world of French poetry. Auclerc suggests that for some French poets, “resorting to the Objectivists may appear as a way of avoiding Ponge” (Auclerc, 159). It is by implicitly letting Ponge contaminate the American Objectivists that Gleize can describe their movement as “in certain respects, antipoetic” (Gleize, 2002, 116).

26 While Jacques Roubaud agreed with Gleize that several Objectivist works constituted generic borderline cases, he drew opposite conclusions from this diagnosis. In 1996, in an essay entitled “La tentative Objectiviste” and published in the second volume of the Revue de littérature générale, Roubaud offered a clarification on the Objectivist movement in which he vindicated “a radical Objectivism” and posited Reznikoff’s Testimony28 as the paradigm of “a (radical) Objectivist attempt in poetry.” While the general public commonly associates poetry with sentimentality, “Radical Objectivism” demonstrates a “conception of poetry so remote from what is generally considered as

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poetry that it runs the risk of not being recognized as such” (Roubaud, 1996, 36). But Roubaud’s goal is to keep Testimony firmly in the domain of poetry both against those who would exclude it as lacking in feelings and lyricism and those, like Gleize, who would enlist it in their anti-poetic project. As Burton Hatlen has pointed out, “Reznikoff levels language down to almost prose—but the ‘almost’ is the key word here, for we are constantly impelled to try to define the ways in which what we are reading is not prose” (DuPlessis, 53). In his clarification Roubaud discards Ponge in a pointed parenthesis: “rhetoric is often a disguise for a conventional, if not regressive, moral; see the example of Ponge” (Roubaud, 1996, 36). Works identified as “diluted Objectivism” are discarded on the same grounds. For Roubaud, “late Oppen, late Rakosi,” the late Williams of Paterson, and Reznikoff’s “Horse” give up on the drastic Objectivist tenets29 and give in to “the Anglo-Saxon inclination towards the moral lesson.”30 Furthermore, where the dividing line at Royaumont had passed between the champions of opacity and those of transparency, Roubaud implicitly rejects this opposition as false when he claims that Reznikoff’s highly-legible Testimony and Zukofsky’s most obdurate 80 Flowers both embody radical objectivism in spite of their varied surfaces and accessibility: the difference is one of material not of method. Incidentally, Gleize offers yet another take on that opposition when he claims that the truly “modern obscurity of poetry [resides] in the extremism of its simplicity” (Gleize, 1992, 15). The muted argument between Gleize and Roubaud in the 1990s demonstrates Testimony’s exceptional ability to support competing interpretations and be enrolled in the service of starkly different poetics.

Post-Poetry or the Pragmatic Turn

27 For the community of scholars and artists known as post-poets, often former students and collaborators of Gleize, the issue is no longer to escape from literature into literality, or from poetry into prose, but to devise new analytical tools or formats that enable one to correlate radically heterogeneous areas of art, media and everyday life so as to see things differently and solve problems. Hocquard’s concept of elucidation has clearly carried over and, once again, Reznikoff’s Testimony offers itself as a striking model. In his afterword to Portraits chinois (2007), “a ‘promenade’ through different websites of various military and political activists, mapping the ‘uncovered realities’ of the low intensity conflicts,” Frank Leibovici explains that these utterances [énoncés] were taken from websites. not a word is from my heart. my work lies elsewhere-— selection, organization, redistribution. many have worked thus, long before me. charles reznikoff, to name only one, belongs to this under-recognized tradition. […] I consider this work [Portraits chinois] as a contribution to the genre of the “poetic document.” By that I mean not a poem, not even a text with a poetic aim, but an apparatus [dispositif] destined to produce a certain type of knowledge. More than specific contents, it is the forms and formalizations of various types of knowledge that I am after, that I hope to invent. (Leibovici, 2007a, 259)

28 Further down, Leibovici notes that the purely aesthetic apprehension of poetry has heretofore obscured its capacity as purveyor of intellectual technologies.31 Leibovici is less interested in Reznikoff’s aesthetic achievement than in his radically simple compositional procedure which throws the United States and its legal system in a harsh light. In Poésie action directe (2003), his post-poet fellow Christophe Hanna had already sought to redefine poetry on heuristic and pragmatic grounds. Furthering Alferi and

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Cadiot’s view of the fetishized object as the curse of poetry, Hanna launched an attack on the “poetics of the bauble” (8). Finding that “almost all theories of poetics are essentialist,” (10) he criticized Jakobson’s poetic function of language and his view of the poem as autotelic, in favor of a pragmatic approach to literature: “One gives up on a poetry conceived as a provider of aesthetic objects subject to a judgment of taste in favor of a positive poetry conceived in concrete terms as an exercise in language with a heuristic goal” (121).

29 The secret of Testimony’s endurance lies in its ability to be seen according to different interpretations or poetics. The post-poets cast Reznikoff in a pragmatic and conceptualist light, in sharp contrast with the Blanchotian light shone by Michael Palmer in 1989 at Royaumont when he had likened Reznikoff to Bartleby the copyist whom Blanchot calls the “pure writer.” What made Testimony a critical text for French poetry in the 1990s was its ability to question the very definition of poetry at a time when a new generation was reconsidering the genre and its aims. As Sandra Raguenet has shown, this most prosaic and translatable of poems “defeats the structuralist method” (vol. II, 185) and all Jakobsonian and Genettian definitions of poeticity founded on a gap between poetic language and ordinary language. Testimony makes true the hope for a poetry stripped of the poetic.

30 What has made the French reception of the Objectivists exceptional/singular? is their ability to crystallize fault lines and to provide poems which serviceably questioned the very definition of the poetry and the poetic. A striking and almost constant feature of their reception has been their revelatory quality and their ability to materialize a latent alternative: to Roubaud they revealed an modernist alternative to surrealism; they helped Albiach achieve a literal alternative to hermeneutic reading; to Hocquard they confirmed the revelatory and cleansing virtue of copying procedures; to Gleize they revealed a buried French Objectivist lineage; they offered the post-poets a model of heuristic poetic document enabling a redefinition of poetry on pragmatic rather than aesthetic grounds. Hanna compares the revelatory power of poetic documents and apparatus (dispositifs) to the scenes of anagnorisis in Greek tragedies: “not so much the passage ‘from ignorance to knowledge’ as that from blindness and stupor to immediate clarity” (Hanna in Gleize 2009, 14). “[S]uddenly you see something else,” the motto of elucidation that Hocquard uncovered in Zukofsky’s interview, also sums up the contribution of the Objectivists to French poetics, its renewal of the tradition of poetry as vision (as opposed to poetry as craft) on grammatical grounds and towards a more pragmatic end.

31 The values ascribed to the Objectivist legacy are so heterogeneous that one may reasonably judge the name to be a universal and a misnomer for a series of nominalist singularities. Still, the sense that there is such a thing as an Objectivist poetics endures and their appeal hinges on a subtle combination of simplicity and complexity, clarity and obduracy, which neatly dovetailed with certain needs in French poetry. Growing out of imagism’s ideal of “direct presentation” and Williams’s speech-based poetics, Objectivists demonstrated a radically different tone and poetics: simplicity, directness, description, sometimes bordering on the prosaic. These qualities are best exemplified in Oppen and Reznikoff but also in parts of Zukofsky, who defined poetry as an integral whose upper limit is music and “lower limit speech” (Zukofsky, 1978, 138). In a 1998 interview, French poet Dominique Fourcade conveyed his transformative discovery of Williams’s iconic and proto-Objectivist poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923) which he

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called his first low voltage poem: “I have gained enormously from the trivial and prosaic character of a poem such as ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’ which suddenly opened up new horizons for me which I avidly embraced” (Java 17, 1998, 63). Objectivism, as well as later movements represented in Donald Allen’s 1960 New American Poetry anthology, offered a model for toning down a French poetic tradition long accustomed to tonal heights.

32 Almost fifty years after they were first introduced in France, and with the new generation having successfully toned down French poetry, it is difficult to tell whether yet another wave of reception is in store or if the appeal of the Objectivists has played itself out. Their mainstream currency and the consequent blurring of their doctrine through often third-hand knowledge plead for the latter option. Since 2010, Frank Smith has been publishing a series of books which straightforwardly replicate the method used by Reznikoff in Testimony and Holocaust, adapting interviews of Guantanamo detainees in Guantanamo, selecting from press coverage of the Lybian civil war in États de faits, and sampling the Goldstone report on the Gaza war of December 2008 in Gaza, d’ici-là. And in 2014, post-poet Sylvain Courtoux launched the first head-on critique of what he terms “French-style Objectivism” (30) as “a poetry of the infra- ordinary, an objevisto/arty poeticism which fascinates the Bobo critics of contemporary art and has been kindling/capturing (since the 90s) the pathos of the time where some of the more prominent members of the poetic’ “showbiz” love to wallow.” (18) The constructivist jeremiad in Consume rouge embodies the subjectivist post-poetry which Courtoux vindicates.

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---, Un objectif & deux autres essais, trans. Pierre Alferi, Royaumont, Un bureau sur l’Atlantique/ Royaumont, 1989.

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NOTES

1. The Objectivists correspond to a nexus of American poets who began publishing in the 1930s with the encouragement of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Committed to Pound’s Imagist tenets but critical of his fascist positions, which clashed with their own Communist sympathies and often Jewish origins, they developed a formally inventive and ethically exigent poetry. 2. Recent translations include George Oppen, Poésie complète, trans. Yves di Manno, Paris, José Corti, 2011; a new edition of Louis Zukofsky, “A”- 9 (première partie), trans. Anne-Marie Albiach, Marseille, Eric Pesty Éditeur, 2011; Louis Zukofsky, « A » sections 13 à 18, trans. Serge Gavronsky and François Dominique, Dijon, Virgile, 2012; Charles Reznikoff, Témoignage, trans. Marc Cholodenko, Paris, P.O.L., 2012; Lorine Niedecker, Louange du lieu et autres poèmes (1949-1970), trans. Abigail Lang, Maïtreyi and Nicolas Pesquès, Paris, José Corti, 2012; Charles Reznikoff, Rythmes 1&2, Poèmes, trans. Eva Antononikov and Jil Silberstein, Genève, Héros-Limite, 2013; Charles Reznikoff, Sur les rives de Manhattan, trans. Eva Antononikov, Genève, Héros-Limite, 2014; Charles Reznikoff, In Memoriam, trans. Jil Silberstein, Genève, Héros-Limite, 2016; Charles Reznikoff, Chacun son chemin, trans. Eva Antononikov, Genève, Héros-Limite, 2016. 3. See the “Objectivism” entry by E. Berry in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics (1993, 848). 4. The Wisconsin-based poet Lorine Niedecker and the British poet Basil Bunting have both been associated with this core Objectivist quartet. 5. I am concentrating on issues of poetic theory as articulated by the poets, at the expense of a close analysis of their own works under the influence of the Objectivists. Yet another approach would focus on the French reception of the Objectivists from the point of view of translation, which I attempted in a paper given in Marseilles in 2013 at the invitation of the research network “Contemporary French Poetic Practice: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” 6. Three years later, Serge Fauchereau supplemented his theoretical introduction with a sizeable anthology: 41 poètes américains d’aujourd’hui, choisis et traduits par Serge Fauchereau, Paris, Les Lettres Nouvelles-Denoël, 1971. Although George and Mary Oppen lived in France in the 1930s and published An “Objectivists” Anthology in the Var, the Objectivists seem to have remained entirely unknown to French readers until the late 1960s. The copy of Discrete Series that Jacques Roubaud read at la Bibliothèque Nationale in 1972 was yet uncut (Roubaud, 1980, 15). 7. Founded in 1923 by Romain Rolland and led by those poets of l’Abbaye de Créteil who helped popularize Whitman in France, Europe has always taken a keen interest in foreign literatures. 8. In his interview with L.S. Dembo, Zukofsky says: “if that thing has lasted for two hundred years and has some merit in it, it is possible I can use it and somehow in transferring it into words […] make something new of it. […] So there’s no reason why I shouldn’t use this ‘old’ form if I thought I could make something new” (Dembo, 213-214). Both Serge Gavronsky and Marjorie Perloff have written about Zukofsky’s place of honor among French avant-garde poets and ascribed it primarily to his use of numerical constraints and his commitment to form. Gavronsky denounces this as a Mallarmean misreading of Zukofsky (see Gavronsky, 1994, and Perloff, 2006, 102-20). 9. In 1973 in Action Poétique 56 (“Poésies USA,” 12); in 1977 in Europe 578-579 (“Une littérature méconnue des USA,” 78); in 1980 in Vingt poètes américains, ed. Michel Deguy and Jacques Roubaud, Paris, Gallimard, 1980, 16-18. 10. “A”-9 is composed of two canzone that respect an exacting rhyme scheme and invisible letter- based constraint, the first written in the vocabulary of Marx, the second of Spinoza. “‘Mantis’” is a sestina. 11. In the conversation reproduced in the 1977 issue of Europe, among the appealing characteristics of the Objectivists, Roubaud stresses the fact that they never wrote poésie engagée, that is, openly and rhetorically political poetry (Europe, 15-17).

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12. “A,” a xeroxed periodical which ceased publication when Zukofsky died (1976-1978) and ZUK, a four-page monthly which printed 24 issues between October 1987 and September 1989. A digital version of ZUK is available online from Jacket 2. 13. La notion d’obstacle (1978), Les objets contiennent l’infini (1983), La poésie entière est préposition (2007), Théorie des prépositions (2007). Zukofsky entitled his collection of essays Prepositions. 14. While Serge Gavronsky and François Dominique chose to translate the semantic meaning when they translated the same poem years later, Albiach translated the form, keeping as close as possible to the exceedingly constraining rhyme scheme. See « A » sections 8 à 11, trans. Serge Gavronsky and François Dominique, Dijon, Ulysse fin de Siècle, 2001. 15. Letter of March 9, 1969 to Albiach kept at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, #6027, item 10. 16. Emmanuel Hocquard provides a lucid account of “the radical reversal implied in substituting the inaugural aim to the cartographic aim,” in favoring presentation over representation, showing [monstration] over demonstration. (Hocquard, 1987, 54, 57) 17. Louis Zukofsky, Un objectif & deux autres essais, trans. Pierre Alferi, Un bureau sur l’Atlantique / Royaumont, 1989; Charles Reznikoff, Holocauste, trans. Auxeméry, Bedou, 1989 (repr., Prétexte 2007); Banana Split 26 (1989), containing poems by Carl Rakosi (trans. Auxeméry), excerpts from Reznikoff’s Testimony (trans. Auxeméry) and the first seven sections of Zukofsky’s “A” (trans. Serge Gavronsky); Java 4 (1990), Objectivist special issue edited by Yves di Manno. Published from 1980 to 1990 by poets Liliane Giraudon and Jean-Jacques Viton, Banana Split featured a joyful mix of poets from across the modernist and experimentalist spectrum and published many American poets in translation. Founded in 1989 by Jean-Michel Espitallier and Jacques Sivan, Java offered new readings of historic avant-gardes and featured contemporary poets working in the experimental tradition. 18. That same year, 1989, Hocquard also established “Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique,” an association and Franco-American center for contemporary poetry whose goal was to intensify the exchange of work between poets of both languages through invitations, seminars and publications. 19. An avant-garde group of poet-critics who started publishing in the 1970s, the Language poets reacted against the spontaneity, orality and individuality that characterized much of the poetry of 1950s. Language poetry was critical, textual, and often written collaboratively. Among the four main speakers at the Objectivist seminar, both Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian were leading members of the movement while Michael Davidson and Michael Palmer might be called fellow travellers . 20. The feature that Yves di Manno discovered in American poetry and has been trying to promote in French poetry is what he calls the common song (le chant commun). Cf. Action poétique n° 137, 196. He champions the epic scope and the quest for form of the Poundian project against what he feels is the narrowly individualistic voice and hermeticism of the Mallarmean heritage. A poet, critic and prolific translator of American poetry, di Manno has been in charge of Flammarion’s poetry collection since 1994. 21. As Hocquard explained in San Diego in 1987, these poets fed on the theoretical food that abounded everywhere (philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology...) but, back home, concentrated on their own writing, considering that it possessed an implicit theoretical dimension which dispensed them from writing manifestoes and taking sensationalistic stances (“La Bibliothèque de Trieste” in Hocquard, 2001, 26). 22. Just as Roubaud must have felt his own project anticipated in certain aspects of Zukofsky’s endeavor, Hocquard must have been struck to discover the kinship between Testimony and his first “book” in which he copied by hand the diary of a 1870 Alsatian soldier on the front (Le Portefeuil, avec Raquel, Paris, Orange Export, 1973.) As Vincent Descombes shrewdly notes on the subject of influence: “Through a sort of platonic reminiscence, the text one falls in love with is that in which one keeps learning what one already knew” (Descombes, 14).

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23. In his 1989 talk at Royaumont, Michael Palmer had mentioned Oppen’s stance “against literary contrivance”, “against the poetic” even (Palmer, 232). 24. See William Carlos Williams’ famous statements: “There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” (Preface to The Wedge (1944) in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. II, 54). 25. To my knowledge, Gleize was the first academic to respond (positively) to the work of the poets associated with modernité négative and to attempt a study of Anne-Marie Albiach (Le théâtre du poème. Vers Anne-Marie Albiach, 1995). 26. Fauchereau, however, had from the start rejected any similarity between their projects, relating instead the Objectivists to Robbe-Grillet (Fauchereau 132; Europe, 30). That said, Robbe- Grillet had himself pointed to Ponge as a precursor of the Nouveau Roman. 27. An essay published as part of a collection entitled New Objectivists and partly devoted to the Italian and French reception of the Objectivists. I warmly thank Luigi Magno who kindly sent me the manuscript of the volume. I refer the interested reader to Luigi Magno’s own charting of the French reception of the Objectivists in that volume. 28. Roubaud translated the first volume of Testimony in 1980. Témoignage, Les États-Unis, 1885-1890, Paris, Hachette/P.O.L, 1981. 29. In his 1969 interview with L.S. Dembo, Reznikoff defined the Objectivist as “a writer […] who does not write directly about his feelings but about what he sees and hears; who is restricted almost to the testimony of a witness in a court of law; and who expresses his feelings indirectly by the selection of his subject-matter and, if he writes in verse, by its music” (Dembo, 194). 30. This is by no means a strictly French critique: Geoffrey Twitchell-Waas also finds sections of Oppen’s late work “annoyingly moralistic” (330). 31. Initially proposed by Daniel Bell, the term “intellectual technology” was extended by anthropologist Jack Goody to designate the tools we use to classify information, to formulate and articulate ideas, to share know-how and knowledge, to take measurements and perform calculations.

ABSTRACTS

For almost fifty years, the Objectivists have been an enduring reference in French poetry, or at least for that section of French poetry committed to the modernist legacy. From the 1968 publication of Serge Fauchereau’s Lectures de la poésie américaine to the documentary poetics of the post-poets, every generation has refashioned the Objectivist canon and critical meaning according to their different, at times antagonistic, needs. Focusing on issues of poetic theory, this paper brings out the landmarks and articulations of the French reception of the Objectivists and shows how the controversies attending the interpretations of Objectivist poetics served to clarify and advance certain issues of French poetics. More generally, it sheds light on the complex dynamics of textual circulation, reception and canonization.

Cela fait bientôt cinquante ans que les Objectivistes constituent une référence pour de nombreux poètes français héritiers des expérimentations modernistes. De la publication des Lectures de la poésie américaine de Fauchereau en 1968 jusqu’à la poésie documentaire des post-poètes, chaque génération a reconfiguré le canon objectiviste et réinterprété sa signification en fonction d’un contexte et d’un projet poétique. Centré sur les enjeux de poétique, cet article dégage les

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moments-clés de la réception française des Objectivistes; il montre comment les interprétations divergentes de leur poétique ont aidé à clarifier et à prolonger la réflexion de la poésie française sur elle-même, et, plus largement, éclaire les dynamiques complexes qui sont en jeu dans la circulation, la réception et la canonisation des textes.

INDEX

Keywords: Objectivist poetics, French poetry, influence, transatlantic exchanges, Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, reception, canon-making, circulation of texts, literary history. Mots-clés: poétique objectiviste, poésie française, influence, échanges transatlantiques, Témoignage de Charles Reznikoff, réception, reconfiguration du canon, circulation des textes, histoire littéraire.

AUTHOR

ABIGAIL LANG Université Paris-Diderot, LARCA-UMR 8225

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The Open Boat and the Shipwreck of the Singular: American Poetry and the Democratic Ideal

Elizabeth Willis

We are all a little wild here. Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle It is entirely wild, wildest / Where there is traffic / And populace. George Oppen

1 As we consider the nature of revolutions in trans-Atlantic literary history, I want to address something about the contradictory senses of subjectivity and self within American poetry. What does the intertwining of linguistic and legislative representation have to do with the way that singularities—in both George Oppen and Susan Howe’s sense of the term—are curiously connected with occasions when the self is radically expansive or blown apart ; that is, when a subject makes itself available to the construction—or reconstruction—of a reality beyond it.

2 This phenomenon seems to involve a compulsion to re-enact what has been inscribed in American history as an encounter between wildness and civilization ; a retelling or undoing of cultural history ; a performance of self that demands an ongoing rethinking of form. What do we, the belated beneficiaries of postmodernism, understand as our relation to history ? What did—or does—the revolution of a word mean ? How does poetry revolt, and how does it revolve ? Does it turn on its own axis, and if so, what is its relation to the diurnal commonplace of the humans who read and write it ?

3 Rereading Oppen, I’ve been struck by the extent to which his poems revolve around certain words and certain poets, the way he shakes off singularity through citation ; for instance, the way he carries on conversations with William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman in “Of Being Numerous” while insistently holding the poem in the present tense. The poem seems to make a world, then turn it. We recognize the ground—it’s our world too—but only as it shifts beneath our feet.

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4 My sense is that American poetry has been propelled by—what shall we call it ?—a trauma ? a fantasy ? of almost-simultaneous revolt and union, holding out—even as we critique it—the dream of a purposeful oneness among individuals of radically different genetic and narrative codes.

5 I want to pause here before the origin myth of American poetry, the decisive moment when it arrives at a vision of itself as a new thing, not just as a new location for poetry written in English, but as something else. I’m not talking about the formulation of America’s founding documents but about the moment eighty or so years later when they could be thought of—and rewritten—as literary documents. When Walt Whitman pitched the singing of a self as an occasion for the constitution of a “we.”

6 Of course the announcement of Independence and the instituting of a Constitution are performative uses of language that pull in opposing directions. We, plural, a shipwrecked and a savage people, choose to constitute a unity composed of our numerousness. We hold certain truths to be self-evident ; which is to say, our concern is with the obvious. And the obvious, Oppen tells us, is no less than “the world” (185). We assert independence and must immediately build a civic structure that is bound to fail the explosive imperatives of its founding. This is the primary contradiction of the democratic text. It is, I think, why contradiction is such an important word in Whitman’s lexicon and why failure is so central to Oppen’s.

7 Next to the public self-assertion performed by the 1855 publication of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—the great do-it-yourself template for American poetry, unsanctioned by academic authorities or literary publishing houses—we might place Emily Dickinson’s self-made fascicles and the distribution of her poems in private correspondence. Both poets wrestled with self-determination and context. Both tested the boundaries—the human reach—of the poem.

8 But for now, let’s stay with Whitman to consider the public moment when American poetry begins to distinguish itself formally from the literary products of what was then a global empire ; that is, when it constitutes itself as a counter-tradition. Whitman’s endlessly revised poem (and, in many ways, the intentional indeterminacies of Dickinson’s manuscripts) argues not only for its own self-determination but for self- determination as an ongoing act.

9 I’m speaking not so much of the self-determination of the poet as that of the poem, which, in effect, demands a sovereignty of its own. “Poetry,” wrote William Carlos Williams, “is a rival government always in opposition to its cruder replicas” (1954, 178). Poetry is, as Robert Duncan would assert a century after Whitman, a landscape in its own right : an enterable meadow, a workable ground. It is, as Dickinson composed it, volcanic. It is, in Gertrude Stein’s hands, a “geography.”

10 Whitman believed American poetry would develop organically, that it would “show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush” (10). Of course in his elegy for Lincoln, Whitman goes on to write the great poem of lilacs. And it is left to William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and other modernists to build the rose factories of the next century.

11 “Pow word,” Stein writes, “a pow word is organic and sectional and an old man’s company” (2012, 41). Pow ! A condensed iteration of power. The word is meant to stun, to disorient, to knock out the reader.

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12 Stein’s rose turns in circles. Williams’ rose explodes. It revolves, and it revolts, at the site of production.

13 In his introduction to Leaves of Grass, Whitman explicitly blurs the distinction between poet and reader, reader and poem, poem and world, announcing that “your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body” (11).

14 This merger of figure and ground—of landscape and portraiture— is a poetic manifestation of what I would call the “democratic ideal.” In linking the project of poetry with the project of democracy, Whitman established a measure toward which he believed American poetry must strive—and he often lamented its failure to reach it.

15 “Nuts,” Stein writes some 60 years later in her portrait of “Americans” : “when and if the bloom is on next and really really really, it is a team” (2012, 43).

16 Like Whitman, Stein had a strong autobiographical impulse that was often displaced and dispersed. Both were concerned with the nature of genius and the relation between genius, specialness, and the commonplace. American poetry—or what was most American about American poetry—would be a series of attempts. It would either be failing at being revolutionary, or failing at having an audience. Or both.

17 That, Stein writes, “is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic” (1926, 9). American poetry would, to some extent, always revolve around this dilemma. We hear it voiced in Whitman’s acknowledgment of his own poems’ contradictions ; in Oppen’s “shipwreck of the singular” ; in the grammatical reorientation of center and periphery produced by Stein’s heightened attention to prepositions, articles, and conjunctions. We hear it in Susan Howe’s explosive typography ; in Nathaniel Mackey’s tracking of fugitivity ; and in Charles Bernstein’s eruptive shifts between semantic depths and surfaces, to give just a few examples.

18 It may or may not be obvious that American poets of this idiosyncratic and non- conforming counter-tradition are repeatedly writing an account of their own making ; that we—whoever we are—are often giving an account of, or grappling with formally, a history of revolutions and disasters, of lands arrived at in error or under duress. The story of a penal colony and a promised land, a waking up, an arrival, an occasion for re- invention, which is also and unequally the story of the Middle Passage, of compulsory heterosexuality, of stolen ground, of whole cities “of the corporations,” and of state- sanctioned genocide, though these histories of violence are often discreetly—and discretely—encoded (Oppen, 163).

19 Here in the middle—or beyond the ending—is an American “we” that wants to believe in the possibility of repeated beginnings.

20 Stein : “Beginning again and again is a natural thing even when there is a series” (1926, 12).

21 In this serially reiterative America, a poet is Nobody and “Everyman.” She is numerous and singular. He is Ulysses and Ishmael. An earnest, undependable, self-accusing, displaced witness to failure.

22 I want to pause for another moment to think about the obvious. About things that are declared to be self-evident. About what Gertrude Stein could see in America because

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she was looking at it from France. But more broadly than that, about the fact that what is obvious to the poet may seem obscure—or beside the point—to the critic. And that what appears obvious to the critic may be the site of greatest mystery to the poet.

23 I want to reconsider Charles Olson’s statement that space is the “central fact” of America and to place beside it the fact that he was unapologetically stating the obvious (17). He was saying I, Ishmael, a survivor of shipwreck and of madness, hold this truth to be self-evident.

24 Did Olson ever think of his maximalism in relation to Stein’s ? I think they arrived at the same shore on different boats. I think in their moments of greatest genius, they both may have thought, like Crusoe, that they were alone.

25 Stein’s Tender Buttons is, in many ways, the opposite of Olson’s Maximus, but it too is thinking broadly and specifically about space, its poems organized according to the private and public textures of rooms ; the purchase, preparation, and consumption of food ; the cut of clothing against the contour of a body ; and of course the friction and slipperiness of words within a sentence. Her texts are full of places and things she is devoted to making us see differently, everyday givens that have become so self-evident we no longer see them. She begins her portrait of “Americans” with a three-word sentence : “Eating and paper” (2012, 39).

26 America is a composition about consumption. Anybody will tell you this. It is all about taking up space. The fact of space. The possibilities of—and, for the intruder, the anxieties generated by—unbounded space.

27 “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. / This is what makes America what it is,” Stein writes in The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1995, 45-46). Like a page, this space is figured either as a landscape or as a portrait and, in its canonical representations, it is very very very very white. It is, in accordance with the literary forms of its most invasive species, in pursuit of whiteness, like a whale. It is an accumulation and intensification of whiteness, and it is a displacement. As Stein writes : “By the white white white white, by the white white white white white white, by the white white white white by the white by the white white white white” (2012, 45).

28 I hear this passage in conversation with Williams’s “red wheel/barrow […] / beside the white / chickens” (Williams, CP vol. 1, 1991, 224), but I also hear Stein addressing other problems of seeing, including issues of race and ethnicity that are inseparable from the basic formal construction of a self among others.

29 Where Williams’s signature poem presents a study in contrasts that is at once commonplace and singular, Stein’s white-on-white field insists and intensifies ; the reader has no way of delineating between figure and ground or, for that matter, between adjective and noun, single entity and crowd. Is the meaning of the passage obvious or obscure ? Or where is the boundary where it crosses between one and the other ?

30 What is the relation of Stein’s highly aestheticized white field—her pointing to the removal of contrast and perspective—with the lived realities of what James Baldwin would address as the contractual status of whiteness, the lie of whiteness that is the price of becoming American ? “No one,” Baldwin writes, “was white before he/she came to America. It took a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country” (136).

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31 Is it freedom or coercion playing against its own echoes at the troubled center of Stein’s “geographical history” ? By placing whiteness beside itself within a non-conforming sentence, Stein pulls at the coercive function of conventional grammar and makes this whiteness visible and audible as a made thing ; its meaning is not immutable, regardless of the reader’s cultural, racial, or national identity. As with her often repeated “Rose is a rose is a rose,” the line’s content is at once unstable and richly obvious ; what is commonly referred to as Stein’s obscurity is, rather, the revelation of something the reader did not expect to see. Seeing what whiteness is, hearing what it says in black and white, begins by making conscious its cognitive delivery system, the interplay between eye and mind. Similarly the “or” of Stein’s title uses an unexpected parallelism to mark the non-neutrality of history : even something that sounds as stable as a “geographical history” involves confronting patterns of human behavior and cognition.

32 Let’s place beside Stein’s study in white, two poems that appear in proximity to the wheel barrow and chickens of Williams’s 1923 Spring and All : “the rose is obsolete” and “the pure products of America” (later titled “The Rose” and “To Elsie”) (1991, 195 ; 217). Both initially appear as untitled passages within a larger work that is preoccupied by— and formally wrestling with—commodification. In the context of a strategically dis- ordered interior in which chapter headings and numerical markers appear both in and out of sequence, “the rose” breaks from an extended prose passage in mid-sentence, a fresh cut that openly contradicts its self-proclaimed obsolescence. A few pages later the “pure products of America” spill into a genetic, cultural, and economic lineage of impoverishment that likewise counters any notion of purity.

33 The contradictions implicit in the “pure products of America” re-emerge forty-five years later during the summer of love, in a year of revolutions, in Oppen’s great reframing of the socio-political implications of representation and arrangement, “Of Being Numerous” (177). While Stein presents a world of paratactical besidedness, Oppen’s text implies an open question driven by a different preposition : what does it mean to be “of” ? How does a “we” perceive what is and isn’t “us” in Oppen’s riff that “there is nobody here but us chickens” (172) ?

34 Perhaps what I am saying is obvious, but what is obvious may be so large as to be almost entirely invisible and, therefore, all the more insistent on making itself known.

35 I’m going to continue to say something about Americans as if it were self-evident ; as if we could be considered, evaluated, described as a group. As if I could unproblematically say something about “us chickens” without more fully addressing the conflicted nature of pronomial ownership and cultural identity and the war economy on the American continent. How deeply does American poetry believe in its own non-conformity ? Is it not our most powerful myth ? Are we not entranced by exceptionalism as much as we detest it ? Ours is a tradition of refusal and negation couched in positivism. A tradition of higher and lower laws, of uneven justice and selective justification. A tradition devoted to breaking with tradition. A tradition in love with the concept of genius.

36 At times it seems as if our poems are running for office ; that they’re making claims they can never fulfill ; that, like the best and worst of collective acts, they are, as Oppen put it, “as ordinary / As a president” (173).

37 At times we seem to write as if our lives depended on it. And this insistence is almost always a little impolite.

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38 “I am sorry I am awfully sorry, I am so sorry, I am so sorry,” Gertrude Stein writes (1998, 377).

39 And what of our great reiterator ? Stein repeatedly instigates a rethinking of the relation between unit and totality, containers and containment. Each of the figures in Four in America is composed of many “volumes,” a reversal of the usual relation between part and whole, the individual book and the life’s work, as if they could be turned inside out.

40 I’m especially interested in the first of her Four in America, devoted to a figure of great significance to Whitman, General Grant, the great depressive Union general of the American Civil War. The man whose name contained a country. U.S. Grant. Ulysses S. Grant.

41 Homer had a Ulysses, and Joyce had a Ulysses. But Ulysses S. Grant is Gertrude Stein’s Ulysses. A lost—even if victorious—man returning home from battle. He is her Crusoe, her Columbus : a failed sailor and a shipwreck, a survivor of his own mistakes. A person capable of making something from the wreckage of a mistake.

42 “Do you begin to see a little what America is what American religion is what American war is,” Stein writes in “Grant” (Stein, 1947, 32).

43 “When is there religion. There always is religion,” she writes (Stein, 1947, 11).

44 We sense in Stein’s sentences the weight and durability of words as moving parts in a larger machinery. Hers is a poetics that attends as much to function as to art—or, rather, to the function of art, the way it “works.” It is a poetics of adding on and adding up, of accumulation and of annexation. Like the vernacular architecture of the New England farmhouse. Like the Louisiana Purchase.

45 Stein’s subtitle for Four in America is “What They Sought and Bought.”

46 In Gertrude Stein’s lifetime, America was quite literally still being “sought and bought.” When she was born, there were not 50 states but 37. It was after she stepped onto American soil that Colorado, North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii, became states of the growing Union, long after U.S. Grant came home with blood on his boots.

47 It was important to Stein that she “make it” in America. In U.S. Grant’s America. It was important that she be part of the making of America, a country barely older than her grandmother.

48 “America is always building a nation, even now, when anybody might think a nation had been built,” she writes in her portrait of Grant (1947, 10).

49 When Whitman says “I” he means both a person and a people.

50 When Stein says “I” she might mean anybody, but when she made it in America “I” meant Alice B. Toklas, and “she” meant Gertrude Stein, a self that continues to exist in and as others. When “she” meant Gertrude Stein, she could celebrate herself without being impolite. “They” were over there ; the America of everybodies who sought and bought the book that propelled her into celebrity.

51 “Everybody, that is, everybody who writes,” she writes (1940, 2).

52 “Think everybody think,” she writes (1947, 41). This is a command you receive in a classroom, for instance, of geography.

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53 This is what someone says to her companions after they’ve coughed out seawater on a desert shore.

54 Like Defoe, Stein’s thinking often revolves around moments of genius, and is devoted to exploring the nature of genre and the status of fact.

55 Think, everybody, think about the importance of prepositions in Stein’s work : She is at, on, and in Grant. The four are in America. The lectures are in America. Are four in America in the same way that stanzas are in meditation ? Or, for that matter, are they in meditation in the same way that Oppen’s “This” is in “which” ?

56 Repetition is insistence and is a means of production, a kind of manufacturing, as of roses. For in America, for in America, for in America, refusing anything is a way of wanting everything. Being an American not in America is a way of pledging other kinds of allegiance.

57 Think of the attention Stein pays to pointing and to positioning—physical and social. It is impolite to point, and it is impolite not to know your place.

58 Now let’s return to her Ulysses. The U.S. of whom Stein writes, who is Grant.

59 He was called Unconditional Surrender Grant. He was called Hyram Ulysses Grant until he changed his name, or someone else did. The name is powerful. It is part of an ancient story. It is a way of seizing a connection with history.

60 Stein : “I think I see why I am an American. Ulysses Simpson Grant” (1947, 77).

61 A geography may also be a portrait. A history, a life, unfolds in volumes.

62 A life may be all about making, the way a kitchen is all about cooking.

63 Writing a life is a life. A writing life is the production of something that is nothing until it is everything. It is being nobody until you are somebody.

64 Four in America was written after the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, when Stein had “made it” in America. But once she had made it, everybody wanted her to keep making the same America, to make sense in America, they wanted more autobiographies.

65 Was it to fulfill—and at the same time mock— the notion of literature as a product that Stein composed much of her “Geographical History of America” in smaller sections called “Autobiographies” ? Autobiography number one. I am writing all this with an American dollar pen. (1995, 183)

66 Stein said she wrote an autobiography the way Robinson Crusoe wrote an autobiography that was the story of Daniel Defoe. Why is Crusoe such a touchstone ? His is a story of waking up. Of self-invention. Of genius. But it is also the story of a man composed of contradictions. When his ship, a slaving vessel, is captured, he is made a slave. His first gesture when he achieves freedom is to enslave his companion. He wants human company but when evidence of the human appears, he is terrified. He teaches everything to be a mirror ; a parrot addresses him as “Poor Robin Crusoe”—which tells us something about the extent to which he wishes his own condition to be acknowledged without having to voice it himself (121). He inhabits a history of violence that appears to be about the violence done to him by the facts of the world, by the chance of his time and place, but that becomes a history of the violence he does to others, about the way acts of violence bleed into—and mirror—acts of self-definition.

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67 George Oppen too would write of and on Crusoe when he was writing Of Being Numerous. To write as if one were alone, when one is not. As if one were shipwrecked, when in fact one is landed. Or had just returned from exile, had survived the reign of the committee on un-American activities, and so would now be unmaking this place, this poem, even as he was making it.

68 Perhaps it is in such unmaking that American poetry finds its return to the wildness Emerson wrote of. Not the wildness that the colonists saw as an unmarked wilderness but something closer to the crowdedness of Oppen’s urban poem.

69 “It is entirely wild, wildest / Where there is traffic / And populace,” Oppen writes (159). Crusoe is there, but the work of the poem is to reverse the terms of Crusoe’s world ; to comprehend wildness not as other but as part of what "we" produce.

70 Stein : “You always have in your writing the resistance outside of you and inside of you, a shadow upon you, and the thing which you must express” (2002, 442).

71 Stein : “I liked the difference between being alone and not alone” ; “This is what makes America what it is” (1995, 233 ; 46).

72 It should not go without saying that the Making of Americans was not made in America, and that Four in America was written out of America, when Stein was at liberty in France. And should not the obvious be stated : that Liberty came to America—as a concept, as a word, and even as a statue—from France, in a boat ?

73 In “The Difference Between the Inhabitants of France and the Inhabitants of the United States of America,” Stein writes : “To say we will wait, to say we wait, waiting for recognition. Take this case. Not excited about that. Take that case. No excitement in that. In that case there is no excitement in that case. That makes what one can out of everything” (1998, 517). In waiting one invents.

74 Considering relation, considering the trans-Atlantic movement of ideas, of humans, and of poems, Edouard Glissant writes : “Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone” (9).

75 “I am not sure that is not the end,” writes Gertrude Stein (1995, 235).

76 She writes : “Let us call a boat. Let us call a boat” (2012, 42).

77 She writes : “Waiting means something if something is coming” (1947, 9).

78 We want to know what the future sounds like. We want to see its hand.

79 Stein : “There is singularly nothing that makes a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking” (1926, 5).

80 This is just the end of what is about to begin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BALDWIN, James, The Cross of Redemption : Uncollected Writings, New York, Vintage, 2010.

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DEFOE, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007.

GLISSANT, Édouard, The Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997.

OLSON, Charles, Collected Prose, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.

OPPEN, George, New Collected Poems, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008.

STEIN, Gertrude, Four in America, New Haven (CT), Yale University Press, 1947.

---, Composition as Explanation, London, L. & V. Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1926.

---, The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind [1936], Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

---, Geography and Plays [1922], Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.

---, “How Writing is Written” [1935], The Gertrude Stein Reader, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, New York, Cooper Square Press, 2002, 438-449.

---, Paris France, New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1940.

---, Writings 1903-1932, New York, Library of America, 1998.

WHITMAN, Walt, Leaves of Grass : The First (1855) Edition [1855], ed. Malcolm Cowley, New York, The Viking Press, 1959.

WILLIAMS, William Carlos, Collected Poems vol. 1 : 1909-1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan, New York, New Directions, 1991.

---, Selected Essays, New York, Random House, 1954.

ABSTRACTS

A poet investigates an essential contradiction within American poetry’s counter-tradition. How is it that vanguard works of poetry and prose repeatedly re-enact foundational narratives of Americanness ? What is the wager between being self-made and being part of ? How do scenes of self-determination and conquest play out generically and syntactically ? Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the trans-Atlantic movement of poetry, political theory, and property reiterates a tension between singularity and inclusion, political and linguistic representation. Works by Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, and Walt Whitman are considered in relation to the competing pressures of idiolectical invention and public address, of literary making and unmaking.

Un poète explore une contradiction essentielle, logée au cœur même de la contre-tradition poétique américaine : comment se fait-il que les œuvres de l’avant-garde expérimentale, en poésie comme en prose, n’ont de cesse de rejouer les grands récits fondateurs de l’américanité ? Que signifie se faire soi-même, et faire partie ? Comment les scènes de prise de décision et de conquête se négocient-elles génériquement et syntaxiquement ? À travers les XIXème et XXème siècles, le mouvement transatlantique de la poésie, de la théorie politique, de la propriété, réitère la tension entre singularité et inclusion, représentation politique et linguistique. Des œuvres de Gertrude Stein, George Oppen et Walt Whitman sont abordées en lien avec les tensions rivales de l’invention idiolectale et du discours public, de la création et de la dé-création littéraires.

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INDEX

Keywords: poetry, democracy, autobiography, Crusoe, Oppen, Whitman, Stein Mots-clés: poésie, démocratie, autobiographie, Crusoé, Oppen, Whitman, Stein

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The Rhetoric of the Rearguard? Sincerity in Innovative American Poetics

Nicholas Manning

1 In the context of twentieth-century American verse, poetic sincerity has undergone a problematic literary historical evolution. Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, proponents of sincerity as an aesthetic and ethical criterion often eschewed values of polysemy and ambiguity in favour of semantic and subjective transparency. Advocates of these prior models frequently sought to use poetic language in order to attain more stable points of anchorage—whether in the self or the world—beyond the moving morass of poetic signs, with their ever expanding semiosis. In doing so, such post- Romantic conceptions often paradoxically sought to transcend, or even abolish, the agonistic tensions of poetic language itself.

2 Poetic sincerity can never be understood, however, as that which provides an escape from language; depending on a readerly act of deliberate credulity, its potential value may only be glimpsed if we accept that sincerity is necessarily a construction of language, as imbricated in the problems of self and sense as any other verbal artifice. In my study Rhétorique de la sincérité (2013), I argue that poetic sincerity functions much like a rhetorical figure, in that it never ceases to illuminate the complex web of enunciative, axiological and identarian issues at stake in modern poetic praxis. For this reason, I abstain from proposing a reductive definition of the likes that Lionel Trilling and Henri Peyre provided in the mid-twentieth century, respectively “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling,” (Trilling, 2) and the demand that a writer “conform his life to his ideas” (Peyre, 237). Such adequational models focus the question of sincerity on a mythical, and in the end futile, quest for congruence—in the case of Trilling, between avowal and actual feeling; in the case of Peyre, between life and ideas. We can never determine if such congruence has been attained for the reason that the two terms of this agreement remain impossible to define, much less theoretically equate. What, after all, is “actual feeling”? How is actual feeling to be distinguished from a supposedly artificial affect when all poetic emotion is necessarily,

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in part, a construction of an ethos, and thus an artificial product of a self-reflexive interrogation? What, moreover, is it to “conform one’s life to one’s ideas”? What is “life”? Which “ideas”? Not to mention how such a congruence may manifest itself in the formal confines of a poetic.

3 Rather than restricting the criterion to a set definition, I thus propose expanding, or rather exploding poetic sincerity’s hermeneutic limits so that it concerns—as is the case for many modern poets—not only expression but also perception; not only affect and emotionality but also conception and intellection; not only the affirmation of a unified or authentic self but also the dramatisation of diverse lyrical identities which often enter into dialogue or conflict. Rather than applying a generalised, a priori definition of sincerity to specific poetics, we may rather approach the question inversely—that is, by observing that each poetic forges its own rhetorical modes of negotiating the question of sincere discourse. This approach does not lead to an absolute heterogeneity or relativism, wherein such is the multiplicity of the pluralised sincerities on offer, the theorisation of the criterion becomes unfeasible. It rather recognises that no vision of poetic sincerity may be abstracted from the semiotic and profoundly social context within which it actively takes on poetic form.

4 The notion of sincerity, associated at the dawn of American poetic modernism with primarily innovative or avant-garde poetries, has steadily metamorphosed—or for some critics, metastasised—into an expressivist, ideational, supposedly conservative poetic value.1 From a notion used by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in their attacks against Romantic expressivity and ideational excess, it became a notion primarily associated with the affirmation of a unified self, and the expressive adequation of this self’s language with its inner world. In the space of a mere half-century, poetic sincerity thus transformed from a fundamental tenet of radical modernism into an incarnation of lyrical, confessional orthodoxy.

5 For the Black Mountain and Objectivist poets of the 1960s, and most notably for Louis Zukofsky, sincerity was far from an expressivist criterion. For such innovative post-war movements it was on the contrary a profoundly phenomenological notion, less concerned with expressive paradigms of “true speech” or with subjective quests for the inner coherency of the self than with the poem as a perceptive encounter with the world. If this is indeed the case, why did the Zukofskian model of a perceptive sincerity have so few subsequent advocates, while other aspects of Zukofsky’s poetics were readily adopted and integrated into innovative movements such as the New American Poetry or language-centred writing? Why does the term “sincerity” conspicuously fade from view in the theoretical and critical texts of innovative poetic traditions from the 1970s on? And lastly, why have the occasional efforts to reintegrate sincerity into avant-garde poetic traditions—such as the problematic New Sincerity of the 1990s—met with limited success?

6 I do not hope to provide definitive answers here to these complex questions. I intend instead to help explain this curious literary-historical evolution by tracing a more appropriate historiography of a poetic principle which cannot, in the end, be inherently associated with either so-called avant-garde or arrière-garde praxes. In many ways, this disconnect between innovative poetics and the criterion of sincerity may be traced back to the fundamentally wrongheaded association between sincerity and expression. This problematic heritage, reinforced by the theoretical formulations of such post-war critics as Lionel Trilling and Henri Peyre, effectively frustrated the

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recuperation of sincerity by innovative traditions. Such recuperation seems possible today not through the creation of new forms of “sincere” expression, but rather by distancing sincerity from the very notion of expressivity itself.

Sincerity as Romantic or Anti-Romantic Criterion?

7 In order to understand this shift, we must first try to grasp the unusual historiographical functioning of poetic sincerity more generally. Crucially, sincerity, even moreso than other criteria, is a weapon used by opposing antagonists throughout literary history to defend startlingly divergent visions of literary texts. Nowhere is this fact more evident than in the opposing historical visions espoused by the two major monographs on literary sincerity of the mid-twentieth century, namely Sincerity and Authenticity by Lionel Trilling, and Literature and Sincerity by Henri Peyre.

8 For Lionel Trilling, the literary historical moment when sincerity was the most valued and prized corresponds to the florescence of European Romanticism. Romanticism represents, for Trilling, the high point of an aesthetic theory emphasising a coherent and reflexive ethos, which demands a new expressive congruence between poetic speech and personal identity. Sincerity is thus conceived as a profoundly Romantic principle. Concerning this era, however which Trilling sees as the veritable apotheosis of literary sincerity, Peyre observes: “a score of critics and social interpreters or reformers of literature poured insult on the Romantics [...] because they had lied to themselves or failed to see soberly and lucidly into themselves” (239). Peyre goes on to claim that “the age of sincerity” (137), which he defines as an upheaval in all the arts between 1908 and 1913, was precisely a reaction against the perceived falsity and emotional copia of Romantic art. He affirms that “for the first time, a literary and artistic revolution was not heralded by the battle cry of ‘Nature and Truth,’ but rather by the determination to be more sincere.” Peyre thus sees sincerity as “an antiromantic reaction [...] directed against what had often been sham in romantic emotions and the excessive or garish expression with which those emotions had been coloured” (239). For Trilling, in contrast,—and in accordance with a vision of Romanticism which we know well from literary encyclopedias—sincerity weakens with the Modernist questioning of the self as a stable source of subjective value: The [modern] devaluation of sincerity is bound up in an essential although paradoxical way with the mystique of the classic literature of our century, some of whose masters took the position that, in relation to their work and their audience, they were not persons or selves, they were artists, by which they meant they were exactly not, in the phrase with which Wordsworth began his definition of the poet, men speaking to men. (10)

9 This vision of Romanticism, and concomitantly of Romantic sincerity, deployed by both Trilling and Peyre, is profoundly skewed and misleading, conveniently ignoring the many examples of high Romantic artifice and rhetorical self-awareness evident in the archly metatextual works of a Byron or Pushkin. As Arlette Michel rightly observes, Romanticism, [which is] nostalgic regarding the resources of eloquence, often develops in the direction of abundance, of copia (this being an oft formulated reproach against Romanticism), of a limited rhetoric where hyperbole, antithesis and the image dominate. But we more often than not forget the Romantic ressources of brevitas,

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ellipsis and litotes, the unsaid and ironic distancing which accentuates both the tragic and the grotesque. (Michel, 1066)2

10 It is hardly necessary to underline the almost comic irony of this literary historical conundrum. To summarise: poetic sincerity is for Lionel Trilling a fundamentally Romantic notion, largely neglected by the literature of the beginning of the twentieth century which, for him, was concerned with attempts to attain a greater degree of “objectivity” and “impersonality” (with Trilling’s primary examples being Eliot and Joyce). The two dates, 1908 and 1913, which for Henri Peyre designate the apogee of sincerity as a literary criterion, correspond for Lionel Trilling with the historical moment when the expressive sincerity idolised by European Romanticism underwent its most rapid and serious decline. For Trilling, the heroes of literary sincerity are Wordsworth, Hugo, and Goethe; for Peyre, they are Gide, Bourget, Lasserre, and Rivière.

11 To make sense of this disconnect we must perhaps accept that poetic sincerity can never be associated with so-called “inherent” qualities of poetic texts, such as formal simplicity or complexity, unity or fragmentation of the lyrical subject, absence or presence of irony or reflexivity; it is never an autonomous, transcendent criterion existing outside the specific historical, enunciative, and rhetorical contexts in which it takes form. This initial statement is profoundly necessary given the critical tendency to link sincerity with a variety of abstract textual phenomena. According, however, to the aesthetic values being espoused, any of these contrastive textual qualities can be seen as either reinforcing or damaging a particular poem’s specific relationship to a hypothetical sincerity. We may thus say of literary sincerity what Louis Menand observes regarding the term “image,” namely that: [It] refers to a fiction every literary theory that uses the term tries to make real; but since what it denotes cannot be settled on to anyone’s complete satisfaction, its meaning is determined not so much by the particular set of practices it is intended to describe as by the particular set of errors its user has enlisted it in reaction against. (29)

12 It follows that what a poet or critic says about literary sincerity reveals to us less what sincerity truly is, as autonomous term or concept, than it does the general conception of literature that this particular individual is seeking to advocate or prescribe. In other words, it is not with a prior definition of poetic sincerity that we may analyse poems; it is with a prior vision of the poem that we may analyse poetic sincerity.

13 This brief methodological statement indicates that sincerity can never be identified as an inherent property of certain poetic works; nor can it be associated with particular formal devices or modes of address. Sincerity rather appears as a profoundly mutable, malleable criterion which, like a true rhetorical figure, can change entirely in accordance with the aesthetic, political, and ethical values with which it is enveloped. Sincerity may just as cogently be associated with supposedly Romantic or anti- Romantic visions of the work of art, and with innovative or mainstream conceptions of contemporary poetic verse—and we may of course wonder to what extent we are not speaking, in both cases, of strikingly similar aesthetic and axiological divides.

The Myth of Sincerity as a Conservative Criterion

14 In spite of this, I do not think it an exaggeration to state that, for many readers of contemporary poetry, and certainly for young poets well-versed in notorious

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innovative versus mainstream divides, sincerity may intuitively seem one of the most reactionary poetic principles imaginable, associated with naïve visions of a transparent relationship between author and text, or with the unilateral affirmation of an authentic self. Have contemporary proponents of an expressivist sincerity thus managed to make a large majority of readers and critics forget that, for Anglo-American modernism, poetic sincerity was precisely an anti-expressive principle, in stark opposition to what was perceived as the identarian blindness of the Wordsworthian imperative that the poet must be “a man speaking to men”?

15 There is thus an apparent effort, on the part of a good number of innovative poets and theorists, to actively dissociate themselves from sincerity as a poetic value, for the reason that sincerity frequently seems too profoundly contaminated with notions of affective expressivity, lyrical ideation and subjective cohesion, to be integrated into the fragmented or meta-reflexive forms of modern innovative verse. This often results in an apparent absence of contemporary efforts to reform, or even to save sincerity, from its reputation as a quietist or mainstream poetic value.

16 An initial important idea thus lies in the literary historical observation that this association between poetic sincerity, lyrical expressivity and subjective coherency is in fact fairly recent. Such a conception bypasses the effort of modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and of such New Critics as F.R. Leavis and I.A. Richards, to formulate poetic sincerity as an anti-expressive principle, grounded in the exigencies of poetic technique. Some contemporary readers are perhaps familiar with Ezra Pound’s famous “I believe in technique as the test of a man’s sincerity” (9), or T.S. Eliot’s similar claim that “honesty never exists without great technical accomplishment” (119). By valuing technique, Pound, Eliot and Leavis implicitly sought to reject a particular Romantic vision of sincerity which, emerging out of the Wordsworthian model of the Preface, was supposedly based on the denial of technique. While contemporary poets and critics often recognise the extent to which such formulations were an explicit attack against the expressive, “everyman” conception of sincerity espoused by Wordsworth, they less often interrogate why this modernist vision of sincerity as a technical, rhetorical construct, found so few subsequent advocates.

17 This apparently intuitive contemporary association of sincerity, however, with mainstream, expressivist or confessionalist traditions, is certainly not confined to readers. Louise Glück’s early nineties essay entitled “Against Sincerity” provides a prime example of the failure, on behalf of a prominent poet, to integrate sincerity as an innovative poetic criterion. In this text, Glück quite cryptically feels it necessary—and this feeling is in itself revealing—to argue that poetry need not be based on lived experience, nor conform to lived experience, in order to be of value: We are unnerved by the thought that authenticity, in the poem, is not produced by sincerity. We incline, in our anxiety for formulas, to be literal: we scan Frost’s face compulsively for hidden kindness, having found the poems to be, by all reports, so much better than the man. This assumes our poems are our fingerprints, which they are not. And the processes by which experience is changed—heightened, distilled, made memorable—have nothing to do with sincerity. The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is, instead, all that can be envisioned. (29)

18 What is curious in Glück’s formulation is firstly her restriction of poetic sincerity to the reductive confines of the adequation between life and art.3 Is Glück setting up a straw- man, an easily attackable version of poetic sincerity which few poets, even the most

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lyrically expressivist among them, would be willing to accept? As Peter Campion rightly observes: “Glück argues that poetic truth stands apart from mere fact, and she takes ‘sincerity’ to stand for the ingenuous desire for a one-to-one relation between what happened and what’s written. The only problem with this is: who can imagine an intelligent person disagreeing?” (n.p.) Campion goes on to provide crucial context for Glück’s apparently unnecessary claim. To be fair, we should see Glück’s essay in context. In several places in her book of criticism, Proofs and Theories, she seems compelled to make an anti-literalist argument, one that carried more force fifteen years ago, during the glut of identity politics and the poetry that drew support from it. It comes to resemble the claims of a movement that has no relation to her own practice.

19 Today, it may seem surprising that Glück felt it necessary to counter the simplistic and reductive vision of sincerity proposed by the dominant cultural climate. I am not suggesting, however, that her gesture was entirely unwarranted: rather, the very fact that Glück felt it necessary to write “Against Sincerity” is testament to the extent to which poetry, at least within the wider culture, was, and to many extents still is, perceived according to criteria of subjective adequation, expressive intensity, and identarian transparency. What is problematic in Glück’s essay is not her rejection of sincerity as a simplistic congruence between life and art—about which we may all agree —but rather her failure to postulate other hermeneutic possibilities within the concept. In rejecting poetic sincerity without proposing variant models, innovative poetics risks participating in—and thus reinforcing—the problematic association of sincerity with reductive notions of expressivity, lyrical identity, and a totalizing truth.

20 Sincerity’s failure to be fully integrated into the rhetorical and theoretical arsenal of innovative poetic praxis may be further supported by another example, this time from poet and critic Annie Finch. Indeed, the divide between the sincerity valued by what Charles Bernstein has called Mainstream Verse, and the anti-sincerity of so-called innovative poetics, is often so strongly felt that Finch identifies sincerity as the central tenet of what she terms anecdotal, quietist poetics: “In contemporary free-verse anecdotal poetry, that mode which Ron Silliman, following Edgar Allan Poe, has called the ‘school of quietude,’ the apparent sincerity of the individual self, or soul, becomes the central transcendent poetic criterion” (Finch, 25). Importantly, Finch is not merely taking aim here at the so-called school of quietude for its reductive concept of poetic sincerity. She is also addressing an explicit critique towards the evacuation of sincerity as a poetic question within the context of late twentieth-century avant-gardes: Both kinds of poetry gain authenticity in the reader’s eyes to the extent that they appear to leave behind, or transcend, the “poem” as artifice, a crafted piece of language with its conventions of diction and rhythm and distinct, recognizable structural characteristics. Whether the spiritual self or its transcendent object is the center of a contemporary poem, in either case the sensual “body” of the poem, and the language that builds it, is beside the point, for both mainstream and avant- garde critics. Whether purged with Puritanical zeal of anything that disturbs the mundane linguistic flow with the reek of the “poetic” on the one hand, or “fractured,” “fragmented,” “ruptured” with tireless violence on the other, the poem’s body has come to be despised by literary culture. (Finch 26)

21 Though we certainly may disagree with Finch here, her critique merits attention. In Finch’s formulation, both “avant-garde” and “arrière-garde” poetries attempt to do away with sincerity as a linguistic, and profoundly rhetorical construct, only they do so for different reasons. For expressivist modes, ranging from post-war confessionalism to

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“quietist” or “mainstream” forms, sincerity is supposedly outside of language, because it locates an idealised point of juncture between self and world, attained during the expressive energumen of the lyrical sublime. For innovative or “avant” traditions, sincerity is similarly “outside” of language for the reason that it remains a chimerical goal, a symbolic fantasy based on the utopian illusion of an authentic self, and of its transparent modes of ideal speech.

22 In other words, fragmentation, whether of the self or of discourse, does not “solve” the problem of poetic sincerity. It merely delays or evacuates it. This failure of sincerity to be integrated into innovative praxis is all the more surprising when one considers the pivotal role played by the term in previous innovative traditions, such as its varied and rich declensions within the poetics of Louis Zukofsky. For a poet such as Zukofsky, sincerity is not a question, as it is for Lionel Trilling, of “congruence between avowal and actual feeling,” nor, as for Henri Peyre, of congruence between lived event and poetic form. Leaving behind these problematic paradigms of adequation, Zukofsky rather identifies sincerity as a phenomenological event: In sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word combinations, precursors of (if there is continuance) completed sound or structure, melody or form. Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody. Shapes suggest themselves, and the mind senses and receives awareness. (12)

23 For Zukofsky, poetic sincerity is a moment of encounter. It manifests itself as an openness to the world which takes account of objects’ inherent dynamism and ontological renewal. It is an attempt not to “think things,” but to “think things as they exist”—that is, in the unfolding of their ontological propensities, which imperfectly meet those of the perceptive subject. Shapes and words, objects and signs, graphisms and sonic interplays, ideally relate, in sincerity, as ontological equals. What is described is thus a primarily perceptive experience, in which a poetic relationship with the world is founded on the apprehension of the world as object, and on writing as a process which itself strives to attain the status of objecthood.

The Absence of Zukofskian Successors

24 Though the conceptual values of Zukofskian sincerity—ranging from affective and perceptive intensities to the ethical imperative of what Robert Creeley calls “man standing by his word”4 —continue to be deployed in the work of such poets as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, George Oppen and Denise Levertov, the term itself comes to be colored by increasing ambivalence, with Creeley also claiming: “This issue of sincerity in itself can be a kind of refuge of fools” (Creeley, n.p.). Further tracing its decline, we may contrast the conception of poetic sincerity within post-war poetics, still positively influenced by a Zukofskian phenomenology, with what the term is generally taken to mean in contemporary poetics today. To do this, I will concentrate briefly on an essay by Seth Abramson in which he returns to the movement of the New Sincerity of the 1990s. Abramson begins as follows: It’s not so often anymore that we read a book of poetry and think to ourselves, “This poet means exactly what they say.” It’s a startling realization, that we so often praise the artistry of a poem or collection for having accurately captured the artistic ambitions of the poet, but less commonly consider how and when

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contemporary poetry is nonfictional, a direct address from the bared poet within the poet. (n.p.)

25 The New Sincerity represents the desire, Abramson observes, “now common among contemporary poets, to achieve escape velocity from the self-conscious irony that marked literature at the tail end of last century, as well as the dry literary theory that has marked presumptive avant-garde poetries since the 1970s.” In Abramson’s formulation, the effort to escape irony entails an effort to escape theory. This is in reality unsurprising, given that sincerity has a long history as an ostensibly anti- theoretical concept. In truth, this apparent anti-theoretical quality of sincerity is an aspect of its enduring myth. It is precisely because sincerity is a profoundly, even intrinsically theoretical notion, that it deserves our full theoretical attention. Abramson goes on: We see sincerity opening its eyes and accepting what it sees—including the presumptive insincerity of multiple selves and multiple realities—as ineluctable, true, and essential. Thus lines which may at first appear ironic or sincere must be read as existing outside, or above, either irony or sincerity. In this way the poet- speaker creates a new metareality, one in which all elements of constituent realities are true but by themselves terminologically insufficient.

26 In contrast to Louise Glück some twenty years before, Abramson does not see the existence of multiple selves, or the fragmentation of self-identity, as being beyond the scope of sincerity as a poetic criterion. Indeed, the concept is easily sufficiently malleable that we may imagine a poetic sincerity that takes full account of the multiplication of personas, personalities and contrasting ethos, without its being yoked, as was the case for Trilling, to the ideal of a unified self. The problem however with Abramson’s formulations resides in the fact that no speech, however multiplied or self-aware, may ever exist “outside” or “above” the identarian and rhetorical interrogations which sincerity invariably evokes. In truth, poetic sincerity never ceases to form and perform a wilfully utopian, ideational and impossible gesture: that of the escape from language, all the while demonstrating that such an escape is fundamentally unattainable. Sincerity thus dramatises the paradoxical desire to transcend language using language’s very own means; moreover, it shows that this tension is itself a linguistic and symbolic construct—that poetic sincerity, in spite of its transcendent claims, will now and always remain a rhetorical and enunciative artifice.

27 “Artifice” must not be understood, however, in a negative sense of that which is untrue, but in the sense of that which, though it remains a technical, intentional construct, may very well retain an inherently powerful truth-content. For Abramson, the poet “over-leaps both the sincerity-irony spectrum and also the sort of theory-as- poetry or immanent language that might respectively define or perform it.” We must remain wary of this supposed overcoming of such a spectrum. The danger of poetic sincerity emerges when poets, critics and readers begin to believe that such a promised, idealised escape from language is indeed possible within the realm of the pragmatic sign—or even worse, that such an escape has, in a given case, actually been attained.

28 If these three visions of poetic sincerity thus seem to me in some ways misguided, why present them as examples of the failure to integrate sincerity as a workable criterion of contemporary innovative verse? In concentrating on conceptions of sincerity more amenable to innovative praxis—and most notably those explored in the work of Reznikoff, Oppen, and Zukofsky—innovative poetic traditions have displayed a marked

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tendency to neglect the widely held conceptions of poetic sincerity to which poets such as Glück, Finch and Abramson adhere. Though one may disagree with the formulations of these critics, this is not a reason to claim that their arguments have no place in critical discourse. Indeed, the unwillingness on behalf of some innovative poets and critics to engage with more conservative or expressivist conceptions of poetic sincerity is itself a revealing literary-historical blindness. After all, if a vast number of readers believe sincerity to be associated with subjective affirmation and expressive transparency, we cannot simply ignore such convictions as though they did not exist, as though they were so misguided that they were not even open to debate. In refusing to engage with these conceptions, innovative poetics risks circumscribing its critiques of poetic value to a paradoxically conformist environment, where only “innovative” conceptions of key notions have droit de cité—and may thus be debated and, if necessary, judged.

Sincerity and the Spectre of Postmodern Irony

29 If poetic sincerity, for poets such as W.H. Auden or Charles Reznikoff, was explicitly contrasted with a wilful or unintentional distorsion of the realities of history, sincerity, in this contemporary “innovative or conservative” divide, is contrasted not with the lie of untrue visions of the self or the world, but with the enunciative and rhetorical problem of postmodern irony. This, indeed, is a crucial shift. This spectrum, which for Auden and the generation of the 1930s was a question of the divide between “sincerity” and “insincerity,” becomes a new divide not between sincerity and manipulative lying, but between the emotional engagement of sincere discourse, and the affective distancing of ironic or disengaged speech. A prime example of this shift is provided by one of Charles Bernstein’s poems entitled “Thank You For Saying Thank You” (Girly Man, 8-9), a brief analysis of which may help to shed further light on what is here at stake: Thank You for Saying Thank You This is a totally accessible poem. There is nothing in this poem that is in any way difficult to understand. All the words are simple & to the point. There are no new concepts, no theories, no ideas to confuse you. This poem has no intellectual pretensions. It is purely emotional. It fully expresses the feelings of the author: my feelings, the person speaking to you now.

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It is all about communication. Heart to heart. This poem appreciates & values you as a reader. It celebrates the triumph of the human imagination amidst pitfalls & calamities. This poem has 90 lines, 269 words, and more syllables than I have time to count. Each line, word, & syllable have been chosen to convey only the intended meaning & nothing more. This poem abjures obscurity & enigma. There is nothing hidden. A hundred readers would each read the poem in an identical manner & derive the same message from it. This poem, like all good poems, tells a story in a direct style that never leaves the reader guessing. While at times expressing bitterness, anger, resentment, xenophobia, & hints of racism, its ultimate mood is affirmative. It finds joy even in those spiteful moments of life that it shares with you. This poem represents the hope for a poetry that doesn’t turn its back on the audience, that doesn’t think it’s better than the reader, that is committed

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to poetry as a popular form, like kite flying and fly fishing. This poem belongs to no school, has no dogma. It follows no fashion. It says just what it says. It’s real.

30 The simplest and most immediately evident reading of Bernstein’s poem is as a series of claims which ironically and comically present the naïve, mainstream desire for sincerity as semantic and subjective transparency—as a type of writing which would allow the reader to glimpse the unified self or illuminated world beyond poetic, palimpsestic obscurity. But the poem itself, in its meta-reflexivity, is importantly frequently wrong about its own make-up. It is clearly not “purely emotional,” as the mere fact of affirming that one is “purely emotional” is itself a propositional, rhetorical, and thus partly extra-emotional act. In this way, the rhetorical content of the verse is countered and undone by the formal context within which these propositions are imbricated.

31 Though Bernstein initially seems merely to be making fun of mainstream conceptions of accessibility, transparency, or emotional truth, a deeper level is also at play. After all, if this poem were merely snickering in the corner at so-called “Quietist” or “Mainstream” models of poetic sincerity, it would hardly be so interesting. As Ron Silliman notes: “Much of what makes this poem work is that not every sentence here is a lie.” (n.p.) Indeed, many of the apparently ironic propositions of “Thank You For Saying Thank You” tap in to a deeper desire—even among those of us most sceptical of such problematic ideas as subjective transparency—to take such notions literally, to believe in language’s fundamental possibility of being a transparent vessel of subjective embodiment. As Silliman says: “To expect transparency of a language object, however well intentioned, is inevitably to court disappointment if not outright disaster.” But even if we know that such transpacency, such transcendent embodiment, is illusory, impossible, politically problematic and pragmatically unwise, we also want to participate in this ideational dream, like the anti-Brechtian spectator lost in a play he or she knows to be false. Though we recognise the intellectual limitation and practical impossibility of such an aim, we may also sometimes hope, on some level, that poetry contains “nothing hidden.” We may also dream of “poetry as a popular form / that doesn’t turn / its back on / the audience, that / doesn’t think it’s / better than the reader.”

32 In this way, Bernstein’s apparent pure irony turns back the mirror on the supposedly self-aware, theoretically conscious reader, and instead of a clear reflection of naïve mainstream principles, we find ourselves staring through the glass darkly, confronted with our own hidden desires which we may harbour in spite, or even because, of our supposed theoretical sophistication. I would argue that this conscious naïvety, this awareness of participating in the illusion of poetic sincerity, is at poetic sincerity’s heart. Berstein’s text, or others such as Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, prove to us that even if the term “sincerity” is conspicously absent from the theoretical formulations of innovative poetics, the question of sincerity is not.

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33 For this reason, poetic sincerity never ceases to shed light on the various types of readers who reside within us. One reader, who represents the learned critics and theorists of poetics we desire to be, knows that poems are not “real,” that a poem which “purely expresses the feelings of the author” is an absurdity, that no poem “follows no fashion,” and that in all poems, as in all language, there is always something hidden. There is also, however, another reader who dwells within us, one who in spite of this awareness, like a child reading a fable, simultaneously believes and does not, and thus seeks to knowingly participate in an imagined horizon of poetic sense where nothing is obscure, where the sign is one with its world, where the self appears garbed in the raiments of a full ontological transparency—in brief, where poems are real, or at least we pretend, even for a fleeting moment, that they are.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABRAMSON, Seth, “On Literary Metamodernism,” (published July 20, 2013, last accessed January 8, 2014).

BERNSTEIN, Charles, Girly Man, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006.

CAMPION, Peter, “Sincerity and Its Discontents in American Poetry Now,” Poetry Magazine, (published February 12, 2008, last accessed January 6, 2014).

CREELEY, Robert, “Interview: The Art of Poetry No. 10”, in The Paris Review, no. 44, Fall 1968, available at (last accessed September 16, 2016).

FINCH, Annie, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 2005.

GLÜCK, Louise, “Against Sincerity,” The American Poetry Review, vol. 22, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1993), 27-29.

LEAVIS, F.R., New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation, London, Chatto & Windus, 1950.

MANNING, Nicholas, Rhétorique de la sincérité. La poésie moderne en quête d’un langage vrai, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2013.

MENAND, Louis, Discovering Modernism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987.

MICHEL, Arlette, “Romantisme, littérature, rhétorique,” Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne, ed. M. Fumaroli, Paris, PUF, 1999, 1039-1071.

PEYRE, Henri, Literature and Sincerity, New Haven (CT), Yale University Press, 1963.

POUND, Ezra , Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, London, Faber and Faber, 1954.

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SILLIMAN, Ron, “Review of Girly Man,” (last accessed January 4, 2014).

TRILLING, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity, London, Oxford University Press, 1972.

ZUKOFSKY, Louis, “An Objective” [1931], Prepositions + The Collected Critical Essays, ed. Mark Scroggins, Hanover, Wesleyan University Press, 2000, 12-18.

NOTES

1. Even when not explicitly indicated here, categorical terms such as innovative or avant-garde, conservative or mainstream, should be taken as inherently problematic, and rife with obvious terminological limitations. 2. “Dès les premières années du [XIX e] siècle s’instaure la recherche d’un langage qui aurait valeur ontologique. Cette recherche, souvent nostalgique des ressources de l’éloquence, se développe volontiers dans le sens de l’abondance, de la copia (c’est un reproche souvent formulé à l’égard du romantisme), d’une rhétorique restreinte où dominent l’hyperbole, l’antithèse, l’image. On oublie plus souvent les ressources romantiques de la brevitas, de l’ellipse et de la litote, du non-dit, de la mise à distance ironique qui accentue et le grotesque, et le tragique” (Michel, 1066). 3. We may note that this is much the same definition used by Henri Peyre when he speaks of poetic sincerity as the demand that the poet “conform his life to his ideas.” 4. “This issue of sincerity in itself can be a kind of refuge of fools. I am sure that Senator Goldwater was sincere in certain ways, but that shouldn’t protect him from a hostile judgment. The zealot is often sincere. But I mean sincerity in the sense that goes back to Pound, that ideogram he notes: man standing by his word. That kind of sincerity has always been important to me—to what I’m doing.” (Creeley, n.p.)

ABSTRACTS

How did the criterion of poetic sincerity transform, in the space of a half-century, from a fundamental tenet of radical modernism to an incarnation of lyrical and expressive orthodoxy? Why have efforts to reintegrate sincerity into experimental poetics and literary traditions—such as the problematic New Sincerity of the 1990s—met with limited success? Continuing a reflection begun in my study Rhétorique de la sincérité, I suggest that this disconnect between innovative American poetics and the criterion of sincerity may be traced back to the fundamentally wrongheaded association between sincerity and expression. Reintegrating sincerity into innovative contemporary verse seems possible not by creating a new form of “sincere” expression, but by distancing sincerity from the notion of expressivity altogether.

Comment le critère de la sincérité poétique s’est-il transformé en un demi-siècle ? Principe fondamental du modernisme radical, comment en est-il venu à incarner l’orthodoxie lyrique et expressive ? Pourquoi les efforts visant à réintégrer la sincérité dans les poétiques et traditions de l’avant-garde – tel le mouvement problématique de la New Sincerity des années 1990 – ont-ils rencontré un succès limité ? Poursuivant la réflexion entamée dans Rhétorique de la sincérité, je

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suggère ici que pour comprendre la rupture entre la poétique américaine innovante et le critère de la sincérité, il est bon de reconsidérer l’association, mal fondée, entre la sincérité et l’expression. Si réintégrer la sincérité dans la poétique contemporaine est possible, ce n’est pas en créant une nouvelle forme d’expression « sincère », mais en distinguant la sincérité de la notion d’expressivité elle-même.

INDEX

Keywords: contemporary poetry, expression, identity, Language Poetry, lyricism, modernism, rhetoric, Romanticism, sincerity, subjectivity Mots-clés: poésie contemporaine, expression, identité, Language Poetry, lyrisme, modernisme, rhétorique, Romantisme, sincerité, subjectivité

AUTHOR

NICHOLAS MANNING Université Paris-Sorbonne [email protected]

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Spectral Telepathy: the Late Style of Susan Howe

Marjorie Perloff

1 Many of our finest poets—think of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound—are also known as major critics, but in Susan Howe’s case, it has always been difficult to separate the two practices.1 My Emily Dickinson (1985), the book that first brought Howe wide attention, is at once revisionary scholarship, careful close reading, and aphoristic meditation on the writing process—a book that tells us at least as much about Howe’s own poetics as about Dickinson’s. My Emily Dickinson was prompted, at least in part, by Howe’s objection to the portrayal of Dickinson as a kind of “madwoman in the attic” in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s celebrated feminist study by that title. Far from being the neurotic and repressed recluse of Amherst, Howe’s Emily Dickinson is a strong poet, keenly interested in her culture and unusually well read : Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory, a “sheltered” woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. (21)

2 Here, and in her later “Logic of Sumptuary Values” in The Birth-mark, Howe showed to what extent Dickinson’s curious punctuation—especially the dash, which “drew liberty of interruption inside the structure of each poem” (23)—revolutionized our understanding of the Dickinson corpus. And although My Emily Dickinson has a particular argument to make, it also introduced, perhaps inadvertently, a new hybrid mode of writing. Eliot Weinberger, in his Introduction to the reprint edition (2007), calls it “a poet’s book, a classic of writers writing on writers” in the tradition of D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, and H.D’s own Tribute to Freud (xi). But Howe’s “critical” books, of which My Emily Dickinson is the first, have a somewhat different valence from those that Weinberger cites, distinguished as hers are by their poetic structure, in which documentary material—facts, dates, place names, citations—are so fully absorbed into the lyric fabric that the texts come to function as long poems in their own right, no longer distinguishable from the volumes

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classified as poetry like The Midnight or That This. The key in Howe’s case is a fierce empathy—a sense of becoming the other in what Howe herself has called an act of “spectral telepathy,” of mesmerism.

3 This is especially true of the “essays” in Howe’s most recent collection The Quarry, whose title piece is an elegiac essay on her “favorite twentieth-century poet,” Wallace Stevens.2 In such earlier volumes as The Birth-mark, the poet still places much weight on outside sources. Compensating for not being herself an academic, Howe was extra- conscientious in acknowledging scholarship like Patricia Caldwell’s The Puritan Conversion Narrative as a source for her own brilliant discussion of Jonathan Edwards or Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence : The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973) as the inspiration for her own now classic essay “The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” an essay that charts, as her scholarly sources do not, the ironies of the Biblical authority constantly invoked and then undermined by the authors of captivity narratives.

4 In the writing of the last decade, however, Howe has increasingly discarded or internalized such buttressing, relying now on what Wallace Stevens called, in a late poem, “the plain sense of things,” although in her case, as in Stevens’s, that plain sense has turned out to be nothing if not mysterious. When I speak of the “late style” of these writings, I am using the term, not in Edward Said’s sense, derived from Adorno, of “artistic lateness . . . as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction” (7), but rather—and in the more literal and historical sense—“late style” in the tradition of Samuel Beckett’s late minimalist works like “Lessness” and “Rockaby”—“texts for nothing” that have dropped all the trappings associated with a particular genre or mode in their focus on language itself.3

5 The very title of Howe’s new book of essays has poetic resonance : a quarry (OED) is “an open-air excavation from which stone for building or other purposes is obtained by cutting, blasting, or the like ; a place where the rock has been, or is being, cut away.” Further, by a nice coincidence, Susan Howe lives at 115 New Quarry Road in Guilford, Connecticut, an hour’s drive from Stevens’s Hartford, whose particular geography, with its seasonal extremes, is also hers. The Quarry’s title essay, in any case, cuts into Stevens’s final volume The Rock, excavating words and lines that Howe recharges, making them her own. Subsequent essays take as their quarry (in the noun’s other sense) Jonathan Edwards and Charles Peirce, the filmmaker Chris Marker, various Concrete artists (again rock is a medium), and the poet’s own forebears, whose history, on her father’s side, is closely bound up with that of New England. Indeed, The Quarry is a book of ghosts—literary as well as familial. And death—the death of two Howe’s husbands, the sculptor David von Schlegell and the Peirce scholar Peter Hare—binds together what might look like “accidental sightings.”

Word Frequencies and Zero Zones

6 “March . . . Someone has walked across the snow, Someone looking for he knows not what.”

7 This is the epigraph for the first section (“Roaming”) of The Quarry’s opening essay “Vagrancy in the Park.” The text opens with an italicized citation, “Singeth spells,”

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referring no doubt to the Celtic myths and folk tales Susan Howe learned from her Irish mother, and then the declaration : “The poetry of Wallace Stevens makes me happy. This is the simple truth. Pleasure springs from the sense of fluid sound patterns phonetic utterance excites in us. Beauty, harmony, and order are represented by the arrangement, and repetition of particular words on paper” (3).

8 But Howe knows only too well that the “simple truth” is never so simple and that “arrangement” is the most complex of processes. Her epigraph comes from a short poem in The Rock called “Vacancy in the Park,” whose last two couplets read :

9 It is like the feeling of a man Come back to see a certain house.

The four winds blow through the rustic arbor, Under its mattresses of vines.

10 Now look at the photograph on the title page [figure 1] and then the one on the title page of part 2, “Ring Around the Roses” [figure 2]. Both are images, so Howe has noted, of a small pavilion or “rustic arbor” in Elizabeth Park in Hartford that Stevens frequented. The first picture is taken in winter, the second in summer. The “vacancy” of winter in the snow-covered park becomes, in Howe’s own poetic text, vagrancy : it is the poet herself who is the vagrant “roaming” through Stevens’s “park” and singing her own “spells”—vagrant recalling Emerson and Thoreau’s play on the related extravagant. “I fear chiefly,” wrote Thoreau, “lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I am convinced” (Walden, 324). In a similar vein, Howe writes, “I owe [Stevens] an incalculable debt, “for ways in which, through word frequencies and zero zones, his writing locates, rescues, and delivers what is various and vagrant in the near at hand” (Quarry, 3).

Figure 1

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Figure 2

11 In coming to terms with Stevens’s “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (“The Snowman”), Howe writes as if from deep inside Stevens’s world. Here she is on “The Course of a Particular,” in which “the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind” : Most critics read the season as autumn. For me, its lyric austerity defines late February weather in Guilford, Connecticut. Often on afternoon winter walks out on the quarry during this coldest month, there is hardly any foliage to cry in the raw air. Some brittle oak leaves still cling to their branches like tattered camouflage while tiny salt hay spindles scud across withered grass and frost-worked asphalt. Smoke-drift from indoor woodstoves is another vagrant variant. (4)

12 The passage begins matter-of-factly with the differentiation of late winter from autumn in Connecticut, but soon the imagery becomes increasingly graphic, and the sound structure highly rhythmic and figured, with its intricate repetitions of voiceless and voiced stops—k, t and d—aligned with the spirants s and t and the fricative ft. “Salt” rhymes with “asphalt” ; “vagrant” echoes “variant,” which is itself a variant of “vacant.” Sound repetition rises to a Keatsian pitch as Howe notes that Stevens deploys the obsolete past participle “shapen” (“shapen snow”), whose “pastness echoes in the sound of wind soughing through pitch pines.” And now she makes us aware of her own presence in the landscape : On my way home I see a small stream rushing along under ice. Maybe the nature of a particular can be understood only in relation to sound inside the sense it quickens. Setting sun. A mourning dove compounds invisible declensions. “Deep dove, placate you in your hiddenness.” (5)

13 The line comes from an earlier Stevens poem called “The Dove in the Belly” (366), but the dove’s “invisible declensions” also bring to mind the famous conclusion of “Sunday Morning,” where “casual flocks of pigeons make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings” (70). And further : in Howe’s Spontaneous

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Particulars, The Telepathy of Archives, the dove—here the Psalmist’s dove (Psalm 55), invoked by Jonathan Edwards’s sister mourning his death—“Oh that I had wings like a dove ! for then would I fly away, and be at rest” (Telepathy, 52)—is also Henry James’s in The Wings of the Dove—“the novel where James so perfectly finds his form for the work that follows, after.” The Wings of the Dove is one of Howe’s sacred texts, and in Spontaneous Particulars, James’s heroine Milly Theale becomes a spectral emblem of suffering, even her name T H E A L E suggesting an “aspirate puff of breath [that] co- implicates his fictional birdwoman with wealth, theatricality and death” (Telepathy, 55).

14 Theatricality and death. As “Vagrancy in Park” unfolds, each section develops some aspect of “the sound inside the sense it quickens.” The first line of the Stevens poem “Somnambulisma” (Stevens 304)—“On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls”—prompts Howe to puzzle over the poet’s obsession with the consonant r, so rarely prominent in American English. This “vagrancy” leads her to thoughts of Spinoza, “by profession a lens-grinder,” who understood that “A poem is a glass, through which light is conveyed to us,” and then to Santayana, for whom Stevens wrote his own great elegy “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” Mrs. Ramsay of To the Lighthouse makes an appearance, “covering the boar skull on the nursery wall with her green shawl,” as does, a few pages later, Mr. Ramsay, who, groping his way through the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, could never get beyond “R.” And in the midst of Howe’s metonymic r passages, the mood becomes more meditative, more phantasmagoric : As we grow old we return to our parents. Their absent submission to the harsh reality of Death renders the tangle luminous. A stellar pallor hangs on strips of silver bubbling before the sun. The spell is broken. There they are—embarking with other happy couples for Cythera. (Quarry 12)

15 The reference is evidently to Watteau’s brilliant little painting The Embarkation for Cythera ("L'Embarquement pour Cythère", 1717) ; the painter’s “luminous” and “silvery” figures—their fragile figures rendered here in falling rhythm, again with elaborate repetition of r’s and s’s. Cythera, of course is never reached. Indeed, Stevens’s river this side of Stygia, “The River of Rivers in Connecticut” (there’s that r again !) “flows nowhere, like a sea.” In the end, Howe insists, following Stevens, she can only be a realist. And so on the penultimate page we read : These days I listen to the high speed Acela Express rushing through the remaining traces of woodland surrounding this four and a half acre, exurban almost suburban lot on the Northeast Corridor en route to Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. Amtrak owns the land immediately bordering the tracks. Recently there has been a lot of hammering into the rock at night for some reason connected with a five-year plan for deploying free Wi-Fi internet service on all trains including slower regional ones. It’s the new millennium. Post 9/11, spangled bleeding banners, war’s carnage, the global War on Terror, Guantánamo, metadata, relationships, fracking, plastic bags, nuclear power plants, climate change, global warming, black holes, possible human extinction. (14-15)

16 A little reality check, just a shade tongue-in-cheek, cataloging those items most poets at this very moment are writing about. True, there is no Cythera at the end of the Acela line, only a passage through “Hartford in a Purple Light”— a town first stumbled upon in June 1636 by a group of pilgrims travelling the hundred plus miles from Cambridge

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“through a hideous and trackless wilderness.” “Vagrancy in the Park” is by no means a nostalgia trip : Late last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I wondered at how the cold reversal of moonlight on snow from outside brightens the commonplace stillness of the house and how quietly night stands open to us, and sits up for us. Not fastening the door (16)

17 No closure in this very twenty-first century elegy, no Miltonic “fresh woods, and pasture new” as the poet finds herself “on the beached margin, after long pilgrimage, waving to the quiet moon.” Remember that a few pages earlier, when Susan was reciting her “Star light, star bright” prayer to herself, she noted that “looking at a new moon through glass was and is terribly unlucky according to my mother’s divinations so I can’t take a chance of accidental sightings” (11). To be true to Stevens’s spirit, the door must stay open.

18 Having carefully mined Stevens’s Rock to assemble her own “Quarry” (Part II, “Ring around the Roses” completes this task), Howe sets the stage for the elegiac essay-poems that follow. The most important of these, to my mind, is “The Disappearance Approach,” written in memory of Howe’s husband Peter Hare, who died in his sleep on a January night in 2008 without her knowing anything was wrong. Howe’s flat documentary account of the morning after, when, thinking Peter might already be up and out for a walk, she “looked out the window and saw the New York Times still on the driveway in its bright blue plastic wrapper” (29), makes for painful reading. Unlike most death memoirs, Howe never directly describes her feelings. Rather, emotion is objectified by intense concentration on such external objects as the CPAP mask used for sleep apnea that is still covering Peter’s face when she enters the room, notes and work plans in Peter’s computer, an overdue tax bill, anecdotes and emails about recent trips, memories of Peter’s quirks like introducing himself to people, adding, “Peter Hare as in Peter Rabbit,” his Buffalo house, whose décor, bearing the imprint of his first wife, didn’t appeal to Susan, and so on. Pain is recorded, never directly, but in analogous stories of other sufferers at other moments in history. In the course of the essay we are presented with the autopsy report, “EMBOLIC OBSTRUCTION OF THE RIGHT VENTRICULAR OUTFLOW TRACT”—and finally with a visit to the Metropolitan to see the exhibition Poussin and Nature, where Howe’s reading of Poussin’s Pyramus and Thisbe becomes a mirror of her own situation. Trying, finally, to understand what such sudden, wholly unanticipated death can mean to the one dying, she muses : It could have been the instant of balance between silence, seeing, and saying ; the moment before speech. Peirce would call this moment secondness. Peter was returning to the common course of things—the world of signs. (46)

19 The rest can only be a zero zone.

20

21 It has long been a cliché that the “language poets,” with whom Susan Howe was loosely grouped because she taught in the Buffalo Poetics Program with Charles Bernstein in the later 80s and 90s, are not true poets at all, failing as they do to present lyric emotion, to dwell in subjectivity. But I can’t think of another contemporary elegy as deeply moving as “The Disappearance Text,” unless it is the long “Sorting Facts,” purportedly a critical essay on the documentary filmmaker Chris Marker, but also—and perhaps primarily—an elegy for Howe’s first husband David von Schlegell, whose death, in contrast to Peter’s, was slow and agonizing. Howe’s study of the representation of

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war in the films of Chris Marker, along with such other great filmmakers as Dziga Vertov and Andrei Tarkovsky, focuses on World War II, in which both David, seventeen years Susan’s senior, and her father had fought. But, as always for this poet, objective correlatives tell the story. In Marker’s early “ciné-roman” La Jetée (1962), World War III is about to begin. “Marker’s use of freeze frames in this film that calls itself a fiction,” writes Howe, “is a compelling documentation of the interaction and multiple connections perceived separately and at once between lyric poetry and murderous history” (Quarry, 111).

22 These hidden connections—words and phrases that seem separate but everywhere echo one another—are omnipresent in Howe’s own writing, especially in The Quarry. Lyric poetry interacts with murderous history to produce a new kind of essay. Part 1 of “Vagrancy in the Park” concludes with the lines

23 Fishmonger on the beached margin after long pilgrimage, waving to the quiet moon. (17)

24 Here Stevens’s “Hartford in a Purple Light” seems to have morphed into an Irish seascape : it was the Molly Malone of the famous ballad who was a fishmonger. Howe, who is relating Molly Malone to her own Irish mother Molly Manning, concludes her “long pilgrimage”—or is it Stevens’s ? —“on the beached margin,” “waving,” in an echo of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” “to the quiet moon.” In this mesmerizing moment— the piece began with “setting sun”—“essay” and elegy—an elegy for Stevens but also for the poet’s mother, and, later in The Quarry, for her lost husbands and father as well— become one.

Poem As Textile : Tom Tit Tot

25 While she was composing the essays in The Quarry, Howe was conducting another poetic experiment—this time not with prose but with found text, fragment, facsimile, and textual montage.4 The artist’s book Tom Tit Tot is, so to speak, the lyric counterpart of The Quarry, and although the fragments on its pages look more like poetry than does an “essay” like Vagrancy in the Park, the paradox is that these fragments, highly original as they are, are entirely made up of cited text : not a word here is Howe’s own.

26 In conversation with W. Scott Howard, who curated a recent exhibition of Tom Tit Tot at the University of Denver Special Collections (2015), Howe explains : TOM TIT TOT broke my poetry, opened a new path to follow that began with the poems in Frolic Architecture [2011] and has been encouraged in acoustic directions while working on collaborations with the musician and composer, David Grubbs. I still felt somehow that Frolic was anchored—down to some material, a document or fact—to Hannah Edwards’ original text—whereas TOM TIT TOT tosses chance and discipline together in a more kaleidoscopic way—seeing the Paul Thek show and then my experience of living at the Gardner Museum in Boston on a fellowship. All my life, I’ve loved fairy tales, and the magic appearance of those three monosyllabic three-letter words as both name and title reminded me of Thek’s wonderful title to a series of sculptures, The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper, which led me back to Browning’s poem and beyond that to his wonderful “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” I began My

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Emily Dickinson with “Childe Roland.” So, at the very beginning of my work and now here so many years later in TOM TIT TOT—via Thek, Browning, even Yeats, who also made use of Childe Roland and the black tower—I have circled through spontaneous particulars (fable and folklore) ending with the beginning.

27 Howe’s book is “kaleidoscopic,” not only with respect to source material, listed at the end in a bibliography that includes poets from Ovid to Yeats, philosophers from Spinoza to Charles Peirce, and a good sprinkling of scholars, historians, and artists like Paul Thek, but it is also what I have called a “differential text,” in that it exists in various forms. There isn’t one definitive version. We have, to begin with, the collector’s item : a fine press book published by the Library Council of the Museum of Modern Art in 2014, made in collaboration with the poet’s daughter, the artist R. W. Quaytman. The MOMA book was hand-printed at The Grenfell Press in New York by Brad Ewing and Leslie Miller, who designed it with the poet and artist. As the colophon informs us : Howe created the poems for Tom Tit Tot with slivers of typeset text extracted from her readings in American, British, and Irish folklore, poetry, philosophy, art criticism and history. Beginning with copies of the source material,and including excerpts not only from the texts themselves but from the surrounding footnotes, tables of contents, and marginalia, Howe cut out words and sentence fragments, then spliced and taped them together while retaining their typefaces, spacing, and rhythms. These re-collected images, formed into arrangements shaped both by control and by chance, were then transferred into letterpress prints.

Quaytman’s design for the book is inspired partly by the geographical atlases and histories of Emma Hart Willard (787-1870), an American author, educator, and civil- and women’s rights activist. (unpaginated)

28 The colophon further informs us that “The poems in Tom Tit Tot are part of an in- progress trilogy.” The publishing history here is complicated. The sixty-seven poems in the MOMA book were first exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon in October 2013 [see figure 3]. A group of related poems (this time not appropriated) was printed as an elegant chapbook, again called Tom Tit Tot, edited by Andrea Andersson, who compiled her own interpretive bibliography, providing notes to some of Howe’s key poetic sources. Again, eight pairs of poems were exhibited at the Whitney Biennial of 2014. And the version of the MOMA book (the trilogy), to be published by New Directions in 2017 under the title Debths (the word comes from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake), will include a new section of “prose poems” conceived while Howe was doing a residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Occupying a private wing of the sumptuous Venetian-style Palazzo, Howe was able to explore the museum’s galleries at night when they were empty—a ghostly experience she found genuinely mesmerizing. For example, and this time in the poet’s own language : Footprint

Certain bronze elements found among the Pied Piper’s personal effects have been moved from one exhibition room to another. Here are messages. “The Face of God.” “Dust,” “Time is a river.” Props and other disinherited paraphernalia are never enough. I have to go in and catch my breath

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Figure 3

29 The reference here is to Paul Thek’s The Personal Effects of the Pied Power [figure 4], exhibited, like Howe’s Tom Tit Tot, at the Whitney Museum in New York and cited by the poet in the comment for the Denver exhibition. Thek’s title is a nice play on the Pied Piper motif in Browning’s Childe Roland, so central to Tom Tit Tot in the MOMA version. And Browning leads in turn to W.B. Yeats’s late work—“The Dark Tower” and “The Ghost of Roger Casement”—the transcriptions of whose manuscripts, as edited by J.C.C. Mays and Stephen Parish, have inspired Howe’s own cuts and strikethroughs.

Figure 4

30 The intricate textual threads that hold such disparate items together are sonic as well as visual and semantic. A number of the Gardner poems may be heard on

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WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER, the recording of a collaborative performance by Howe and the composer David Grubbs.5 “Poeticity,” Roman Jakobson reminds us, “is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality” (378). Or, in the words of the Brazilian concrete poet Haroldo de Campos : “Whereas for the referential use of language, it makes no difference whether the word astre (“star”) can be found within the adjective désastreux (“disastrous”) or the noun désastre (“disaster”) . . . for the poet this kind of ‘discovery’ is of prime relevance” (294-95). Astre/désastre : it is precisely the sort of etymological game Howe plays in “Vagrancy in the Park,” in her play on vacant / vagrant / extravagant, and the metonymic use of etymology is central to Tom Tit Tot as well.

31 At the same time—and here Howe puts a new spin on the Jakobson model—it is hard to imagine that the differential texts in question could have been produced before the internet age. “Vagrancy in the Park” appeared as an independent “essay” in The Nation, where the illustrations were reproduced in color. Hand crafted, quirky, wholly unique, with regards to construction, and available in such different states—deluxe collaborative artist’s book, recorded musical composition, exhibition catalogue, conventional paperback—Tom Tit Tot could not be what it is without the current possibilities of digital production and distribution. No longer is a given sequence composed of self-contained lyrics—poems that might be anthologized or reprinted. Rather, the materiality of the text itself becomes central to the project. As Howe puts it in Spontaneous Particulars, STITCH (originally STICH) had as its original definition, “In poetry, a verse of whatever measure or number of feet” (31). We still use the term hemistich. But the “sewing” definition is also central : Quotations are skeins or collected knots. “KNOT, (n., not. . .) The complication of threads made by knitting ; a tie, union of cords by interweaving ; as a knot difficult to be untied.” Quotations are lines or passages taken at hazard from piled up cultural treasures. A quotation, cut, or closely teased out as if with a needle, can interrupt the continuous flow of a poem, a tapestry, a picture, an essay ; or a piece of writing like this one. “STITCH, n. A single pass of a needle in sewing.

32 “Quotations are skeins or collected knots.” From Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978) on, Howe, trained as a visual artist, has been using typography and page layout in experimental and expressive ways. But now found-text fragments, cut up, superimposed, overlaid—take center stage. In Tom Tit Tot, whose first page contains no more than an enigmatic mathematical formula, evidently taken from the notebooks of the philosopher Charles Peirce, with a few words in Greek handwriting scribbled on the right, we come to pages that relate to the Rumpelstiltskin motif of the title, for example [figure 5] :

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Figure 5

33 Here is the text of the familiar fairy-tale, but with margins cut off so that we have to rely on our own knowledge or guess work. From line 1, we surmise that the count must atone for invading the little “[mann]ikin’s territory either with his lif[e]” or with the [surre]nder of his wife. The count ple[ads]—we don’t know what exactly—“and the dwarf so far modifies hi[s]/ demand or his initial bargain, so as to “agree that if within a month the / c[ountess] can’t find out his name, she is to be his.”6 There is a gap in the narrative (line 6), but, in any case, something is [bring]ing the count to the forest bound[s]—notice the near-rhyme—and beside “an ancient fir-tree, it is bargained t[hat] Rumpelstiltskin (or is it, in the version Howe is using, Tom Tit Tot ?) “wll there await the countess, w[ho] . . . .” At this point, the narrative becomes irrecoverable, one line folded over another, allowing us to discern no more than the famous “three guesses” and a “lovely vancy” (fancy ? relevancy ?, vacancy ?) in what is presumably the “tiny hous[e] of the dwarf. Everything dissolves into WOODSLIPPER-COUNTERCLATTER, barely visible at the fragment’s bottom, but sounded emphatically and intensified by repetition in Howe’s oral performance.

34 What makes Howe’s retelling of the familiar fairy tale so oddly arresting ? The answer, I think, is that the ellipses and elisions, torn fragments and superpositions found in Tom Tit Tot, fanciful as they may seem at first sight, actually track the movement whereby we process the information that constantly bombards us. We read or hear snatches of conversation or the tail end of a radio program, we catch sight of a sign or placard as we drive through traffic, we come across familiar stories retold on websites or the social media, and find items in the blogosphere that trigger childhood memories. There is, on our literary horizon, no continuous narrative, no linear progression from A to B. Rather, fragmentary phrases take on a life of their own, especially when, as so often here, they are skillfully repeated and varied. Consider the two facing pages where, in

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capital letters, the words “TANGIBLE THINGS” are reproduced, with “TOM TIT TOT” peeking out from underneath “THINGS.” Almost buried on the right side are the words “DIFFUSION OF STOR[IES] and, below this text, in small typeface, the phrase, evidently from a nineteenth-century historical text, “Out of a stark oblivion disenter,” where dissent is doubly asserted by its misspelling and strikethrough. Or again, in another instance, the text contains a reference to something that “partially obscures the newspaper grid,” arousing the reader’s curiosity about the small letters printed sideways and the reference in italics to “See Edgar’s song in”—words that point us to a story of betrayal very different from Rumpelstiltskin—namely King Lear.

35 Throughout, the poet has arranged her text fragments so as to keep the reader in a state of suspension : her initiating fairytale plot comes to encompass any number of related stories, legends, myths, scientific descriptions—and also rumor. Along the way, Tom Tit Tot defamiliarizes the reading and writing process itself, challenging us to confront that “snake’s small eye” and “white scarfed riders,” whose origins we do not know. At the same time, the poet reminds us at every turn that we are dealing with material—with paper, print, font, and typeface, and that meaning often depends on a single letter, syllable, or line break. On the very last page—a page that at first looks blank until we detect a small 8-line stanza at its far left margin, looking as if it wants to exit from the page, we read : paper’s edges. The par- from underneath, half no chance for any unity field, dust and puddle R, opposition in its most Zed, and yet all will be a LITTLE above eye- level if not a little below

36 Between those “littles,” both above and below, the letter “R,” the subject of Howe’s extended meditation in “Vagrancy in the Park,” returns, this time as an instance of “opposition in its most / Zed.” In the Stevens essay, we find this passage : For Webster the letter r is numbered among the liquids and “is uttered with a guttural extrusion of the breath, and in some words, particularly at the end of or after a labial and a dental letter, with a sort of quivering motion or slight jar of the tongue.” He defines a Roamer as “A wanderer ; a rover ; a rambler ; a vagrant.” Signal sender, faraway receiver. (Quarry, 15)

37 Just so, the poet-narrator of Tom Tit Tot, knowing there is “no chance for any unity,” surveys the “field, dust and puddle” around her from the perspective of the alphabet’s last letter, Zed—the emblem, it seems, of the vagrant—“the signal sender, the faraway receiver.” As one turns that last page, whose comforting adage “yet all will be” breaks off before the expected adjective “well,” the text opens up, suggesting that the real scene of poetry is just beyond the “page’s edges.” In the words of one of the prose poems for “Debths” : Electric bulb

It’s a manic condition ; barbaric conceptions of an “other self” sawing away our finite future as we approach the laws which govern clutter ; leaving at death to return no more although

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fitfully visiting old haunts with the aid of metal, clay, gouache, glass, glue

38 From the electric bulb to gouache, glass, and glue : it is, Howe suggests, the “clutter” assembled with such ordinary tools, that transforms the flax of our daily sightings and readings into the poetic gold of Tom Tit Tot.

ANDERSSON, Andrea and Robert Snowden, Curators. Exhibition brochure for Susan Howe, TOM TIT TOT, Portland, Oregon, Yale Union, October 5-December 6, 2013.

CAMPOS, Haroldo de, “Poetic Function and Ideogram” (1986), Novas : Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2007, 287-311.

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---, The Birth-mark : Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), New York, New Directions, 2015.

---, Spontaneous Particulars ; The Telepathy of Archives, New York, New Directions, 2014.

---, Tom Tit Tot, with Prints by R. H. Quaytman, New York, Library Council of the Museum of Modern Art, 2014.

--- , The Quarry, New York, New Directions, 2015.

---, “Vagrancy in the Park,” The Nation, October 15, 2015, (last accessed on January 10, 2016).

--- and David Grubbs, WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER, collaboration. CD #BC27, Drag City, 2015.

---, Frolic Architecture , recorded at the Woodberry Room at Harvard, November 1 2011, (last accessed on Jan. 3, 2016).

JAKOBSON, Roman, “What is Poetry ?” Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 1987, 368-78.

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SAID, Edward, On Late Style : Music and Literature Against the Grain, New York, Vintage Books, 2006.

STEVENS, Wallace, The Collected Poems, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961.

THOREAU, Henry David, Walden (1853), ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press, 2004.

WEINBERGER, Eliot, Preface, Susan HOWE, The Birth-mark (2015), vii-xii.

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NOTES

1. A portion of this essay was published in different form as “Conversation with Reality,” The Weekly Standard, April 18, 2016, 39-41. 2. Maureen N. McLane, interview with Susan Howe (“Susan Howe, The Art of Poetry No. 97”), The Paris Review 203 (Winter 2012). Howe, who has been paying homage to Stevens—especially the late Stevens of The Rock—throughout her career, adds, “I am so much in awe of [Stevens’s] power —he is the father figure, if you like—that [W.C.] Williams and the library section of Paterson seemed more humanly possible to discuss.” 3. For Said, following Adorno, the exemplar is Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, which Adorno calls an “alienated masterpiece by virtue of its difficulty, its archaisms, and its strange subjective revaluation of the Mass” (Said, 7-8). 4. For an excellent discussion of Howe’s recent use of the facsimile, see Jennings, “Susan Howe’s Facsimile Aesthetic.” And on Howe’s use of erasure, see Dworkin, 31-49. 5. For the video of an earlier collaboration, see Grubbs and Howe, Frolic Architecture (2011). 6. The actual text is given in regular typeface, the “missing” in bracketed italics.

ABSTRACTS

Susan Howe’s late style marks a departure from her earlier work. Two books recently published— The Quarry (New Directions, 2015) and Tom Tit Tot (Museum of Modern Art, 2015) illustrate this point. Whereas Howe’s earlier books of critical prose—for example, My Emily Dickinson (1985)— used scholarship to buttress Howe’s critical positions and arguments, her new “essays” in The Quarry are more properly understood as poems. When we analyze Howe’s meditations on Wallace Stevens, we learn that she identifies with Stevens to create a new poetic hybrid. And the language and rhythm of these new essays is that of a poetic construct. In the same vein, her long poetic sequence, Tom Tit Tot, made up of fragments of other people’s writings, the underlying thread being the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin (Tom Tit Tot), is a conceptual work that appropriates fragments of other texts so as to create an entirely new angle on the fairy tale and its cognates. Both of these new books show how contemporary technique—facsimile, xerography, overprint, digital processing—can reanimate literary texts and make them new. Howe’s austere later writing is perhaps her very finest.

Le style tardif de Susan Howe s’écarte sensiblement de son travail antérieur. Deux livres récemment publiés, The Quarry (New Directions, 2015) et Tom Tit Tot (Museum of Modern Art, 2015), suffisent à illustrer mon propos. Tandis que ses précédents ouvrages de prose critique, notamment My Emily Dickinson (1985), se fondaient sur la recherche pour étayer ses arguments et ses positions critiques, les nouveaux « essais » parus dans The Quarry sont mieux appréhendés s’ils sont lus comme des poèmes. Lorsqu’on analyse les méditations de Howe sur Wallace Stevens, on apprend qu’elle s’identifie à Stevens pour créer un nouvel objet poétique hybride. La langue et le rythme de ces nouveaux textes participent de la construction d’un monde poétique. Dans la même veine, Tom Tit Tot, sa longue séquence poétique inspirée du conte de fée Rumpelstiltskin, composée de fragments empruntés à d’autres auteurs, est une œuvre conceptuelle qui désintègre

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et s’approprie d’autres textes afin d’ouvrir une perspective radicalement nouvelle sur le conte et ses ramifications. Ces deux ouvrages montrent comment la technologie contemporaine, du facsimile à la xérographie, de la surimpression au traitement numérique, permet de ranimer les textes littéraires et d’en renouveler les enjeux. Le style tardif de Susan Howe, pour austère qu’il soit, est peut-être son plus achevé.

INDEX

Keywords: essay, hybridity, rhythm, anaphora, repetition, fragment, mesmerism, Stevens, documentary, lyric Mots-clés: essai, hybridité, rythme, anaphore, répétition, fragment, mesmérisme, Stevens, documentaire, lyrisme

AUTHOR

MARJORIE PERLOFF Stanford University

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Hors Thème

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Fundamental Education: UNESCO and American Post-War Modernism

Matthew Chambers

1 On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall gave a speech at the Harvard University commencement as one of the honorees, which became known as the first public statement on the European Recovery Act, or Marshall Plan. At the alumni luncheon that same afternoon, another honoree, I.A. Richards, spoke about the vital relevance of the incipient United Nations in securing global peace. This commencement, almost strictly remembered for Marshall’s speech, in fact marks a coalescing of several interests concerning a post-war vision of the world. Richards’ speech that day points to a well-worn thesis of post-war antimodernism, but it is also an overlooked example of modernism’s influence, if any, over the US’s post-war global interests and investments. In other words, much of the literary criticism that periodizes the years following the end of World War II tends to do so with an eye firmly on the stakes for subsequent literary production, but it too often fails to consider how the intersection of literary and political interests in the late 1940s resulted in an education platform with a global reach, mainly in the form of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The rise of literary and cultural NGOs, then, is best viewed in light of an intersection of political and academic interests that institutionalized literary production in the form of humanitarian outreach. To hone in on this claim, I.A. Richards’, along with the American poet-turned-Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish’s participation in the shaping and promotion of the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will be reviewed in order to demonstrate modernism’s role in post-war populist progressive political discourse.1

2 But first it is important to place this discussion within the context of a certain rhetoric which formed in the late 1940s that boiled down modernist poetic discourse to a two- sided debate over its political and social function. Poetic discourse in the late-1940s/ early-1950s was firmly anchored in the politics of the 1930s. Al Filreis describes this configuration as “the Fifties’ Thirties,” or the rhetorical device built to smear a period of modernist literary production that “referred less to a decade than to vast and secret aims, to generational delusion, to collective bad style […] [which] became metonymic

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for communism’s pernicious linguistic influence” (34). Greg Barnhisel, describing Filreis’ “the Fifties’ Thirties” as an “antimodernist” position, adds that a “pro- modernist” position, on the other hand, argued “that radical artists of the 1930s had rejected modernist techniques in favor of dogmatic socialist realism and thus that modernism had no political inflection […]. [T]he ultimate philosophical grounding of the pro-modernist position was aesthetic autonomy” (39). Such autonomy was promoted to a “middle-brow” American audience within a discourse of “freedom,” which Barnhisel is careful to note meant in the early 50s “Western Cold War rhetoric […], the amalgamation of individual liberties cast as the inverse of the coercive communalistic totalitarianism of communism” (42). In essence, post-war poetic production encountered a political discourse of social utility. Modernist poetry was either linked to an assessment of its health in the body politic, or scrubbed and sealed as quintessential formalist experiments, to be re-purposed for cultural claims that could as objects qua objects contain a political agenda.

3 In order to add to this discussion that has maintained a primarily “literary focus,” this writing will review MacLeish’s and Richards’ contribution to the formative years of UNESCO (1945-1947), and will argue that their respective views on literature and education overlap with the politics of this globally-governing and influential body. That political agenda carried with it a global dimension. The US’s new global reach, combined with increasingly more efficient modes of duplication and transmission, resulted in a “discourse of cultural freedom [that] provided innumerable opportunities for the persistent enforcement and reinforcement of dominant structures of attitude and reference, ideas ultimately bereft of variety, diversity, and history” (Rubin, 2012, 18). Literary and cultural production that conformed to this discourse suited what J.P. Singh has referred to as the “norm-making” power of an institution like UNESCO.2 The “discourse of cultural freedom” took shape in many contexts, and indeed, Filreis, Barnhisel, and Rubin identify many within, or related to, the US in this period.3 In other words, the overlooked writings of MacLeish and Richards in the 1940s illustrate how the social role of literary production was conceived within an internationalist discourse of cultural freedom.

Post-War Modernism and UNESCO

4 I.A. Richards’ involvement in UNESCO was only ever indirect, but his contribution to educational reform in the 1940s and beyond speaks to the nature of how education and literacy were interlinked in a liberal internationalist discourse of democratic development. Richards is, of course, best known as the author of Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1928) and as the progenitor of New Criticism, thus firmly rooting him in a tradition of literary criticism. Indeed, a history of ideas approach to Richards underlines his influence on New Criticism with the consequence of a retrospective lumping together of his writing with a movement best known for “close reading.” However, especially in works like Principles of Literary Criticism and Science and Poetry (1926), his thinking about poetry and the reader emphasizes the social situatedness of the activities of reading and writing a text.4 Indeed, his collaborations with C.K. Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning (1923), and ultimately Basic English, attempt to rigorously systematize meaning-making firmly as a public activity. By the time Richards is in the US in the 1940s, his views on the role of literacy and education in the

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body politic are best seen as an organic development out of those earlier texts. His biographer John Paul Russo has argued that Richards’ switch in focus from literary criticism to education in the 1930s is best viewed in light of his time spent in China and the US and his growing interest in C.K. Ogden’s research into Basic. In addition to establishing the Language Research, Inc., he published several texts including First Steps in Reading English, the “Language Through Pictures” series, How To Read a Page (1942), and Techniques in Language Control (1974), as well as translated several classical texts into a “simplified” English (Russo 360-4).5 In some ways, Richards’ shift in focus from literary criticism to education reform mirrors the impact of American modernism’s transition from a formally innovative writing practice to the politicization of its social utility. In other words, if there was a central thread throughout Richards’ output, it was his concern simply for how words mean in multiple contexts that led him towards a liberal internationalist approach towards education and its role in securing world peace.

5 Throughout the 1940s, and with the funding and support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Richards promoted the use of Basic English as what he called an “auxiliary language” to foster international exchange.6 The idea behind Basic was to facilitate a “basic” language system that would be highly portable and communicable, thus facilitating quick and easy exchange anywhere around the globe. Basic condensed the English language to 850 words with occasional allowances for specialized terminology. While he primarily concentrated his efforts on bringing Basic to China, he did not limit his focus there, and indeed, by the end of the war he advocated for Basic to be a part of a world federal organization. Following a 1946 Princeton conference on world federalism, Richards’ ideas about disarmament, and international relations more broadly, were expressed in two documents: the Harvard address referenced above, and an illustrated book called Nations and Peace (1947) (Russo, 510-11).7 The address, in retrospect, can be seen as notes towards the eventual book, as he focused on the war-making potential of nations: “[w]hile national governments carry the responsibility for the defense of their peoples they breed the danger of war.”8 In Nations and Peace, written in Basic with illustrations aimed at maximizing a potential global readership,9 Richards criticizes what he perceives as mankind’s warlike drive—“Our minds are formed by our need for defense. Our ideas of what is best in man are formed by our need for defense” (38)—and he argues that instead we need collectively to focus on global cooperation: helping us to make the new World Government work; helping us to become responsible for one another as we are parts of one another; helping us in the government of all by all for the good of all; helping us to see that men and groups, great or small, get their rights under equal Laws—no less and no more—everywhere on this earth which is MAN’S; helping us to become, at last and in time, what MAN must be. (158-59)

6 For Richards this cooperation is only possible if lines of communication are transparent and shared, which is where he sees the role of Basic in the post-war global reconstruction. Nations and Peace, in part, argues for the vital role the United Nations could play in securing global cooperation and peace, and he believed that UNESCO was the organization that could most effectively implement his vision for a world language.

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Fundamental Education program

7 Fundamental Education is a phrase UNESCO has used since its first General Congress in 1946 to describe a broad-based approach towards education goals for countries worldwide. According to a 1956 internally-distributed working paper, Fundamental Education aims at helping children and adults who do not have the advantages of formal schooling to understand the problems of their environment and their rights and duties as citizens and individuals, to acquire essential knowledge and skill for the progressive improvement of their living conditions and to participate effectively in the economic and social development of their community, making full use of facilities and techniques brought to the community from outside.

8 Indeed, the report generated from those early 1946 meetings and published as Fundamental Education: Common Ground for All Peoples, Report of a Special Committee to the Preparatory Commission of UNESCO, 1946, emphasizes the social, political, and economic needs that would be satisfied by a structured approach to the problem of illiteracy. The purpose of the report was to generate ideas for how to pursue such an ambitious course; Richards’ experiments with using film to teach English was one of them. Richards references a recent effort he was engaged in to teach members of the Chinese Navy who were at the US Naval Training Center, Miami, Florida in 1945. For Richards, what he later terms the “sense” and “situation” of language instruction must involve the moving image, because “[o]n theoretical grounds, motion may be expected to assist the perceptual grasp of the configurations of words in a number of ways” (1947, 229).10 Yet, in addition to the multimedia component Richards proposes, he argues for a link between literacy and development. Joseph Slaughter has drawn attention to how UNESCO’s emphasis on Fundamental Education has configured the issue of literacy as a tent pole in a broad approach towards global democratization and securitization. In the emergent globalist discourse of the UN, illiteracy assumes the character of an international problem; that is, illiteracy represents not merely a domestic impediment to modernization and the industrialization of individual nation-states but also a global obstacle to the smooth operations and socioeconomic dynamics of a projected world system based on human rights. (Slaughter, 2007, 277)

9 As he points out, and as Richards was at pains to outline, the “right to education,” which was subsequently enshrined in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), contained a global foreign policy strategy of providing securitization through literacy development as part of a logic of equivalents. [I]n international affairs, one nation’s underdevelopment is imagined to pose a threat to other nations’ development; poverty poses a threat to wealth; illiteracy to literacy; nonscientific culture to the progress of science and culture […] literacy joins the cultural package of mutually reinforcing and revered modern goods, goals, and means identified in the UN Charter as the purposes for which the international body was incorporated: “economic and social advancement of all peoples,” “better standards of life in larger freedom,” “international peace and security,” and “fundamental human rights.” (Slaughter, 278-9)

10 Viewed from this perspective, the writing of Nations and Peace serves a dual function: to promote a concept of world peace and the role of the UN in securing that peace, and to serve as an educational text for the acquisition of Basic for foreign learners with the ideology of securitization as a root principle. In much the same way that Richards’ literary criticism of the 1920s and 1930s held faith in poetry as “capable of saving us,”

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his approach to global literacy, and a literacy in English no less, configured reading as key to knowledge and action.11

Minds of Men

11 The means by which UNESCO might fulfill its literacy program were identified by Richards as an issue of method rather than content. And it was an issue that Archibald MacLeish held a more prominent role in attempting to articulate and enact in his various leadership capacities in early UNESCO planning meetings (Fall 1945-Spring 1947). As Richards puts it in Fundamental Education, the issue of method is the “truism” of giving people what they want. [Modern school systems] seek to teach people only to read, not how or what to read. It forgets the end in pursuit of the means. Readings should least of all be so conceived in the case of the illiterates or the child who is being introduced through writing to ranges of experience far wider than are contained in his native culture. As every word, for him, at the start, is an investment whose dividend should be considered, so, later, every page should be similarly weighed. (1947, 232)

12 MacLeish, reflecting on the role of education in America, argued along similar lines, stating that education “can assert the difference between means and ends, and value each” (1948, 48). The speech, “The Responsibility of the Teacher,” was given by MacLeish fresh from a UNESCO conference in the spring of 1947, to an audience at the installation of George Stoddard as president of the University of Illinois. In it he argued that it is education and educators who are at the center of social improvement, a claim that Rubin and Slaughter have both argued is at the heart of a neoliberal argument over the role of institutions in managing cultural freedom.12 “[Education] can attempt to discover among the ideas which have vitality in our time those, like the conception of human dignity and value […]. It can accept again the moral responsibility to decide and teach—not merely select and report” (1948, 48-49). The role of educators in society and the emphasis on action are two tropes that recur in much of MacLeish’s writing in the 1940s, and inform his contribution to UNESCO.

13 MacLeish’s work experience in the 1940s clearly influenced his view on the institutional role of literary production and transmission. He is unique among American modernists for the extent to which he worked in government service, and specifically the capacities in which he served: Librarian of Congress (5 April 1939-8 November 1944); director of the Office of Facts and Figures (24 October 1941-13 June 1942); assistant director of the Office of War Information (13 June 1942-26 January 1943); and as the first assistant secretary of state for cultural and public affairs (19 December 1944-13 April 1945).13 In his role as Librarian of Congress, across several texts, MacLeish argued for the culturally essential role of the librarian-as-educator. It is this issue, as I see it, which is presented to American libraries, for it is upon American libraries that the burden of this education must fall […]. The libraries alone are staffed by people whose disinterestedness is beyond suspicion. (MacLeish, 1939, 10) [L]ibraries must now make use of every means at their disposal to bring to the people of this country a disinterested informed account of the means of education at their disposition. (1940a, 4-5) [Librarians] must themselves become active and not passive agents of the democratic process […]. They must think of their libraries as organizations of intelligent and well-trained men and women qualified to select from the record in

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their keeping such materials as are relevant to the decisions the people must make and able to provide those materials to the people in a useful form. (1940b, 388)14

14 The emphasis on direct action and implied rejection of aloofness not only echo Ezra Pound at his more declamatory, but the tone and rhetoric of the modernist manifesto.15 Yet, MacLeish’s politics were not radicalized: his writings argue for institutional reform not their overthrow. Furthermore, he did not limit his ideas on the socially transformative power of institutions to libraries: he gave several addresses between 1940 and 1942 where he spoke about the social function of journalists (7-18), propaganda (19-32), American democracy (103-116), and booksellers (143-157).16 For example, in an address to the American Booksellers Association (6 May 1942) entitled “The Power of the Book,” MacLeish contends that the commercialization of the book trade in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the crisis of ideas the present war represented, has meant that booksellers themselves held a unique responsibility to their customers. It is […] precisely the task which the man who loves books and human beings enough to devote his life to mediation between the two will recognize as his […]. A man must know the books of his time as a scholar knows his titles and he must know the people of his town as a doctor knows his patients. He must know, in other words, what his people need to learn and what his writers have to teach them. (155)

15 This passage, of course, echoes his statements on educators and libraries mentioned above, which, taken as a whole, argues for a kind of informal, yet coherent, attitude towards the social responsibility of public institutions that arrives fully formed at the UNESCO organizational meetings in 1945.

16 As head of the US delegation, and later as a member of the executive council, MacLeish was at the center of conceiving UNESCO’s global program as well as writing reports to Secretary of State James Byrnes about the progress of the meetings, and advocating for the organization’s worth to the American public. Between the summer of 1945 and spring of 1947, 21 articles or stories were published by MacLeish or about his involvement with UNESCO, mostly in the New York Times. He published two articles in the journal for the American Association of University Professors—“UNESCO’s Task” (December 1946), and, a year after he stepped down from his duties, “How Can UNESCO Contribute to Peace ?” (September 1948). The audiences for these articles include American academics; State Department employees, potentially including embassy officials; as well as the general public. Taken as a whole, they emphasize a particular theme, namely, UNESCO’s ability to achieve peace and security through a coordinated educational outreach and management program. In an article for the AAUP Bulletin (the journal of the American Association of University Professors), he foregrounds education’s ability to smooth over difference through shared learning. UNESCO’s task is to employ science and education and the arts to make clear and articulate, as they alone can make clear and articulate, the underlying agreements between the peoples of the earth—agreements which the events of the last few weeks and months have overlaid with a confusion of voices and an almost hysterical chattering of insecurity and fear. (1946a, 608)

17 As Immanuel Wallerstein has succinctly characterized the post-war rise of area studies, a development whose logic is echoed in MacLeish’s comments (and UNESCO’s remit), “[i]t meant that the ‘most developed’ state could offer itself as a model for the ‘less developed’ states, urging the latter to engage in a sort of mimicry” (10). In other words, within the now well-established history of area studies and development theory,

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MacLeish was offering justification for American academics’ role in the new world system by way of UNESCO.

18 For his US government audience, he seemingly subverts the appeal towards academic specialization he fronted in the AAUP Bulletin, and instead emphasizes UNESCO as a beacon of popular education. After downplaying an old-fashioned conception of a “republic of letters” as “associations of learned men and learned societies,” MacLeish points to the expanded abilities of mass communication to offer mass education. The real reason, however, for the greater directness of UNESCO’s approach to the problem lies, in my opinion, in the new realization, now abroad in the world, that the mutual understanding of the peoples of the world is essential to the hope for peace—that in a world armed with weapons of such terrible destructiveness as those which men contrived during the last war, the only hope for peace lies in the mutual understanding not of Foreign Offices alone but of the peoples themselves. Certainly it is for this reason that the aim of UNESCO is set not at the elevated level of advanced scholarship or science but at the level of the popular education of the peoples of the world and of their communication with each other through the mass media now at their disposition. (1946b, 629)

19 He paints his position with the rhetoric of popular democracy and suggests that state actors and their institutions are incapable of handling global security alone. UNESCO, as it is not a governmental organization, can reach large populations more directly, but as an extra-governmental organization, it can do so effectively on a macro-scale. Bound up in this, as Slaughter argued above, is the emphasis on securitization. In the end, the real value of UNESCO as an educational institution is delimited wholly by its ability to check foreign aggression.

20 The way forward for MacLeish appeared to be the advances in global mass communications. In the 17 November 1946 issue of the New York Times under the heading “If We Want Peace, This Is the First Job,” MacLeish puts his weight behind the power of mass communication and the benefits of a global organization like UNESCO to use such technology responsibly. MacLeish envisions a centralized network of global communication, quoting the United States National Commission for UNESCO, which describes “a worldwide radio network capable of laying down a strong and consistent signal in all major areas of the world” (60). MacLeish argues for the implementation of new media technology suggesting that media’s inevitable penetration into global daily life should be used and managed for diplomatic ends. Such a network, supported by a worldwide use of motion pictures and of the new techniques available in the field of press and photograph, such as facsimile reproduction, would enable UNESCO to use science, art, learning and education not as channels between specialists alone, but as great cultural bridges between peoples […] The first and most urgent function of UNESCO, in the opinion of many of its supporters, should be the employment of the new instruments of communication to that end. (1946c, 60)

21 MacLeish anticipated mass media discourse, especially the notion of a “networked” world, to argue for the projection of UNESCO as an agent of popular communication. Yet, MacLeish’s framing of the globe flattens power relations, either idealistically or naively, and thus ignores the projection of power latent in such organizing. If UNESCO’s aim is mutual understanding in the name of peace, then there is left unanswered where exactly the site on which mutuality may be established. It is this question UNESCO would face in its early years as the discourse of the Cold War arose and congealed.

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22 MacLeish’s argument for the social responsibility of public institutions to replicate and transmit packaged cultural materials situates literary production and consumption in a liberal internationalist discourse of cultural freedom. As Rubin has characterized it, in what he terms an “archive of relations,” governmental and non-governmental organizations formed in the postwar period “not only fundamentally reconstituted the relationship between the writer and their public but redefined the very modes of domination, subjugation, and subordination” (2012, 20). In Rubin’s framing, the political shifts and technological advancements of the post-war meant that “the public space had to be saturated by signals that were interchangeable with the new cultural order” (2012, 20). In this sense, MacLeish articulated the rising discourse of post-war American foreign policy wherein literary production would have public value while retaining the idea of a progressive aesthetics in service of institutional power.

23 To return to my opening anecdote, the 1947 Harvard commencement remains relevant because of Marshall’s speech, yet the fuller story of that commencement paints a more representative picture of post-war American global interests. Several of the other honorees that day—T.S. Eliot, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and General Omar Bradley—along with the university president, James Conant, were each in their own way involved at the intersection of government and education, and in particular, in their own various ways voiced an international vision for education’s role in securing global peace. So, in short, while George Marshall’s “Plan” achieved real economic effects, his co-honorees represented a broader cultural program mainly pursued by the US, but certainly also by its Western allies, of shifting the global arena into a remotely managed terrain of cultural production.17

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WALLERSTEIN, Immanuel, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2004.

NOTES

1. Importantly, this is not to argue that what will be tracked here is an early mapping of what UNESCO is today. Several factors almost immediately contributed to a shift in UNESCO’s various agendas, so that by the 1970s Richard Hoggart, best known as the founder of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University and who served as assistant-director general of UNESCO (1971-75), published a book despairing at length how the organization's labyrinthine bureaucracy led to its general inefficacy. See An Idea and Its Servants (1978, 2011). The reissue of this book, as an example of how the critique of international institutions can create strange pairings, is introduced by John Bolton, the hawkish former US ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush’s administration. 2. Norms, in international relations discourse, refer to “a standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity” (Finnemore and Sikkink, 891). They are importantly different from institutions in that a “norm definition isolates single standards of behavior, whereas institutions emphasize the way in which behavioral rules are structured together and interrelate” (ibid.). From this perspective, UNESCO itself is the institution, and its origins and eventual remit were (and are) driven by “norm-making,” and thus amenable to the “discourse of cultural freedom” Rubin refers to. “Non-governmental organizations” as they are understood in a contemporary sense, originated out of Article 71 of the UN Charter. An organization must register with the UN to be considered an NGO. UNESCO, as an agency of the UN, is best thought of as an international governmental organization, but its actual status is complex, and as the following will make clear, its official cooperation with over 200 NGOs today firmly puts it in the realm of NGO activity. 3. See Alan Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word (2008); Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists (2015); Jed Rasula, American Poetry Wax Museum (1996). Barnhisel and Rubin both address organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the United States Information Agency (USIA), and Voice of America (VOA), as well as literary magazines such as Encounter and Perspectives USA, with Rubin including non-American based institutions such as the British Council and several CCF-funded magazines, yet a fruitful area they neglect is the development of non-governmental organizations, especially those directly linked to the United Nations. 4. See Chambers, Modernism, Periodicals, and Cultural Poetics (2015), where I unpack Richards’ overwhelming, if implied, influence over British modernism—from the literary criticism of Edgell Rickword and F.R. Leavis (and to some extent T.S. Eliot), British Surrealism, and Mass- Observation.

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5. “The interest in “reconstructing ‘general education’” was channeled into educational reform at Harvard, where he served on the committee that issued General Education in a Free Society (1945), which for many years was a blueprint for undergraduate core curricula in the United States” (Russo, 364) 6. For more on Basic, see C.K. Ogden’s 1930 Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar. 7. While of tangential interest to the main points of the argument, this talk was given at the same Harvard commencement that George Marshall gave his famous “Marshall Plan” speech. 8. I would like to thank John Paul Russo for sharing the unpublished draft of Richards’ speech with me. 9. Words with images was a direction Richards’ research was taking him by the late 1940s. See especially English through Pictures (1945) and a set of short films for Disney called Basic English Teaching Pictures (Russo, 1989, 436-37; Liu, 2010, 89-91). 10. Or, as he also wrote, “writing […] is applied dancing” (1947, 229). For his presentation on “sense and situation,” see “Notes on Principles of Beginning Language Instruction” (125-27) in Design for Escape: World Education through Modern Media (1968), which was originally a presentation for the June 19, 1947 UNESCO conference in Paris. 11. For Richards’ claim that poetry was “capable of saving us,” see the end of his Science and Poetry (1926, 82-3) and Chambers’ discussion of this claim and the influence of his perception of the role of poetry in society in Modernism, Periodicals, and Cultural Poetics (11-14). 12. See especially Rubin’s claim on the role of the CIA-funded Congress of Cultural Freedom (17-18) and, for example, its role in translating and circulating Animal Farm (44-45) and Slaughter (see above). 13. For a detailed telling of MacLeish’s time as Librarian of Congress, and in these other positions, see Donaldson (1992, 306-379). 14. MacLeish wrote and spoke often about the role of libraries and librarians during his tenure and after. They were later collected in Champions of a Cause: Essays and Addresses on Librarianship (1971). 15. Pound’s influence on MacLeish’s writing is well-established, and MacLeish’s involvement in supporting Pound during his treason trial, partially by helping arrange the Bollingen award vote in his favor, has been recounted several times (see, for example, Jed Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum). For our purposes here, it is mainly important to note that Pound’s influence over MacLeish’s writing seems to extend to his prose as well. During his time in Paris (1923-1928), MacLeish frequently borrowed from Shakespeare and Co.’s lending library, and as the lending cards and his own notes demonstrate, Eliot’s Sacred Wood and Pound’s Instigations were two of his most essential finds (Donaldson, 130-131). 16. Collected in A Time to Act (1943). 17. As for UNESCO itself, the liberal internationalist spirit that figures like Richards and MacLeish embodied was set aside by a more contentious dynamic outside of UNESCO’s control. The hardening of hegemonic Cold War positions was occurring as UNESCO was forming, and one indicator of its impact was the chilling effect it had on UNESCO’s influence in American education policy. For example, rising anticommunist rhetoric impacted education reform efforts in the late 40s. Andrew Hartman points to the influential Education Policy Commission and the differing tones of two of their publications in the span of a year: a 1947 report entitled Education for International Understanding, and a 1948 pamphlet called American Education and International Tensions. The former, invoking the UNESCO preamble and explicitly endorsing the United Nations and UNESCO, sought to “promote an education that fostered global awareness” to produce “world-minded Americans,” while the latter notably argued against hiring teachers who were communist (Hartman, 2008, 138-9). A dangerous precedent was later adopted with the

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endorsement of Harvard University president James Conant, who was also active in EPC meetings and other educational policy organizations in the 1940s.

ABSTRACTS

This article examines how the impact of modernism’s reception dominated post-war poetic discourse, and in turn, how the intersection of literary and political interests in the late 1940s resulted in an education platform with a global reach and implications, mainly in the form of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and most notably in the shaping of UNESCO. The rise of literary and cultural NGOs, then, is best viewed in light of an intersection of political and academic interests that institutionalized literary production in the form of humanitarian outreach. The claims for modernism’s liberatory aesthetics were folded into a discourse of cultural freedom that was packaged as an educational imperative for global literacy. I.A. Richards and Archibald MacLeish’s different involvements in UNESCO will be used as case studies to illustrate how one aspect of modernism’s transmutation into a populist progressive political discourse occurred and how they reflected a global structural shift for literary production.

Cet article montre comment l’impact de la réception du modernisme, plutôt que son influence, a dominé le discours critique de l’après-guerre, avant d’analyser comment le recoupement des enjeux politiques et littéraires à la fin des années 1940 s’est traduit, dans le domaine éducatif, par la mise en place d’un dispositif international de premier plan, notamment porté par les organisations non gouvernementales (ONG), et plus particulièrement par l’UNESCO. Ainsi, on s’attachera à comprendre l’essor d’ONG culturelles en examinant la façon dont la convergence des intérêts académiques et politiques a engendré une production littéraire institutionnalisée par le biais d’organisations à visée humanitaire. L’esthétique libératoire prônée par le modernisme fut aisément intégrée à un discours sur la liberté culturelle, lui-même présenté comme un impératif éducatif lié à la lutte contre l’illettrisme. L’engagement auprès de l’UNESCO de figures majeures comme I.A. Richards et Archibald MacLeish fera donc l’objet d’études de cas visant à révéler comment s’est produite une partie de la transmutation du modernisme en un discours politique progressiste et populiste, et en quoi ces derniers incarnent un changement culturel mondial plus profond dans le champ de la production littéraire.

INDEX

Mots-clés: modernisme, éducation, relations internationales, ONG, UNESCO Keywords: modernism, education, international relations, NGO, UNESCO Subjects: Hors-thème

AUTHOR

MATTHEW CHAMBERS University of Lodz, Poland

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« Hair-oes » et « hair-oines » : les choix capillaires osés de John Neal, ou comment circonscrire l’Américain, entre poil dur et poil souple

Sébastien Liagre

1 John Neal, originaire de Portland, dans le Maine, connaît sa période d’écriture la plus créative entre 1817 et 1835. Pourtant, il n’est pas l’auteur le plus étudié de la littérature américaine, loin s’en faut : il n’existe à ce jour aucune réédition moderne de sa vingtaine de romans, notamment de Rachel Dyer (1828, ici abrégé RD)1 et de Brother Jonathan (1825, trois volumes, ici abrégés 1BJ, 2BJ, 3BJ)2, imprimé à Londres par William Blackwood à 2000 exemplaires, dont moins de cinq cents furent vendus (Lease, 1972, 59). L’auteur entend y concrétiser son projet d’une littérature nationale en l’associant à une version personnelle de la Déclaration d’Indépendance, rendant, pour ce faire, leur contingence aux événements historiques de l’Amérique coloniale et révolutionnaire tout en ouvrant de nouvelles perspectives à un « présent déstructuré » (Derail-Imbert et Monfort, 2008, 7). L’écriture nealienne est celle de la limite, de l’entre-deux, elle oscille entre une critique de l’esprit impérialiste anglais et une défiance envers la façon dont l’Amérique postrévolutionnaire s’est structurée. C’est une écriture de l’écart, qui se diffracte et se décline en itinéraires alternatifs, se nourrit de cette instabilité, de cette fragmentation, de cette recherche identitaire qui finissent par se constituer en symptômes. C’est à ce titre que l’omniprésent cheveu, à valeur métonymique, occupe une place de choix dans le protocole de lecture esquissé par le texte nealien, car il contribue à l’articulation d’une problématique majeure qui traverse l’écriture de John Neal – celle de la frontière. La frontière, dans son acception nealienne, se concevra moins comme une ligne de démarcation que comme un espace ou un processus : Homi Bhabha parle d’un « espace de liminalité » où l’on subit « l’insupportable épreuve de l’effondrement de la certitude » (Bhabha, 2007, 238), d’un lieu de négociation qui

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permet l’articulation d’éléments antagoniques (64), affichant le monde inconfortable, le mi-chemin, le monde non défini. La frontière est une zone d’interpénétration, un lieu de chevauchement, un seuil dynamique appelant l’expansion à venir d’un entre-deux incertain, à la fois territoire neutre et zone de créativité, site innovant de collaboration, espace interstitiel initiant de nouveaux signes d’identité. Elle est ce lieu où « se négocient les expériences intersubjectives et collectives d’appartenance à la nation » (30)3, une zone intermédiaire, labile, un territoire du possible. Mais la frontière sait également être un processus, la ligne pionnière en mouvement de Frederick Jackson Turner. Approcher la frontière, dit Homi Bhabha, c’est approcher l’au-delà, « ce moment de transit où l’espace et le temps se croisent pour produire des figures complexes de différence et d’identité, de passé et de présent, d’intérieur et d’extérieur, d’inclusion et d’exclusion ». De là un sentiment de désorientation, une perturbation de direction (29-30) : assurément, cette ligne mouvante autorise les reconfigurations, une zone liminale que l’écriture nealienne habite, et où tout devient envisageable.

2 Le concept de frontière ainsi énoncé entre en résonance avec l’utilisation faite du cheveu dans l’économie du récit, un cheveu que l’on associera dès à présent à différentes approches théoriques. Dans sa réflexion menée sur la formation du mythe, Roland Barthes note que dans la structure sémiotique, le cheveu joue un rôle social et systémique (Barthes, 1970, 51-52), traduit en terme de dynamique de flux par Gilles Deleuze — « la personne en tant qu’elle porte ses cheveux, se présente typiquement comme interceptrice par rapport à des flux de cheveux qui la dépassent et dépassent son cas » (Deleuze, 1971) —, ce que Bertrand Lançon explique pour partie par la liminalité du cheveu : [le poil] met en jeu, à la proue du corps humain, des expressions essentielles par rapport à l’ordre et au désordre, à l’humain et au divin, au masculin et au féminin, à la sagesse et à la barbarie, à l’ascèse et à la sensualité. (Lançon et Delavaud-Roux, 2011, 16)

3 Ni vraiment humeur corporelle et pas encore véritablement chair, la pilosité reste « la partie la plus facilement détachable et transportable du corps sans, toutefois, qu’elle ne se corrompe » (Karadimas, 2010a, quatrième de couverture). Afin de prolonger les recherches engagées sur la marginalité essentielle du cheveu, je souhaite démontrer, au terme d’une démarche empirique prenant le texte de Neal à témoin4, que la chevelure, gagnant en vitalité et en indépendance, porte atteinte à l’intégrité du corps, l’écarte de lui-même, l’arrache à la fiction de l’identité5, participant ainsi du renouveau de la nation nealienne, une nation qui ne prendrait forme que dans l’enlèvement de ses contours. En d’autres termes, il s’agira d’inscrire les codes originaux d’un cheveu nealien défiant toute circonscription dans l’agrégation d’une identité américaine – nealienne – exceptionnelle, frontière au sens précédemment défini, car John Neal le frontalier écrit toujours à l’extrême limite, développant ce que l’on qualifiera d’esthétique de l’excès, et ses constructions sont par essence fragiles.

4 Dans la présente étude, je désire dans un premier temps montrer qu’au-delà d’un certain fétichisme du cheveu, dans les écrits de John Neal, la chevelure vaut toutes les descriptions : les personnages existent et se définissent par la texture et l’esthétique de leur chevelure tout autant que par des descriptions vestimentaires et physiques qui restent parcimonieuses. Ce qui m’amènera à explorer sous le prisme particulier du cheveu l’inscription des protagonistes nealiens dans la liminalité, des protagonistes androgynes et chevelus portant la raie, caractérisés par leur indéfinitude. Car il y a bien un côté expérimental dans l’écriture nealienne : son objet d’étude est l’Américain, qu’il

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faut dévêtir avant de circonscrire, sans l’enfermer dans une définition stérile, à la frontière entre le défini et le pas encore défini, ou le pas défini du tout, ou qui n’est pas destiné à l’être. Ainsi, se précisera la contribution de John Neal à l’écriture américaine. Il s’agira enfin d’examiner comment, dans cette écriture qui prend la frontière pour méthode en s’interdisant d’appréhender la totalité depuis un centre absent, le cheveu est le principe unificateur d’un récit qui se recentre sur ses marges. De fait, la sémantique du cheveu ne devra pas se concevoir comme simple illustration d’une résistance à cadrer le réel. Bien au contraire, le cheveu nealien, naturel, vecteur de mobilité et d’émancipation, deviendra surtout un formidable trait d’union, un facilitateur du langage et de la sexualité.

La chevelure pour toute parure

5 Avant de pénétrer de plain-pied dans le royaume autonome du cheveu nealien, un détour s’impose par le traitement réservé au vêtement, bien loin de sa fonctionnalité première, car, si le cheveu est central, c’est aussi parce que les descriptions vestimentaires brillent par leur absence et le sens singulier qui leur est donné. Lorsque – fait très rare – un paragraphe est consacré au vêtement, il est présenté en quasi- décomposition ; à l’image de l’uniforme fragmenté par le temps du Brigadier Johnson (ce capitan héritier de Falstaff), il est désassemblé par le perspicace Yankee Jonathan Peters qui met en lumière les mensonges qu’il dissimule : la lecture de la veste palimpseste du Brigadier, adepte des titres égrenés à la chaîne, permet notamment de démasquer les supercheries du glorieux aïeul. Ainsi, les taches et les trous de la veste sont, après analyse, causés par le tabac et l’alcool, non par l’âpreté des combats ; les épaulettes qui ne cessent de grandir d’année en année n’en apparaissent que plus grotesques car même leur taille disproportionnée ne leur permet plus de masquer la réalité (1BJ 6). Le vêtement, ce marqueur rassurant d’un monde apaisé, immobile, dans un univers rangé et arrangé, n’est plus. Qu’on se le dise, l’Américain nealien ne doit pas être une contrefaçon narcissique ; il se positionne en retrait, en dehors des lois vestimentaires en vigueur. Plus généralement, le vêtement glisse6, il ne se porte pas, il se supporte, pour être ôté bien vite car il condamne irrémédiablement au grotesque ; le héros (Walter Harwood) se prend même à rêver d’une parure boisée, plus naturelle : He was half ready to cry, at his own grotesque appearance; ay, big as he was, to throw himself on the bed, and cry—blubber—like a good fellow, for a suit of any thing else, under heaven—pitch pine, or hard hemlock. (3BJ 144)

6 Déjà, plus tôt dans le roman, lorsque Walter avait été retrouvé gisant, inconscient, après la crue de la rivière, la nature avait donné l’assaut : « he was covered with meadow soil; his clothes were full of grass and wet leaves: when we unbuttoned his jacket, a heap of rubbish fell out. » (1BJ 357) Quelle que soit la lecture de l’épisode, le vêtement, ce voile d’hypocrisie, n’est pas à l’honneur : maculé de terre, il dissimule une sorte d’épouvantail dans le meilleur des cas, un homme qui n’en est finalement plus un, comme rongé de l’intérieur, digne prédécesseur de Feathertop. Neal, dans tous les cas, dénonce la facticité du vêtement. En 1825, dans « Late American Books », il était on ne peut plus clair sur la nudité revendiquée pour ses héros, indiens ou blancs, même difformes : Grotesque, you may be; but, whether grotesque, or not, you will be respectable. [...] Come forth naked, absolutely naked, we should say, to every real North American—

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savage, or not; wild, or tame; though your muscles be rather too large, and your toes are turned the wrong way. (Neal, 1825a, 320-321)

7 John Neal n’accepte que du bout des lèvres le grotesque que l’on pourrait imputer à la nudité, car le corps nu, au naturel, ne doit pas prêter à rire. Lui qui officiait fréquemment en tant que critique d’art, nous ferait presque entrevoir ces nus revenus en grâce à partir de 1810 sous l’impulsion de Benjamin West, reprise par des peintres américains tels que Charles Willson Peale, John Vanderlyn, Washington Allston, Thomas Sully, Samuel Finley Breeze Morse, Charles Leslie ou Rembrandt Peale (McSherry Fowble, 1974, 108-114). Car si John Neal regrette dans sa série de portraits « American Writers » de ne jamais avoir vu la Danaë and the Shower of Gold d’Adolph Ulrik Wertmüller (Neal, 1824a, 419), il a en revanche observé et loué l’Ariadne de Vanderlyn et le Dream of Love de son ami Rembrandt Peale (Dickson, 1943, 33 et 22). John Neal aurait abondé dans le sens de Thoreau qui invitera à se dévêtir, à se défaire de cette servitude afin de se remettre au centre de soi-même (Thoreau, 1985, 341-342) : il choisit en effet, pour atteindre à la vérité, de découvrir, c’est-à-dire de retirer la couverture, le vêtement. En cela, il est notamment désireux d’émuler la peinture du portraitiste Thomas Sully dont il dit qu’elle parvient à habiller ses sujets de chair et de muscle7. L’absence récurrente de ce marqueur social qu’est le vêtement concerne la majeure partie des protagonistes nealiens en devenir, ce qui est, de notre point de vue, un signe démocratique fort : en ramenant la dimension individuelle au premier plan, l’auteur entend ainsi court-circuiter la prééminence de la hiérarchie sociale en vigueur, en 1692, en 1776 comme en 1825.

8 Étrangement, les particularités physiques des corps présentés sont rarement mémorables8. En se refusant à délinéer les contours de ses Américains avec précision, John Neal met à profit, à sa manière, cette particularité américaine du premier dix- neuvième siècle soulignée par Thomas C. Upham dans la préface de ses American Sketches : « [The writer] would not be limited to the delineation of a particular cast of character in the defect of well-defined national features » (Upham, 1819, 14-15). Informe, difforme, le corps nealien est souvent générique ; sur cette arrière-scène indéfinie, le virevoltant cheveu, parfois implanté sur une tête hypertrophiée, se détache et entre en action, occupant l’espace textuel : [Rachel Dyer’s] forehead flashing to the sky and her coarse red hair shining and shivering about her huge head with a frightful fixed gleam,—her cap off, her cloak thrown aside and her distorted shape, for the first time, in full view of the awe- struck multitude. (RD 226)

9 Les cheveux roux de Rachel Dyer sont mis sur le même plan que d’autres éléments corporels9. N’est-il pas remarquable que la tête figée ne s’anime (et ne s’anim-alise) qu’avec l’introduction du cheveu ? Même si le vêtement est écarté pour de bon, ce n’est, ici mais aussi ailleurs, que par le truchement de ce cheveu, auquel l’auteur et le lecteur se raccrochent in extremis, qu’il semble possible de pénétrer l’intimité du personnage. En résumé, les protagonistes nealiens sont les Adam et Eve d’une terre vierge, vêtus de leurs seuls cheveux, des êtres indéfinis socialement, caractérisés par un unique trait physique, le poil, et l’on se prendrait presque à crier, comme le père de Chesterfield Montgomery défendant son fils sur le point d’être baptisé : “Let ’em turn up their noses, now, if they dare! Let ’em say ’t he’s hairy all over; with barnacles under his arm pits—or gingerbread, back of his ears; we’ll show 'em what’s what, if the critter lives.” It was bravely done. The boy was christened, as the father wished—in spite of his deformity. The biters were bit; and all the scoffers, in

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such a way, that few of them ever looked up, again. The boy grew out of all shape. (2BJ 441)

10 Même si la pilosité de Chesterfield n’est peut-être pas aussi excessive que la remarque des villageois médisants le laisse supposer, il n’en reste pas moins que le poil est d’ores et déjà associé à la difformité, voire à l’absence de forme. L’indéfinitude des contours devra permettre une nouvelle formulation de l’humanité américaine, à laquelle le poil participe, aux frontières mouvantes de l’humain et de l’animal : l’habit sera toujours un signe social, alors que si les marques qui sont issues du corps lui-même peuvent être socialisées, elles ne sont pas en elles-mêmes sociales. Leur signification est ancrée dans le corps, elle est générée par le corps lui-même. Le cheveu, contrairement à l’habit ou à la perruque, est de l’ordre du signe somatique10, ce n’est ni un rajout, ni un signe extérieur de richesse, c’est une inscription, une extension que le corps donne pour se figurer lui-même. La coquetterie, qui n’est plus une afféterie vestimentaire, s’exprime dès lors par le cheveu : « “Soft hair and a white hand, Abraham Harwood,” said Peters, looking up—losing all patience when he saw the preacher coquetting thus with his own tresses » (1BJ 61). Neal ne cherche pas à dresser un portrait officiel, marqué par une norme sociale et historique mais un portrait privé, de l’homme en tant qu’individu, qui retourne aux ressources de son propre corps. Tel est le sens du détricotage en règle de John Neal, la laine ne doit pas être sur les corps mais sur les têtes. Et attention, pas d’accessoires, surtout plus de perruques : les têtes yankees seront échevelées, le cheveu rebelle de 1776 fait sa révolution. Excessifs, les Américains nealiens habitent dès lors une frontière conçue comme une wilderness , un espace d’indétermination où naissent les possibles : difformes, grotesques, chevelus, en permanence à la limite, extra-vagants au sens où l’entend Thoreau (Thoreau, 1985, 580), ils viennent ébranler les bornes du paradigme, dans ce que l’on pourra qualifier d’« esthétique de l’écart ». Peut-être est-ce là la plus grande réussite de la fiction nealienne qui ne se fait qu’en se défaisant, à la faveur d’une expérimentation constante des formes. Dévêtu, l’Américain bénéficie du pouvoir couvrant de la chevelure, à l’image d’Edith Cummin, « a profusion of hair, overshadowing her whole face » (1BJ 33). Les cheveux habillent en effet ceux que l’on osera désormais appeler les « hair-oes » et « hair-oines », à commencer par le premier d’entre eux, Walter Harwood : il est l’éternel « curly head » (2BJ 153), surnom synecdochique scandé à sept reprises. Le cheveu recouvre jusqu’au patronyme du héros puisque dans le dialecte virginien utilisé par l’héroïne, « hair » se prononce « har » (1BJ 88). Walter Har-wood, Walter Hair-wood, et naît le hair-o…

S’inscrire dans la liminalité : l’Américain, un androgyne chevelu portant la raie ?

11 Si Hester Prynne ne pourra avoir la tentation du cheveu libre que dans la forêt du chapitre 18 de The Scarlet Letter, en revanche, dans les pages qui nous concernent, cette clandestinité devient la norme : les cheveux masculins ou féminins sont invariablement défaits, libres de toute attache, se constituant en une zone d’interpénétration et de tremblements qui ne revendique ni ne choisit d’appartenance11. C’est pourquoi il ne m’a pas semblé opportun d’établir une typologie détaillée du cheveu chez Neal ; le codage (coiffure festive, coiffure arrangée...) ne fonctionne pas au-delà des axes ici définis, car la primauté est donnée à l’abondance générique. L’indéfinitude de la chevelure ample (« loose ») devient un signe distinctif récurrent que Neal choisit d’associer à bon

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nombre de ses protagonistes12— y compris aux statues en marbre13 —, et cela vaut particulièrement pour le couple phare de Brother Jonathan, Edith et Walter, pour lesquels les références sont pléthoriques.14 L’écriture nealienne est torrentielle, à dessein, sans être maîtrisée totalement ; elle se diffracte et se décline en itinéraires alternatifs, sans être nécessairement systématisable, mais Neal choisit le fil d’Ariane capillaire pour définir sa nation plurielle, délivrée du port réglementé du cheveu imposé par la tradition religieuse judéo-chrétienne (Ofek, 2009, 4-5). Dans leur Anti- Œdipe, Deleuze et Guattari parlent du corps qui « chie », qui « baise », pour nommer le corps réel, en opposition au corps platonicien idéalisé (Deleuze et Guattari, 1973, 9). La prose de Jehu O’Cataract – le surnom de John Neal (Sears, 1978, 26) – affiche cette même volonté ; elle laisse couler, en surabondance, dans un « cataractisme » capillaire primitif. Étudier l’américanité sous l’angle de cette esthétique de l’excès permet à l’auteur de réinventer la doctrine du pluralisme américain, le E pluribus unum figé. Au contraire, ici, chez Neal, on a affaire au multiple en lui-même, sans que l’on ne préjuge de ce qui va arriver. Nous touchons au cœur de l’indéfinitude, de la potentialité, de la porosité de cette écriture-frontière subversive caractérisée par l’absence de partition claire, et que l’on osera appeler « américaine » parce qu’elle est libérée. La chevelure y est une clef en ce sens qu’elle est ex-centrique, elle matérialise la frontière tout en sortant du cadre, elle participe de ce processus créateur qui organise les contours d’un « je » hybride, et c’est précisément en cela qu’elle est adaptée à un romancier qui n’entend pas proposer une écriture du centre, de la loi, du juste milieu. Il y a une espèce de contingence des choses, on laisse être l’Américain, on le laisse être non pas dans ce qu’il va être mais dans ce qu’il est, on le laisse répandre sa chevelure, sans qu’il y ait d’intention de l’arrêter. Et le résultat est étonnant.

12 Si l’on extrapole à partir de ce développement capillaire, on se rend compte que lorsqu’on essaie de dresser le portrait de l’Américain, il se dérobe, il n’a de cesse que de se reconfigurer. Parfois, la peau est tendre, le cheveu long, souple, soigné, et la coquetterie quelque peu déplacée dans l’univers de la frontière. Pourtant, à travers le personnage d’Abraham Harwood, la question revient avec insistance, elle est posée en filigrane dans l’intertexte : « Soft hair, and a white hand, for an American farmer, at a time like this! » (1BJ 61) Crèvecœur a écrit ses lettres, et notamment la troisième, « What is an American ? », juste avant la révolution, « at a time like this ». Brother Jonathan, dont l’intrigue démarre en 1775, met à profit cette référence emblématique. Abraham Harwood, être hybride – mi-prêtre, mi-fermier, mi-homme, mi-femme – porte en lui et sur lui la multiplicité américaine. À sa célèbre question ouverte, Crèvecœur ne propose pas de réponse tranchée. Neal, réécrivant avec malice l’histoire de la colonisation des États-Unis, lui emboîte le pas, à sa manière, et participe à la réflexion sur ce que cela signifie d’être américain : être américain, ne serait-ce pas être autre, marquer sa différence ? Faut-il interpréter cette antithèse du fermier iconique comme un pied de nez aux idées reçues et aux définitions sclérosantes ? L’idée est en définitive de pouvoir interroger l’américanité. Plus on est capable de le faire, plus on est américain. Même si Neal ne fait pas explicitement d’Abraham Harwood l’incarnation d’une république décadente, corrompue et efféminée, il n’est assurément pas l’Américain que le romancier souhaite modéliser (ce pasteur était entrepreneur, propriétaire foncier et spéculateur !) ; mais en proposant cette déclinaison extrême de l’Américain, Neal efface aussi l’image figée par le rêve agraire jeffersonien, de la même façon qu’il a effacé les archétypes du Yankee et de l’Indien. L’Américain est multiple, l’Américain est, répétons-le, précisément celui qui se pose – sans en avoir la réponse –

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la question « what is an American? », à savoir, au vu du passage provocateur cité, le lecteur. Comme Crèvecœur avant lui, Neal n’est pas dogmatique, son art capillaire original lui permet d’opérer un retour vers le moment d’indéfinitude qui est précisément le moment de naissance de l’Américain : Forth came the boy, with a new face. The cloud had gone over the landscape. His heart bounded; his brilliant hair flew out, behind, with a sudden glitter, in the current of the open door; and he walked up—up—to the very table; with his face illuminated. (1BJ 192)

13 Nous vivons là l’avènement d’un héros d’un nouveau genre, Walter Harwood (« a new face », « illuminated »), homme des seuils (« Forth […] open door »), un être d’émotion (« his heart bounded ») plus que de raison. Les longs cheveux ondoyants et libérés du héros, aux lueurs féeriques, traduisent sa propension à imaginer, sa créativité toute « féminine », replaçant du même coup l’imagination (et l’imaginaire) au cœur de la démarche de renaissance nationale proposée par l’auteur.

14 Mais comment circonscrire ces personnages chevelus ? L’objet Walter ne se laisse pas cerner : « [...] a dead body, lying out, under the shadow of a tree—half naked—bare footed—bare headed—with a profusion of wet hair, spread out over the green turf—like the hair of a drowned, pale woman. » (1BJ 348) Inanimé, boule de poil, nu et sauvage, étendu, fragilisé donc, blanchi, et en fin de compte féminisé (« pale woman »), adoptant par mimétisme la féminité capillaire de son père adoptif, il déjoue les tentatives de classification : l’œil posé sur ce corps inerte finit, utilisant la chevelure comme fil d’Ariane de ses déductions, par le nommer presque femme. D’ailleurs, lorsqu’il endosse le rôle résolument masculin du soldat révolutionnaire, il dépérit : « The beauty of his fine, soft hair, was gone. It was now harsh, weather beaten, rough; and lay, upon his forehead, as if it were immovable. » (3BJ 124) Le lien fort unissant Walter et son chien indien Panther achève de semer le trouble : le poil humide de l’homme qui entre en contact avec le poil de la bête et rappelle au héros son animalité nous incite à aller plus avant dans l’excavation de cet étrange mammouth15. En fait, c’est l’association Walter- Bald Eagle, cimentée par une même pilosité, qui est fondatrice pour comprendre l’Américain rêvé par Neal. Bald Eagle, élevé par une mère de substitution indienne que Walter appelle « mother » (3BJ 76), se laisse lui aussi envelopper par des crinières animales dans son chant funèbre16. Le caractère androgyne du Peau-Rouge est épisodiquement réactivé par le narrateur : de petits pieds, des membres délicats (« daintily made » [2BJ 5]), l’absence de muscles apparents et la pratique de l’épilation jeffersonienne (« smooth » [2BJ 5]) ne l’empêchent pas d’être un lutteur redoutable (2BJ 6). Quant à Walter Harwood, de sang mêlé (3BJ 438), il est l’un des rares – sinon le seul – Indien-Blanc de la littérature américaine pré-jacksonienne17. Le système pileux est par conséquent mis à contribution pour accentuer la dilution de la blancheur et de la masculinité du héros, dévoilant la facette indienne de l’Américain à venir. Dans une certaine mesure, John Neal a théorisé l’importance du poil, clamant : « Who ever heard of a robust, powerful man, with a fine imagination?—nay, who ever heard of a man, with coarse hair, steady eyes, and a thick skin, who was at all remarkable for the faculty of imagination? » (Neal, 1824b, 392) Les cheveux, donc, encore et toujours ; et qu’importe finalement le sexe. La chevelure de Walter ébranle la belle circonférence du soi, elle joue ce rôle de contrepoids, tout en évitant au héros de perdre par ailleurs sa virilité, sa musculature : ses cheveux volent, sont libres, ils se détachent en quelque sorte de Walter dont la part féminine est conçue comme un ajout, non comme endémique et susceptible d’affaiblir la vigueur de ce futur père fondateur de la nation

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nealienne. Il est par conséquent permis de voir en Walter Harwood la convergence de ces principes, un être atypique, indien, blanc, animal, androgyne, adepte des voies du rêve et de la puissance de l’imagination. C’est sans aucun doute là, aussi, que réside la contribution de Neal à la constitution d’un héros littéraire américain au statut ambigu, venant compléter sans la copier cette autre figure de la frontière et du seuil, le viril Natty Bumppo. À travers ce héros, John Neal se projette, lui, l’architecte de l’indépendance littéraire de l’Amérique, un homme certes robuste, mais à la peau délicate, et aux cheveux blonds et soyeux18.

15 Cette indéfinitude de l’Américain prend donc avec notre objet d’étude une forme remarquable : l’Américain conçu par Neal est un assemblage, structuré autour de l’idée fondatrice de frontière, de « parting », de raie. La frontière est même là, dans les cheveux. Jonathan Peters attire notre attention sur le caractère symbolique – l’adverbe « reverentially » en témoigne – de cette ligne de partage formée dans les cheveux d’Edith Cummin : « “My dear child,” said he; parting the hair upon her forehead, while he spoke; and stooping reverentially toward it, as if to put a kiss, there » (1BJ 56). L’importance de la raie ne se dément pas au fil des pages : Increase Mather et Abraham Harwood en bénéficient d’une (RD 136, 1BJ 60), et le pasteur George Burroughs prend le temps de soigner sa raie avant de sauter la palissade de Fort Casco, mis à feu et à sang par une horde de Mohawks déchaînés19. Bald Eagle présente lui aussi cette caractéristique : [...] hair coarse, black and shining, like the mane of a young stallion, roughened, if you will, in the blaze and smoke of battle—or scorched, by unholy fires. It was carefully parted, from the middle of his head—all the way over—and hung behind, somewhat after the fashion of the squaws, in a large heavy club. (2BJ 6-7)

16 En suivant des lignes soigneusement tracées (« carefully parted ») à même le corps, Neal emboîte les pièces de son puzzle américain, mélange de virilité indienne (« coarse », « roughened », « battle »), d’animalité (« mane of a young stallion »), de paganisme (« unholy ») et de féminité (« after the fashion of the squaws »). La raie traduit les prémices d’une personnalité divisée, affichée sans complexe par Walter Harwood : His hair was parted before, like his father’s; carried behind his ears; and let loose, below, upon his broad shoulders, where, at every motion of his body, it played and shook, with a changeable brightness, not altogether in character, with his fine, large, masculine head. (1BJ 187-188)

17 Walter est le personnage liminaire par excellence, androgyne donc, mais également métissé, dont le parcours s’apparente à une série de tâtonnements. Cette raie paraît indissociable de l’Américain que Neal cherche à circonscrire, elle représente finalement bien plus qu’une simple frontière entre deux pôles d’une personnalité divisée. Elle est de l’ordre du trait physique ; difficile à manier, elle matérialise l’indéfinitude de l’Américain. Cette passion de la démarcation, cette instrumentalisation de la ligne, font que la frontière n’est pas seulement dans les paysages, elle est aussi dans les esprits, et elle est même sur les corps. Elle vient du dedans. En d’autres termes, la raie est l’instanciation de cette idée globale que le personnage américain porte sur lui la frontière, dont Cécile Roudeau rappelle qu’elle peut être « une ligne dont on a oublié les raisons du tracé, mais qui subsiste, gravée dans les esprits et dans les corps » (Roudeau, 2012, 314). Elle ouvre une zone d’indétermination, univers des possibles, qui ne saurait être contrainte par une logique binaire.

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Le cheveu, ce trait d’union : la couleur naturelle de l’Amérique, entre langage et sexualité

18 Dans cette écriture qui prend la frontière pour méthode, la marginalité essentielle de la chevelure, amplifiée à dessein, est significative : le cheveu fédérateur, frontière mouvante, tenant lieu de lien à la terre, de lien verbal ou physique, devra autoriser les reconfigurations les plus osées.

19 Il faut le dire d’emblée, le cheveu nealien, à l’occasion marqueur géographique, s’inscrit durablement dans la nature américaine. Poursuivant sa quête de l’indéfini américain, Neal fait sien le credo de Crèvecœur : « Men are like plants; the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. » (Crèvecœur, 1981, 71) De fait, le cuir chevelu américain, fertile, nourrit des cheveux abondants. Le cheveu est brillant car il a un secret de beauté : par capillarité, la nature est absorbée par l’Américain, la chevelure est naturelle, parce qu’elle vient du corps. Rapunzel ? Oubliée ! Avec la romance nealienne, le pigment change ; le cheveu du nouveau monde coupe les ponts avec les traditions de la vieille Europe : il sera châtain, couleur de l’humus, riche comme la terre brune. Les cheveux se substituent littéralement à la terre : « and, while our hero lay, with his luxuriant, rich brown hair all abroad—his brave boy would lie buried in it, his own hair afloat over it, like a vapour of spun gold » (3BJ 316, je souligne). Le chevauchement entre le végétal et le cheveu est particulièrement frappant dans un long passage qui témoigne de la prépondérance du cheveu dans l’imaginaire nealien et du lien fort qu’il entretient avec la nature. Presque nue (« letting her loose hair go—her night gown—every thing » [1BJ 345]), nouvelle Ève dans son éden, Edith Cummin tente de soigner des fleurs meurtries par la tempête : Her shining, soft hair had interwoven itself with nearly all that were left; […] her hands employed, the while, in gently detaching her tresses from the green tendrils, and brilliant blossoms. […] tearing away the flowers, with which her fine, bright hair was interwoven. (1BJ 346-347)

20 Mais le cheveu nealien étant naturel, elle ne parviendra pas à se défaire de ces fleurs, matérialisations inattendues des arabesques fleuries qu’elle traçait sur le sable (1BJ 349, 11). Osons donc le dire, si l’Américain nealien est en phase avec la nature, c’est parce que la chevelure à la mode nealienne transforme les personnages en petits microcosmes naturels américains. Les feuilles et l’herbe s’y enchevêtrent (3BJ 267), et il arrive aux cheveux de remplacer le végétal, ou presque20. Ils servent de trait d’union entre les genres, les ethnies, et avec la nature américaine. Walter Harwood écrit ainsi à Edith Cummin : « I threw myself into the deep, after you; following the light of your glorious hair—as it floated upward—into my face—interweaving itself, with whatever it came near—the rich grass; the sleeping water lilies. » (2BJ 436-437) Donnant corps à l’image bachelardienne de la chevelure ondulante associée à l’eau courante (Bachelard 116), ce péan aux cheveux plonge Wa-l-ter le bien nommé dans les grands fonds, dans le sillage de sa sirène21. Il se laisse submerger (« into my face ») par la nature féminine et par la Nature (« interweaving »), dans une tentative de réécriture d’une scène originelle, d’un mythe fondateur pour l’Amérique, mythe où le poil a toute sa place. Le cheveu féminin y constitue une matrice nationale, il reflète la luxuriance d’une nature vierge et réinvente la nature « humaine » américaine, donnant corps à cette écriture- frontière, à la ligne en mouvement, insaisissable, poétique, sanctuarisant un espace qui conduit vers l’autre, pour délinéer le « moi » américain, sans toutefois tracer une ligne

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claire. Walter, prophète extatique aux cheveux longs, est investi d’une mission. Il est comme ces hommes qui avaient fait en Israël le vœu de naziréat, et ne laissaient aucun rasoir passer sur leur tête, montrant ainsi leur désir de retrouver la pureté de leurs ancêtres nomades22.

21 Il y a pour George Frazer quelque chose de magique et vivant dans le cheveu (Frazer, 1998, 187-189), et ce n’est pas John Neal qui pourrait le contredire : les cheveux tels qu’il les conçoit gagnent en vitalité et deviennent un prolongement des terminaisons nerveuses, actifs même quand le pronostic vital semble engagé pour l’individu lui- même23. Les cheveux sont salvateurs, ils sont à l’origine de la vie, et, lorsqu’on ôte les cheveux, on ôte la vie. Ainsi, à travers le pasteur George Burroughs, se décrivant émergeant des eaux, grâce à un être divin le tirant par la chevelure (RD 73-74), ou à travers l’Indien Bald Eagle – l’aigle chauve symbolique –, l’Amérique défend bec et ongles ses cheveux : [Bald Eagle] revived, while something, or somebody was tugging at his chief treasure—his life—his vitality—the bright, wonderful hair of her, whom he had so loved—so lamented—poor Lucy—the white woman. (3BJ 416-417)24

22 Les cheveux sont les vivants piliers du temple naturel que Neal édifie pour son Américain : même si les paroles délivrées restent parfois confuses, le cheveu ajoute à la tessiture de la voix américaine, car il parvient à devenir langage. En cela, il s’inscrit pleinement dans les stratégies développées par l’auteur pour proposer une langue oralisée, dialectale, corporelle, unique25. Il contribue à combler un manque, celui d’une langue « américaine » qui cherche à s’écrire en se singularisant. À cette fin, ce cheveu va gagner en autonomie : Ah me! said poor Martha when they put the rope about her neck....Ah me!—and she died while she was playing with her little withered fingers, and blowing the loose grey hair from about her mouth as it strayed away from her tawdry cap....saying over the words of a child in the voice of a child, Ah me—ah me—with her last breath. (RD 145)

23 La corde est raide, elle étrangle Martha Cory, pendue pour sorcellerie ; l’air ne passe plus, la strangulation, la constriction exercée sur le cou par une masse bientôt inerte, contraste avec la légèreté (« blowing ») et la souplesse aérienne (« loose ») du cheveu qui, jouissant d’une autonomie relative, conserve sa part de liberté (« strayed away »). Neal place le cheveu en première ligne car il donne « un supplément de concret », pour aller à la « racine du concret », mettant en exergue ce vivant qui va mourir. Il accompagne ce que Roland Barthes qualifie de « moments de vérité », à savoir des « moments de Mort et d’Amour » (Barthes, 2003, 158). Dans cette écriture nealienne oralisée, le cheveu prolonge la vocalisation. Lettres et cheveux sont juxtaposés : « The hair, and the letters—I have divided equally » (2BJ 235). Les cheveux s’observent, ils se déchiffrent (« Look upon the hair, which is enclosed. It is the hair of a dead woman » [2BJ 234]) au même titre que les lettres ; en somme, ils accompagnent la lettre du texte, parfois ils s’y substituent. Cela paraît à peine croyable, mais le cheveu, initialement tronqué, croît en langue, littéralement : « Ha—ha—ha [...] ha! ha! ha! » devient rapidement « hair—hair! [...] hair!—hair [...] Ay—hair—hair—[...]—hair—hair » (3BJ 447-448). Le signifiant « hair » finit par saturer l’espace textuel, mais ses vertus ne sont pas uniquement incantatoires car, répétons-le, le cheveu doit avoir un sens dans la prose de John Neal, le cheveu n’est jamais accessoirisé. Naturel, vivant, participant à l’émergence d’un moi enfoui primitif, il est au cœur de la parole nealienne, et il prend logiquement place au cœur du dénouement : la parole attendue (« Speak! speak! [...]

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Speak! speak! [...] Speak—witch—devil—whose hair is that? » [3BJ 448]), celle qui permettra de démêler l’écheveau, encadre une lutte homérique sans merci mais désincarnée, où les chevelures de Mary Elizabeth Hewes (décédée) et de la sorcière Hannah sont sous les feux de la rampe et livrent combat26. Dans Brother Jonathan, les cheveux sont ainsi conçus qu’ils permettront à coup sûr d’identifier leur possesseur lors de l’ultime confrontation entre Walter Harwood et Jonathan Peters, établissant le lien de filiation : « “Father! father!—I am your child—even I!”—“Boy—boy!”—“Yes—I—I —even I—I am the true Jasper—the riband—the hair—the letters—they are all mine” » (3BJ 449). Le « je » omniprésent (« I », « mine »), qui émerge enfin après une quête identitaire qui aura tenu en haleine le lecteur pendant plus de mille trois cents pages, le doit à l’identification des cheveux, mémoire de l’individu tout autant que les lettres et autres manuscrits qui composent le texte. Les protagonistes de Neal ne sont pas de grands orateurs, le signe n’est pas uniquement verbal : la chevelure s’invite dans l’art du discours ; se substituant au verbe, elle devient vecteur d’émotion, empoignée par Walter qui vient d’apprendre la mort de son père adoptif27, ou malmenée lorsque le pasteur Matthew Paris prend conscience, dans une sorte d’anagnorèse, que sa fille est ensorcelée28. La chevelure est un facilitateur du langage, son observation précède l’engagement verbal ; ainsi, Robert Eveleth parviendra à entrer en contact avec Bridget Pope jusqu’alors muette, en passant la main sur ses cheveux, devenus canaux de communication (RD 78-79). Anticipant les pouvoirs expressifs et performatifs du cheveu dans la littérature victorienne29, les cheveux nealiens profitent de leur contiguïté avec une bouche qui s’agite : « Are you Thomas Fisk—with your white hair blowing about your agitated mouth and your dim eyes, are you able to see your way clear » (RD 68-69). Aucun son ne sortira de la bouche de Thomas Fisk ; en ce sens, le cheveu virevoltant, en se mettant en mouvement devant et autour de sa bouche, devient une prothèse inorganique, celle de la parole qui ne sort pas. Un souffle (« hair blowing ») expressif se substitue aux vibrations des cordes vocales. Les cheveux sont à nouveau juxtaposés à l’organe de la parole lorsque George Burroughs s’évertue à démontrer le manque d’impartialité d’un témoin30, ou même pour véhiculer l’émotion de Jonathan Peters31. Sans qu’il faille pour autant y voir une irruption des Gorgones dans la diégèse, la demeure des Montgomery se peuple de géants aux cheveux sifflants32, d’hommes et de femmes âgés aux corps invisibles ; seule la présence de leurs cheveux gris semble permettre de colorer les têtes. Walter Harwood, présent, ne fait pas exception : il a les yeux « clairs », le front « transparent », et seule sa « riche chevelure » le sauve de la dissolution (3BJ 169). Partout, le cheveu donne de la voix. Au moment même où George Burroughs plaide l’innocence de Martha Cory, les cheveux sont à la barre et témoignent : « I beseech you, however, to look with pity upon the poor soul there— poor Martha!—let her gray hairs plead with you, as your gray hairs plead with me—I—I— proceed, Mr. Attorney-General. » (RD 94, je souligne) Comme si le cheveu libre et indiscipliné, parce que rattaché au corps, parce que prenant racine en l’être humain, était finalement un marqueur fiable de la vérité.

24 Dans son stade de mutation ultime, la chevelure finit par se substituer à l’expression du visage ; l’amalgame est savamment entretenu, tant et si bien que la syntaxe ambiguë utilisée par Harry Flemming provoque l’interrogation légitime de son interlocuteur, « The expression; or the hair? » “[…] I found him, as I say—I found him asleep, in the solitude;—alone—altogether alone;—his ragged hair, falling about his haughty face, with a crazy, frightful expression”—“Ah!”—“To be sure; tangled with dead, yellow grass—matted with dry

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leaves.”—“The expression; or the hair?” “The hair. He was nearly starved, I know—I could see it, in the convulsive twitching of his mouth […].” (3BJ 267, je souligne)

25 Sans surprise, c’est le cheveu qui gagne, tandis que la bouche se contorsionne. Une double page de Rachel Dyer (RD 195-196) achèvera d’illustrer ce point. Y figurent les cheveux en bataille d’Abigail Paris, mal peignés, des cheveux qui alimentent l’échange verbal mal engagé avec George Burroughs et qui, lorsque les mots se tarissent, opèrent un retour victorieux, inondant finalement la scène33. Bien plus qu’un élément descriptif anecdotique, les cheveux s’invitent dans la discussion, ils sont partie intégrante du langage américain imaginé par Neal ; vibrants, vivants, ils participent de l’acte de communication, ils se substituent à une gestuelle convenue et reflètent l’humeur des personnages. Dans ce passage, les cheveux malmenés (« ragged » [RD 195], « rougher » [RD 196]) se détendent à mesure qu’Abigail Paris gagne en assurance. L’être chétif recroquevillé dans l’âtre entrevu par Burroughs prend du volume : pour remplir l’espace, la chevelure, abondante, libérée, est dès lors aux avant-postes, y compris pour aller au-delà de l’acte langagier.

26 Certes, les antécédents ne manquent pas qui associent cheveux et sexualité. Dans The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton les nomme « Cupid’s nets, to catch all comers, a brushy wood in which Cupid builds his nest, and under whose shadow all loves a thousand several ways sport themselves »34. Elizabeth Gitter affirme : « the more abundant the hair, the more potent the sexual invitation » (Gitter, 1984, 938), et il est vrai que dans cet autre roman de John Neal, Seventy-Six, le rouge des lèvres de la pétillante Ellen Sampson, la blancheur de sa dentition et ses pieds attirants – entre autres caractéristiques de la séduction nealienne – sont associés à une chevelure envoûtante aux courbes fluides et serpentines : « her bright hair danced like a quivering halo about her head at every swing » (Neal, 1840, 54). Les cheveux occupent une position centrale dans le jeu de l’amour, entre une main charmante posée sur un bras yankee, une bouche trop proche d’un visage, ou des tempes masculines battant au rythme d’un cœur féminin (1BJ 84-85). L’Américain nealien, primitif, répondrait à des mécanismes sexuels ancestraux. La chevelure nealienne, féminisée, déstructurée, acquiert une vie propre, des mouvements autonomes, du moins lorsque Walter apparaît dans un état second et qu’une entité informe, mélange de cheveux et de lèvres, le poursuit : « He knew not where he was—nor what he meditated: a glowing face—and large eyes were visible through the dim light; a profusion of hair—and lips, that pursued his. He felt, as if he were yet sleeping; he strove to awake. » (2BJ 413-414) Cette association témoigne du pouvoir d’évocation sexuelle du cheveu, dont les ondulations lascives s’accommodent de la présence des lèvres. Dans un tel contexte – rappelons que Walter est inconscient, dans une maison close – les lèvres féminines, d’ailleurs, retrouvent aisément leur acception d’organes génitaux, et les cheveux glissent vers le pubis… Un autre argument devrait satisfaire les sceptiques : les cheveux nealiens provoquent – littéralement – l’étincelle. Ils autorisent une communication instantanée entre les êtres : ce sont des conducteurs électriques. Pour s’en convaincre, relisons le passage suivant qui concerne Edith Cummin : She was perpetually doing what nobody was prepared for—perpetually making people jump; and had, if there be such a one, the faculty of unexpectedness, within her; like a Leyden jar, always ready to be let off. At one time, it would really appear, as if she had been lying in wait, like a torpedo-fish, in the water, for an opportunity to set people tingling: at another, as if she enjoyed, in her very soul, the confusion of those; especially if they were grown up, who, led astray by her manner, and size, had mistaken her for a child. A word, or a laugh, was enough; just when some stranger,

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perhaps, who had been looking at her absurd gambols, with a large dog, was on the point of pulling her into his lap, for a fine romp—only a word, or a laugh; and he would start back, as if he had been playing with an electrical machine; or had put his hand, by mistake, upon one of the little wood-women; the North American fairies, who have bonnets like human hair, and faces like masks, which they can put off, or on, at pleasure. (1BJ 29-30, je souligne)

27 Mieux qu’une bouteille de Leyde, Edith est une machine électrique35. Lorsqu’un inconnu la touche – et la référence à la chevelure laisse supposer que la chevelure ait pu être effleurée – la décharge électrique semble instantanée (« start back »). Dans le couple électrique qu’il forme avec elle, aqueux ou mercureux36, Walter le Peau-Rouge, qu’il se décline sous la forme d’oxyde rouge, de vapeur ou de liquide, est le conducteur ; entre ces deux-là, le courant passe, ce que Neal traduisait ainsi dans Logan : « who shall mistake the mysterious intelligence of young hearts, in their electrick communication? » (Neal, 1822, 162) Lors d’un cauchemar de Walter Harwood, il suffira qu’Edith Cummin s’appuie contre la poitrine de Jonathan Peters pour que des étincelles jaillissent, jusqu’à ce que ses cheveux prennent feu à leur tour (2BJ 368) ! Le précieux poil s’embrase certes facilement, mais tout cela ne serait que vaines conjectures si un autre précédent éclairant n’existait chez Neal, décrivant la chevelure d’une héroïne d’Errata : There was a brilliancy in it, almost metallick—like spun gold; and yet, it was very soft. But rouse her—alarm her; and you would look at her in amazement. Her whole form would undergo an instantaneous illumination;—her hair would shake, and quiver, and sparkle, with electricity. (Neal, 1823a, 46, je souligne)37

28 Cependant, en dépit des apparences, les cheveux nealiens entretiennent un rapport ambigu à la sexualité. Elle ne s’affiche pas, tout au plus est-elle suggérée. Arrêtons-nous à nouveau sur les cheveux d’Edith Cummin, avec leurs ondoiements qui renvoient au pouvoir de séduction de la femme. L’abondance capillaire de l’héroïne a vocation à être partagée, discrètement : « her bright hair afloat upon the table » (1BJ 84), « with rich, plentiful hair, always in the way of herself, or somebody else » (1BJ 25). Neal construit ce que la poésie lyrique victorienne nommera les « tentes de cheveux » (« hair tents »38), la femme recouvrant de ses longs cheveux la tête de l’homme, ce que William Holman Hunt immortalisera dans son macabre tableau Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1868). Un mystère érotique pour Baudelaire, l’antichambre de la sexualité pour Neal ? La jeune femme enlace Walter, et, ce faisant, les cheveux féminins fusionnent avec ceux de son compagnon, qui ne parvient pas à échapper à la « contagion » (2BJ 416) féminine, malgré une tentative de mise à distance : [Edith] caught his weary head into her young, pure bosom; gathered up her loose flannel robe, or night gown, over it, in a paroxysm of deep tenderness; called him her dear, dear Watty; and wept over him, as if her heart were breaking. He knew the voice; and starting up, he tore away the clothes; pushed aside her abundant rich hair; and met her eyes. (1BJ 353)

29 S’il est tentant, lorsque les vêtements glissent, de suivre Edmund Leach qui, dans son article séminal « Magical Hair », reconnaît qu’il est symboliquement possible d’associer la longue chevelure à une sexualité sans contrainte39, Edith Cummin n’a néanmoins rien d’une tentatrice, et elle demeurera, a priori, virginienne et vierge (« pure bosom ») jusqu’à l’épilogue. Elle dépasse la construction sociale de la féminité pour affirmer sa féminité individuelle. Plutôt que de subir le diktat de la tradition, elle est elle-même la source de l’impulsion, « tracing patterns and flowers (which were imitated all over the country) upon the white sanded floor » (1BJ 11, je souligne). Edith est le fer de lance de

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la féminité nealienne : imaginative, elle essaime ; ses cheveux abondants, souples et aériens, dupliqués, implantés sur d’autres personnages devenus androgynes, s’inscrivent dans ce mouvement, imprimant sur des corps palimpsestes les arabesques libératrices de la jeune artiste. Elle est la matrice créative qui manquait à l’Amérique. Les cheveux longs et libérés symboliseraient donc la liberté, sociale et individuelle, plutôt que sexuelle40. Totémisés, plus qu’un symbole, ils constituent un talisman, une protection indispensable pour affronter l’autre – la seule, en fin de compte, au vu de la rareté du vêtement. Les protagonistes sont en attente ; tout au plus, désolidarisées de la partie centrale du corps, leurs antennes mobiles, d’une sensibilité prodigieuse, ont entamé leur recherche. Mais attention, pas de baisers, pas de contacts physiques autrement que par les cheveux41 : dans une Amérique nealienne différant autant qu’il est possible le moment de la jointure, les cheveux sont un rappel discret d’une sexualité qui affleure mais qui ne peut se concrétiser42, et qui semble s’autoréguler, au cours d’une sorte de « sélection naturelle » avant la lettre. Deux parcours, et deux chevelures atypiques – enlacées dès l’épisode de la cascade en crue dans le premier volume –, laissent présager de l’issue finale : seul le couple Edith-Walter aura finalement dans l’épilogue la possibilité de sceller une union programmée.

30 Dans son article « A Summary View of America », Neal déclare : « Strangers are comets: common incidents, phenomena; among the heavenly bodies of a small village. » (Neal, 1824 632) Le héros nealien est toujours d’ailleurs, à Ginger Town, Salem ou New York. Il est toujours cet étranger à la parole elliptique, qui file et se défile, défini comme tel dans les textes, dont l’étrangeté est en permanence réactivée ; qu’il ait pour nom George Burroughs (RD 68, 71, 99, 106), Winslow (1BJ 101, 102, 104), Harry Flemming (2BJ 215), Jonathan Peters (1BJ 287, 290, 293) ou Walter Harwood (2BJ 392, 3BJ 389, 414), il semble condamné à reproduire la même course indéfiniment (3BJ 426). Ces têtes nealiennes, traversant les romans révolutionnaires, ceintes d’un halo de cheveux flottants, ont tout de la comète chevelue43 décrite par les Grecs puis par les puritains 44. En un sens, les têtes nealiennes s’inscrivent dans l’utilisation faite des comètes par le pasteur puritain Samuel Danforth en 1665 : avertir la Nouvelle-Angleterre de ne pas se détourner de sa divine mission (Danforth, 2006, 17-18). Droits et porteurs de renouveau tout à la fois, les Américains que Neal appelle de ses vœux ne pourraient-ils pas s’écarter de la norme, tourner, comme le fait fréquemment Walter Harwood, la tête vers les étoiles et, cheveux au vent, arborer fièrement la chevelure de la comète dans ce qui serait la version cosmique de l’indéfinitude américaine ? En dernière analyse, il n’y a pas de règles, pas de stabilité chez Neal, pas d’idéologie figée, pas de portrait idéal de l’Américain, mais une recherche permanente qui fait que l’on est toujours à la frontière des genres, des races, de l’animalité ou du végétal. La chevelure autorise ces rencontres ébouriffantes, car les cheveux constituent une frontière, une zone neutre, plus vraiment le corps mais pas vraiment l’autre, lieu des possibles, symbole d’une indéfinitude libératoire portée par Walter Harwood, héros chevelu errant dans la sanglante réalité de 1776. S’accrocher aux tresses nealiennes permet de s’approcher du cœur de cette écriture de la transition et de la spontanéité.

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NOTES

1. Rachel Dyer retrace, dans l’Amérique coloniale, le combat romancé de deux accusés majeurs, victimes de la chasse aux sorcières — le pasteur George Burroughs et la quakeresse Rachel Dyer — lors des procès de sorcellerie à Salem, en 1692. 2. Roman ouvertement américain dans le sujet traité et la période choisie (1774-1776), Brother Jonathan est un hydropique de mille trois cent vingt-quatre pages à la structure lâche, dans lequel il est possible de se perdre ; les identités des personnages, parfois multiples, ne s’y dévoilent que progressivement, ralentissant la compréhension et la progression d’une intrigue complexe. Il s’agit avant tout de l’histoire de deux quêtes identitaires qui finiront par fusionner dans la dernière page du roman : celle d’un jeune Yankee provincial, Walter Harwood, orphelin de mère et ignorant l’identité de son véritable père, dont nous suivons les aventures amoureuses (auprès d’Edith Cummin et Olive Montgomery), militaires (Brooklyn Heights), parfois grotesques et risibles, dans l’Amérique révolutionnaire de 1776 ; et, dans une moindre mesure, celle d’un père aux multiples identités — Jonathan Peters — qui porte pendant les trois volumes le deuil d’un fils qu’il croit mort : Walter Harwood. 3. Sauf mention contraire, les italiques sont toujours de l’auteur de la citation. 4. J’ai délibérément choisi d’être à l’écoute du texte, d’en épouser les méandres, même si la surabondance du matériau dans les deux romans composant le corpus rend la tâche ardue ; je m’efforcerai donc de thématiser ce foisonnement, en citant généreusement un texte source difficilement consultable et pourtant nécessaire à ma démonstration. 5. Librement inspiré de Poulain, 2011, 10. 6. « waistcoat falling off » (1BJ 36) ; « her night-gown falling away from her white shoulders » (1BJ 343) ; « a great quantity of new clothes—all of which came to pieces, while he was putting them on » (2BJ 196). 7. « clothe them with flesh and muscle—infuse into them meaning and passion—and give to them the noblest of all expression—dramatick individuality » (Neal, 1823b, 121).

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8. « There was little or nothing remarkable, in his countenance or manner. You might have passed him every day, for a twelve-month, perhaps, without remembering his face, or enquiring his name. » (1BJ 15) 9. Voir aussi, pour des exemples similaires, RD iv, RD 216, 1BJ 84. 10. « la pilosité est la partie visible d’un sang invisible, ou l’extériorisation d’un sang interne, un extruda du corps et de la personne [...] un témoin d’une qualité interne de la personne » (Karadimas, 2010b, 25). 11. Hallpike, proposant une analyse sociologique du traitement de la chevelure dans son article « Social hair », suggère de voir dans la longue chevelure un symbole de détachement ou une liberté face à l’ordre social, alors que les cheveux courts ou attachés représentent selon lui la subordination (Hallpike, 1969, 261). Voir aussi Hershman qui, dans son article « Hair, Sex and Dirt » (1974), souligne à nouveau le caractère liminal et incontrôlable du cheveu, ainsi que Obeyesekere, qui, dans une approche psychanalytique, déconstruit l’opposition entre symbolisme individuel et symbolisme culturel (Obeyesekere, 1981). 12. À Lucy Armstrong (« her loose black hair » [2BJ 122]), à Ruth Ashley (« her dark, heavy, superb hair, breaking loose » [3BJ 73]), à Olive Montgomery (« shaking her loose, black hair, all about her face » [3BJ 6]), à Emily (« her dark, rich hair, pouring about her face, like a shower » [3BJ 216]), à une inconnue de la maison isolée (« her white, naked arms reaching up—up—up—far above her head; slowly training a profusion of dark hair, through her fingers » [3BJ 239]) et même à la machiavélique sorcière mohawk (« her black hair loose » [3BJ 446]). 13. « the hair, that most difficult of all things to represent in marble, where it cannot be massed, but requires to be lightened and loosened » (Neal, 1874, 42). 14. Cette analyse s’appuie, pour Edith Cummin, sur la liste non exhaustive d’occurrences suivantes : « her loose hair falling about her face » (1BJ 27), « her loose hair » (1BJ 36, 304, 409), « her bright hair » (1BJ 305), « her bright hair dishevelled » (1BJ 309), « her beautiful hair was disordered » (1BJ 322), « letting her loose hair go » (1BJ 345), « her disordered hair » (1BJ 356), « her fine hair, all in disorder » (3BJ 208). Les descriptions de la chevelure de Walter ne constituent rien de moins qu’un copier-coller de celles d’Edith Cummin : « his hair flying » (1BJ 260), « his own rich hair » (1BJ 264), « his hair had broken loose » (1BJ 272), « his long hair » (1BJ 278-279), « his rich, loose hair huddled about his neck » (2BJ 46), « his hair flying loose, again » (2BJ 148), « the fine hair, all in disorder » (2BJ 361), « shaking his hair loose upon his broad shoulders » (2BJ 408), « his hair loose » (3BJ 101-102). 15. « Walter Harwood! Why!—Walter Harwood! I am astonished! What is the matter with you? What is the meaning of all this? You are paler than ever. Your hair too, is wringing wet—your—. What, sir! caressing that beast, while your father is talking to you! » (1BJ 205) 16. « I am going, I am going covered with manes of horses—alive with the eyes of cattle, I’ve taken. » (3BJ 409). 17. Natty Bumppo était blanc (Cooper, 1859, 78), et même le prétendu métis de The Pioneers, Oliver Edwards (Cooper, 1852, 122-123), se révèlera être, en fin de roman, totalement blanc (389). 18. Effectivement, le héros de l’Amérique nealienne ressemble étonnamment, dans cet article rédigé l’année de la publication de Brother Jonathan pour Blackwood’s, à Neal en personne : « All men, who have been greatly, and peculiarly distinguished, for splendour and activity of imagination [...], have been men of inflammable bodily temperaments; great irritability of nerve —with clear, changeable eyes, thin skin, and fine hair, like women. » (Neal, 1824b, 392) Cette hypothèse est vraisemblable, car Walter Harwood est ainsi : irascible parfois, impulsif, aux yeux clairs (« the eyes were sunshine; the mouth, blood red; the large, noble neck, which was open to the bosom, full of solid, strong beauty; like marble sculpture » [1BJ 202] ; « a thousand stars were reflected in his large eyes » [1BJ 210]). Aucun autre protagoniste ne colle davantage à la description physique de John Neal (Lease, 1972, 9 et 128).

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19. « Here he shook his black hair loose, and parted it on his forehead and twisted it into a club, and bound it up hastily after the fashion of the tribe. » (RD 167) 20. « the wet, crumbling precipice—the very edge—where the slippery grass lay, like smooth hair, combed out—or the bright streaming weeds of a strong current » (3BJ 435). 21. Au niveau intradiégétique, le héros de Brother Jonathan se laissera guider par ce même fil d’Ariane capillaire matérialisé par les lettres qu’Edith Cummin lui envoie régulièrement. 22. Judg. 13.5-7, 16.17. Walter, s’il n’est pas abstinent comme les naziréens (Num. 6.1-5), n’en est pas moins horrifié à la vue de l’enivrement collectif et de la débauche généralisée qui l’entourent lorsqu’il observe, dans un langage moralisateur, le comportement des patriotes fêtant l’indépendance des États-Unis, « profanant » ce qu’il considère, comme un jour de « fête religieuse » (2BJ 385-386). 23. « In a chair like a porter’s lodge, sat a very ancient woman—a tall, emaciated, helpless creature—on the very point of departure, our hero thought, from this world;—with hair like thistle down, stirring about her blind eyes, at every breath » (2BJ 194-195). 24. L’historien James Axtell et l’ethnologue William C. Sturtevant indiquent ainsi que chez les Indiens, la mèche tressée dès l’enfance sur le sommet du crâne représente la vie de l’individu (Axtell et Sturtevant, 1980, 466-67) ; par ailleurs, à propos des Indiens du Sud-Est des États-Unis, les anthropologues Douglas Owsley et Hugh Berryman émettent l’hypothèse que le scalp symbolise l’âme (Owsley et Berryman, 1975, 41-58). Plus généralement, les cheveux sont pour les ethnographes fréquemment associés à l’âme (Hallpike, 1969, 258). 25. John Neal est un adepte de ce qu’il qualifie de « talking on paper » (Neal, 1869, 186), l’oralité de sa prose est renforcée par le recours fréquent à des variations dialectales, et il a contribué, bien avant Twain, à la pérennisation littéraire du dialecte yankee. Au moment où Cooper écrit d’un poulain non sevré, dans une langue ampoulée, « [It] exact[ed] the maternal contribution » (Cooper, 1859, 51), John Neal – lui reprochant son style châtié et son intransigeance sur l’agrammaticalité (Neal, 1825a, 327) – choisit de mener une expérience différente anticipant là encore le réalisme et la vivacité d’esprit de Twain. L’évaluation critique de Diedrich Knickerbocker’s A History of New York (1809) par John Neal (Neal 1825b 61-62) s’inscrit notamment dans la même veine que le commentaire corrosif de Mark Twain, « Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences » (1895). Prenant le contre-pied de Cooper dont l’aversion pour le Yankee allait croissante (Gould, 1996, 133), John Neal entreprend d’inscrire sa langue en littérature. 26. « the rich, beautiful brown hair flashed in the moonlight » (3BJ 448, je souligne) ; « her own dishevelled, abundant, black tresses, were like the plumage of a spirit—ruffled » (3BJ 448). 27. « The paper fell out of Walter’s hand. A brief cry—a short, strong, fierce convulsion—a sudden death-like quiet—succeeded; and, immediately, the poor boy lay flat upon his back—stiff and cold —both hands clenched into his hair. » (2BJ 201) 28. « [Matthew Paris] […] tore his white hair with a grief […] and the hair of his flesh rose » (RD 58). 29. « Silent, the larger-than-life woman who dominated the literature and art of the period used her hair to weave her discourse; immobile, she used her hair at times to shelter her lovers, at times to strangle them. But always, as Rossetti’s Lady Lilith painting suggests, the grand woman achieved her transcendent vitality partly through her magic hair, which was invested with independent energy » (Gitter, 1984, 936). 30. « Ye are fathers!—look at her streaming eyes, at her locked hands, at her pale quivering mouth, at her dishevelled hair—can you wonder now at anything she says to save her boy [...]? » (RD 85, je souligne) 31. « the loose hair trembled upon his head; and his mouth was agitated » (1BJ 59-60). 32. Les cheveux siffleront par trois fois dans le roman : « hair whistling » (2BJ 312), « whistling hair » (3BJ 168), « his white hair whistling » (3BJ 421). 33. « shaking her abundant hair loose » (RD 196).

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34. Burton, 1857, 466. Shakespeare utilise le même procédé : Portia, vertueuse mais ingénieuse, a des cheveux qui sont « A golden mesh t’entrap the hearts of men / Faster than gnats in cobwebs » (MV, 3.2, 122-23). Citons également l’hommage d’Alexander Pope à la chevelure de Belinda : « This Nymph, to the destruction of mankind, / Nourish’d two Locks, which graceful hung behind / In equal curls, and well conspir’d to deck / With shining ringlets the smooth iv’ry neck: / Love in these labyrinths his slaves detains, / And mighty hearts are held in slender chains. / With hairy Sprindges we the birds betray, / Slight lines of hair surprize the finny prey, / Fair tresses man’s imperial race insnare, / And beauty draws us with a single hair » (Pope, 1990, 8, ch. 2, v. 19-28). 35. Neal mentionnera en 1870 Michael Faraday (aux côtés de Humphry Davy), découvreur de l’induction électromagnétique et des lois de l’électrolyse (Neal, 1870, 142). Connaissait-il l’invention de Faraday, datant de 1821, en rédigeant Brother Jonathan en 1824 ? Ce dispositif montre comment un courant électrique agit sur un pôle magnétique isolé et réciproquement. Cette interaction, fournissant le principe du nouveau moteur, se traduit par la rotation continue d’un fil métallique électrifié plongé dans le mercure – le cheveu métallique de l’une des citations à suivre –, autour d’un aimant, le tout provoquant un champ électrique circulaire autour du fil (Weber et Perkins, 1992, 34-35). Pour appuyer mon propos, il convient aussi de rappeler que Neal, intarissable sur l’apport scientifique de Benjamin Franklin, connaît son histoire américaine de l’électricité : en 1825, dans la série « American Writers », il s’emploie à disqualifier ceux qui auraient pu lui disputer la paternité de ses découvertes, notamment l’abbé Nollet qui avait « rêvé » la similitude entre la foudre et l’électricité, M. Du Faye pour la découverte des polarités, William Watson pour la résolution du problème posé par la bouteille de Leyde, ou encore l’abbé Bertholon pour la découverte de la foudre ascendante (Neal, 1825b, 51-52). 36. « The steam and vapour of his blood were condensed—the mercury, precipitated » (2BJ 189). 37. Cette héroïne, Catherine-Elizabeth, est en outre construite sur le même modèle qu’Edith Cummin : elle tient tête aux étrangers et produit la même impression d’un être éthéré et féerique (Neal, 1823a, 46-47). 38. Gitter, 1984, 941-942, illustrées par Poe dans le poème « For Annie » (« Drowned in a bath / Of the tresses of Annie » [Thompson, 2004, 73]) et par Baudelaire (« La chevelure », Les Fleurs du mal, [Baudelaire, 1975, 26-27]). 39. Leach, 1958, 154. Dans la tradition psychanalytique, la luxuriance de la chevelure est la marque d’une sexualité vigoureuse, et même de comportements dissolus (Hallpike, 1969, 259-260). 40. Le contre-exemple de Brother Jonathan est Jonathan Peters : les cheveux courts et clairsemés, il a voyagé en Europe ; il s’est compromis ; longtemps patriote, il finit loyaliste. 41. Même la main donnée à Jonathan Peters par Edith sous la contrainte fait l’objet d’une longue discussion (1BJ 39-47) ; Edith menace de blesser Winslow s’il persiste à tenter de l’embrasser (1BJ 179-185), et l’aventure de Walter avec une prostituée le plonge dans la dépression... Les acteurs majeurs des romans sont veufs (Matthew Paris, George Burroughs, Abraham Harwood, Jonathan Peters) ou vont le devenir (Bald Eagle) ; quant aux femmes, elles sont seules (les sœurs Dyer, Sarah Good, Martha Cory, Edith Cummin, Mrs P., Emily). Jamais de couples mariés. Les nouveau- nés de Brother Jonathan conçus pendant le roman (l’enfant de Bald Eagle et Lucie Armstrong, celui de Walter et Emily) ne survivent pas. Pour l’heure, à peine pubère, l’Américain semble incapable de procréer. 42. Les cheveux des personnages, nous avons eu l’occasion de le remarquer, sont souvent défaits, voire emmêlés, ce qui pour le psychanalyste Charles Berg traduit une castration symbolique dans laquelle le désir, bien que présent, est ignoré et réprimé par l’inconscient (Leach, 1958, 149). 43. Dans « American Writers » Neal compare un certain Yankee – bien réel celui-là, dénommé Evans – à une comète qui aurait dévié du plan de l’écliptique : « Evans was an eccentric, bold, queer, adventurous fellow—a little mad undoubtedly—as all men of genius—all extraordinary

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men—and all who are unlike the majority of mankind, always are. Every aberration from the common road is eccentricity; and what is eccentricity but madness?—as our friend Polonius would say. Every deviation from the plane of the ecliptic—wherein all the mob of stars, constellations, and signs, are eternally plodding, makes a comet of a fellow. » (Neal, 1824a, 568) Rappelons simplement que dans Brother Jonathan, Robert Evans est le véritable nom du Yankee Jonathan Peters... 44. « Comète ». ÉTYM. : « V. 1140; lat. cometa, grec komêtês, proprt “(astre) chevelu”, de komê “chevelure” » (Rey et Paul, 1985). « A Comet is denominated from it’s Coma or Bushy lock for the Stream hath some resemblance of a lock of hair. [...] A Comet is barbate, when the stream like a beard, goes before the body of the Comet. Caudate, when the stream like a tail follows the body of the Comet. Crinite when the stream goes right up into the Heavens and seems like a hairy-lock to be wound up around the Comet’s head. » (Danforth, 2006, 3 et 10)

RÉSUMÉS

Cet article explore l’obsession de l’écriture de John Neal (1793-1876) pour le cheveu, objet de toutes les convoitises. La vibrante chevelure nealienne, zone neutre, lieu de tous les possibles, constitue un point de départ dans la constitution de l’Américain androgyne que l’auteur s’emploie à circonscrire. Offrant une perspective décalée sur la « déclaration d’indépendance dans la grande république des lettres » que Neal appelle de ses vœux dans la préface de Rachel Dyer (1828), l’étude des têtes chevelues nous plonge au cœur de cette écriture-frontière ébouriffante, américaine et méconnue.

This paper explores the quasi-obsessional use John Neal (1793-1876) makes of hair: the vibrating nealian hair is a neutral ground, a ground where the alchemy shaping Neal’s androgynous American is at work. This study offers a new perspective on the “Declaration of Independence, in the great Republic of Letters” proclaimed in the preface of Rachel Dyer (1828): following Neal’s wavy-haired protagonists, we come closer to the heart of his “Frontier-writing,” American, though underrated.

INDEX

Keywords : John Neal, hair, frontier, United States, American literature, nineteenth century, 1776, 1692, Yankee, Brother Jonathan, Rachel Dyer, revolution, independence, nature, Indian, indefiniteness, clothes, language, sexuality, androgyny. Mots-clés : John Neal, cheveux, frontière, États-Unis, littérature américaine, xixe siècle, 1776, 1692, Yankee, Brother Jonathan, Rachel Dyer, révolution, indépendance, nature, Indien, indéfinitude, vêtements, langage, sexualité, androgynie. Thèmes : Hors-thème

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AUTEUR

SÉBASTIEN LIAGRE CECILLE-Lille 3

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Tracer l’animal dans les nouvelles de Rick Bass

Claire Cazajous-Augé

La dimension élusive de l’animal

1 Dans The Book of Yaak, Rick Bass présente sa démarche artistique et la compare aux comportements du loup et de l’ours : Sometimes I think that art is like a wolf, traveling great distances around the edges of its wide territory, and chasing and hunting down objects of its desire: a deer in the deep snow. Traveling laterally, across the land, like thunder rolling. Other times I think that art is like a grizzly, burrowing deep into the earth, traveling vertically like lightning: mining the underground soil, the emotions of magic—the unseen, the unnamable. (39-40)

2 Dans cet extrait, Rick Bass révèle la manière dont son processus créateur est lié aux modes d’existence de certains animaux. Adoptant tantôt le rapport conquérant du loup qui traverse l’espace de manière horizontale à la poursuite de sa proie, tantôt l’approche verticale de l’ours qui consiste davantage à appréhender une réalité inaccessible à l’homme, l’auteur varie les modes d’approche et de saisie de l’objet de l’écriture. Or, si Bass montre le rôle structurant des animaux dans son projet poétique, ces derniers sont néanmoins étonnamment souvent absents ou évanescents dans ses récits de fiction et de non-fiction.

3 Ainsi, Rick Bass évoque souvent l’envol des oiseaux ou l’esquive des grands prédateurs. À la manière des oiseaux de « Real Town », qui s’échappent lorsque la narratrice s’approche, les animaux des nouvelles de Bass se montrent moins qu’ils ne se dérobent : « I keep walking, scaring up more birds: killdeer, snipe, and plover. They fly away fast and do not come back » (The Hermit’s Story, 134). La représentation animalière, limitée à la nomination des oiseaux et à la brève description de leurs mouvements, reproduit la dimension furtive de leur rencontre. En effet, comme l’écrit Jean-Christophe Bailly dans Le Parti pris des animaux, l’un des principaux modes d’existence des animaux est celui de la fuite : « Vivre […] c’est pour chaque animal traverser le visible en s’y

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cachant » (26). Afin de survivre, les animaux n’ont d’autre choix que de se soustraire au regard de leurs prédateurs. Dans ses nouvelles1, Bass recourt aussi à des traces scripturales (fragments descriptifs, ellipses, anamorphoses, métonymies) et à des traces animalières (empreintes, odeurs, touffes de poils) afin de manifester la dimension fugace des animaux. Plutôt que de procéder à des descriptions détaillées, il entreprend de tracer l’animal2. Or, les traces descriptives ne visent pas uniquement à révéler le caractère furtif des apparitions animalières. En ce qu’elles incarnent à la fois la présence et l’absence, la fixité et l’évanescence, les traces amènent l’auteur à s’interroger sur les modes de représentation du non-humain3. Loin de seulement montrer qu’une part du non-humain se dérobe à la compréhension et au désir de maîtrise de l’homme sur le monde, elles donnent lieu à un questionnement sur les modes de nomination et de représentation de l’animal. Dans les nouvelles de Bass, l’interrogation qui naît de l’impossibilité de procéder à des descriptions animalières exhaustives entrave moins le déroulement du récit qu’elle ne révèle le projet scriptural et éthique de l’auteur.

4 Afin de montrer comment les traces scripturales et animalières permettent de mettre au jour une nouvelle relation des hommes à l’espace sauvage, cet essai s’appuiera sur l’étude de descriptions d’animaux qui cherchent à se soustraire au regard de l’homme. Les nouvelles de Rick Bass donnent accès à la dimension furtive de l’animal et mettent en évidence la nécessité de respecter cette façon d’habiter transitoirement le monde. Je tenterai ainsi de montrer comment les descriptions animalières ne sont pas envisagées comme un mode d’appropriation4 mais plutôt comme l’occasion de reconnaître l’existence de modes de cohabitation entre les hommes et les animaux. Dans le contexte de la traque – motif qui s’apparente habituellement à une relation de domination du chasseur sur sa proie – l’évocation de traces animalières donne paradoxalement lieu à un mode d’approche respectueux de l’animal. Les récits qui naissent de la découverte de traces animalières créent une relation de réciprocité entre l’humain et le non- humain, mais aussi au sein de la communauté des chasseurs. Ce constat m’amènera à envisager la manière dont la découverte de restes du corps animal inaugure une réflexion sur la mise en chemin scripturale. Les traces laissées par les animaux revêtent une dimension métatextuelle et annoncent un nouveau mode d’écriture, susceptible d’amener l’homme à penser sa propre manière d’être au monde. Dans les nouvelles de Bass, le « style animal »5 (Macé, 2001, 97) que révèle la présence de traces permet non seulement à l’homme de penser sa position face au monde non-humain mais aussi de réinventer un lien communautaire.

Touches descriptives

5 Dans ses nouvelles, Rick Bass recourt principalement à des fragments descriptifs dont la fonction paraît au premier abord se limiter à inscrire le récit dans une région ou un décor particuliers. À la fin de la nouvelle « Wild Horses », par exemple, le récit s’interrompt brièvement pour s’attarder sur un vol de hérons garde-bœufs : « Out in the field, a few cattle egrets fluttered and hopped behind the horse and a boy. […] The egrets hopped and danced, following at a slight distance, but neither the boy nor the horse seemed to notice » (The Watch, 169). À première vue, la description semble n’avoir d’autre utilité que celle d’évoquer l’environnement rural des personnages. L’indifférence du jeune garçon face aux hérons qui l’entourent et l’isolement de ce

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passage descriptif en fin de nouvelle permettent de figurer une séparation entre les milieux humains et animaliers mais aussi entre le récit et la description. Hormis la proposition adverbiale « out there », qui rappelle la présence d’un focalisateur interne, la description prend le parti de l’objectivité. Selon Anne Simon, le recours à une neutralité quasi-scientifique dans la description animalière est un procédé que certains écrivains utilisent afin de « décharger [l’animal] du poids de la culture et d’affects – légendes, cultures, amours, haines – que l’humain a développés » et ainsi de « restaurer la différence du monde animal » (Simon, 2012, 110). L’adoption d’une apparente objectivité scientifique dans la description animalière se présente selon elle comme un moyen permettant de souligner les caractéristiques propres aux animaux sans ériger le monde des hommes en cadre de référence. À travers l’utilisation de modes stylistiques et discursifs visant à suggérer le souhait du narrateur d’intervenir le moins possible dans le récit, l’écriture de Bass parvient à restituer une existence propre à l’animal sur laquelle l’homme semble n’avoir aucune influence.

6 Dans la nouvelle « Pagans », le cadavre d’une aigrette, décrit en focalisation interne à travers le regard de personnages étudiants en biologie, est soumis à une véritable dissection narrative et la description de l’oiseau est assimilée à une planche anatomique. Or, il s’agit moins ici de figer le corps de l’animal à la manière du professeur de biologie, Miss Countée, qui conserve des créatures des marais dans des bocaux en verre, que de rendre compte de la transformation du cadavre : The egret fell to pieces slowly. Sun-baked, rained-upon, wind-ruffled, ant-eaten, it deflated as if only now was its life leaving it; and then it disintegrated further until soon there were only piles of sun-bleached feathers lying in the cracks and crevices of the junk-slag island below, and feathers loose, too, within the ghost frame of its own skeleton, still up there at the top of the machines. As the egret decomposed, so too was revealed the quarry within—the last meal upon which it had gorged—and they could see within the bone basket of its rib cage all the tiny fish skeletons, with their piles of scale glitter lying around like bright sand. (The Lives of Rocks, 14)

7 Le corps de l’oiseau s’ouvre et se décompose sous les yeux des étudiants, mettant au jour une autre forme de vie au cœur même du cadavre. Par l’entremise d’adjectifs composés, d’adverbes et de subordonnées de concomitance, l’écriture révèle qu’elle s’inspire du processus de transfiguration du corps de l’aigrette. En d’autres termes, la vivacité du monde animal engage l’écriture à se transformer à son tour. En donnant à voir le processus de décomposition de l’oiseau, la description se fait narration. On assiste alors au glissement d’un mode descriptif à un autre, d’une apparente stase objective à une animation du récit.

8 En plus de leur dimension fragmentaire, les descriptions animalières de Bass adoptent un mode répétitif, influençant à la fois l’écriture et la vie des personnages. Les rythmes animaliers – hibernation, migration, parade nuptiale – jouent souvent le rôle de marqueurs de temps et instaurent un nouveau cadre de référence dans le récit : « It was the time when bears came out of hibernation » (In the Loyal Mountains, 43). Recréée sur la page par des répétitions discursives et stylistiques, la cyclicité des mouvements animaliers prend une valeur de repère pour les personnages. L’évocation des rituels animaliers met aussi en échec la linéarité du temps humain et soustrait les hommes à la certitude de leur mortalité. En ce sens, il n’est pas surprenant que les descriptions de rituels animaliers soient particulièrement présentes dans les nouvelles où les personnages traversent des crises personnelles – maladie, rupture amoureuse. Face aux

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défaillances physiques ou psychiques de l’être, et notamment face à l’approche de la mort, la cyclicité des mouvements animaliers se révèle rassurante. Dans « Swans », par exemple, les annonces de la maladie et de la mort de Bill sont encadrées par l’évocation de la manière dont les cygnes dessinent des cercles à la surface du lac, près de sa maison. Alors qu’Amy et le narrateur, lui-même ami de Bill, viennent de trouver le corps sans vie du bûcheron dans les bois, le narrateur tourne son attention vers l’étang où se trouvent les cygnes, dans l’espoir que ces derniers se mettent à chanter afin d’exprimer sa douleur et sa perte. Or, le narrateur note l’indifférence des oiseaux face à son deuil : « I rolled my window down, thinking that as we passed some of them would cry out at Billy’s death. But then I remembered it was only for their own death that they sang » (The Hermit’s Story, 40). Le contact quotidien avec les animaux que garantit la vie des personnages dans la vallée ne permet pas toujours de créer des relations d’empathie entre les mondes humain et non-humain. Cependant, plutôt que de s’attarder sur la mort de son ami et sur la séparation entre les mondes des hommes et des animaux, le narrateur choisit de s’intéresser au mode de survie des oiseaux qui consiste à tracer des cercles près des feux qu’Amy a allumés : « They watched us, silent as ever, as we passed, the swans graceful and perfect in the firelight » (40). Dans ce passage, tout se passe comme si l’allitération en -s et l’enchaînement régulier des propositions dessinaient des cercles à la surface de la page. Les mouvements des cygnes ne font pas qu’empêcher le lac de geler : ils préviennent l’enlisement du récit dans une évocation funèbre de la mort de Bill. Loin de créer un effet de stase, la répétition des descriptions animalières contribue à dynamiser le récit. Dans la nouvelle, l’évocation régulière des mouvements animaliers peut être lue comme une « relance » du « style » des cygnes (Macé, 2011, 101), qui montre un mode de vie reposant davantage sur la cyclicité que sur la linéarité, et, en cela, permet d’envisager la mort comme une continuation de la vie.

Sur la trace de l’animal

9 Parce que l’animal se dérobe au regard de l’homme, l’un des modes d’approche privilégiés est celui de la traque. Or, dans les nouvelles de Bass, la traque n’est pas envisagée comme une relation de domination dont l’issue doit nécessairement être la mise à mort de la proie par le chasseur. Les parties de chasse donnent plutôt lieu à un jeu d’adaptation réciproque entre l’homme et l’animal. Les personnages qui sont sur la piste d’un animal doivent déchiffrer les traces qui se présentent comme des indices menant l’homme à l’animal. Les personnages-chasseurs des textes de Bass recourent en effet au « paradigme indiciaire » (Ginzburg) et effectuent une lecture métonymique pour retrouver l’animal : Au cours de poursuites innombrables [le chasseur] a appris à reconstruire les formes et les mouvements de proies invisibles à partir des empreintes inscrites dans la boue, des branches cassées, des boulettes de déjection, des touffes de poils, des plumes enchevêtrées et des odeurs stagnantes. Il a appris à sentir, enregistrer, interpréter et classifier des traces infinitésimales comme des filets de bave. Il a appris à accomplir des opérations mentales complexes avec une rapidité foudroyante, dans l’épaisseur d'un fourré ou dans une clairière pleine d’embûches. (Ginzburg, 233)

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10 Le chasseur peut répondre à l’énigme « quelqu’un est passé par là », comme c’est le cas dans la nouvelle « Antlers » dans laquelle le narrateur et l’un de ses amis sont en quête d’un cerf : After two hours we got up and began to follow the blood trail. There wasn’t much of it at first, just a drop or two in the dry leaves, already turning brown and cracking, drops that I would never have seen had Randy not pointed them out. A quarter of a mile down the hill we began to see more of it, a widening stream of blood, until it seemed that surely all of the bull’s blood had drained out. We passed two places where the bull had lain down beneath a tree to die, but had gotten up and moved on. We found him by the creek a half mile away, down in the shadows, his huge antlers rising into a patch of sun and gleaming. (In the Loyal Mountains, 72)

11 Le déchiffrement des traces donne lieu à une description anamorphique de l’animal absent. À partir d’indices laissés par l’animal, les deux hommes suivent la trace de leur proie et parviennent à la retrouver. Or, en permettant au chasseur de reconstituer le parcours d’un animal, la traque renvoie à l’acte d’écriture6. L’auteur recrée la dimension discontinue de la traque et du récit qu’elle engendre en recourant à de nombreuses propositions incises et circonstancielles qui altèrent le cours de la syntaxe. Ainsi, le récit performatif qui naît de la présence de traces se construit au fur et à mesure que les personnages découvrent et analysent les traces. En s’évertuant à combler les blancs narratifs entre chaque découverte, l’auteur donne à voir le procédé d’élaboration du récit. En d’autres termes, les courtes pauses descriptives consacrées aux traces animalières mettent au jour un faisceau d’indices qui visent à poursuivre la traque, et donc la constitution du récit. Un renversement s’opère ; au lieu de s’élaborer à partir de la description, le récit mène à la description, comme la quête conduit à la rencontre avec l’animal. Dans les nouvelles mettant en scène des parties de chasse, la description n’est pas seulement envisagée comme un outil ornemental ou explicatif, elle est ce vers quoi tend le récit. Si la traque échoue, il ne pourra pas y avoir de description complète de l’animal.

12 Si la chasse, dans la nouvelle intitulée « Antlers », montre le succès de la méthode inductive en s’achevant par la mort de l’animal, Rick Bass fait souvent le récit de chasses dans lesquelles les personnages ne parviennent pas à capturer leur proie ou renoncent à la tuer. Dans les textes de fiction, l’auteur multiplie les exemples dans lesquels ses personnages perdent la trace de l’animal qu’ils poursuivent et font l’expérience d’une perte de repères, en particulier suite à l’effacement des indices. Ainsi, dans « The Lives of Rocks », les empreintes d’un autre cerf, que Jyl poursuit, disparaissent brutalement : « [the tracks] were already filled in with snow, and it was as if the thing had never existed » (The Lives of Rocks, 82). La quête et le récit de la quête s’achèvent dès lors que les traces sont recouvertes par la neige et qu’il n’y a plus rien à décrire. Alors qu’il dépeint précisément le parcours qui a mené Jyl jusqu’aux traces de sa proie, le narrateur omet de faire le récit de son retour et le paragraphe suivant présente Jyl chez elle. L’écriture se conforme à la disparition des traces du cerf sur la neige : celle-ci est signifiée par une ellipse discursive et transparaît graphiquement sur la page sous la forme d’un blanc. Partant, le motif de l’effacement des traces ne marque pas l’échec de l’auteur à écrire l’animal mais se présente au contraire comme un outil dans l’élaboration de son projet scriptural et éthique. On retrouve dans d’autres nouvelles cette stratégie consistant à attirer l’attention sur une possible adéquation7 entre moyens littéraires et mouvements animaliers, quitte à mettre en péril le déroulement du récit, lors de parties de chasse ou de moments d’observation du monde

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animal8. Dans les nouvelles de Bass, le désir de conquête laisse place à ce que Lawrence Buell nomme une expérience de dessaisissement (« relinquishment ») dans laquelle le sujet narrateur semble lui-même s’effacer. Selon Buell, un auteur qui choisit de placer le monde non-humain au centre de son texte doit sacrifier le rôle du narrateur et le laisser dans les marges du récit : « Insofar as such work takes as its starting point the decision to focus on the nonhuman, it tends to deny itself some of the most basic aesthetic pleasures of homocentricism: plot, characterization, lyric pathos, dialogue, intersocial events, and so on » (Buell, 168). Affranchi du point de vue dominant de l’homme – personnage, narrateur –, le texte peut désormais prendre en compte d’autres perspectives sur le monde, y compris celles des animaux. Une telle stratégie a pour effet de renouveler la vision de l’homme sur le monde et d’enrichir le texte en l’ouvrant sur de nouveaux points de vue.

13 En choisissant de faire le récit de traques qui s’interrompent suite à la disparition des traces animalières, l’auteur entreprend de signifier que la chasse ne vise pas uniquement à atteindre une proie mais à comprendre la manière dont l’animal évolue dans son territoire. Le contexte de la traque permet non seulement de voir l’animal dans son mouvement mais aussi de saisir une ouverture vers le paysage dans lequel il vit, et sa façon d’habiter le monde. À travers les traques effectuées par deux personnages féminins, Martha dans « Two Deer » et Jyl dans « Her First Elk » et « The Lives of Rocks », Bass révèle que la fiction qui naît des traces permet de révéler des récits de vie, qu’il s’agisse du parcours de l’animal ou de l’existence des chasseurs qui mènent la traque. Lorsque Martha, jeune biologiste, trouve les os d’un cerf à la surface d’un étang gelé, elle tente de recréer le déroulement d’une chasse à laquelle elle n’a pas assisté, celle des loups : “That’s how they do it,” Martha explained. “The wolves try to get the deer out onto the ice where the deer will slip and go down, or will even punch a leg through and get stuck. “Then the wolves move in.” She made a whistling sound, drew her finger across her throat. “And then it’s over.” (The Hermit’s Story, 178)

14 Le récit que Martha met au jour conjugue détails réalistes et élaboration d’un récit fictionnel. La mise en récit est d’autant plus probante que la biologiste engage son corps. En effet, Martha accompagne son raisonnement de gestes et de sifflements mimant la mise à mort du cerf. Son récit est ensuite confirmé par une analyse plus approfondie des carcasses de cerfs et des empreintes laissées par les loups. Enfin, l’utilisation du présent simple et du modal « will » suggère que Martha possède les connaissances éthologiques nécessaires à sa reconstruction du récit de la mort du cerf.

15 Tout comme Martha, Jyl crée un récit qui retrace le parcours d’un animal et qui témoigne d’une relation de réciprocité entre l’homme qui effectue la traque et sa proie. Dans « Her First Elk », Jyl, lors de sa première chasse, met en jeu des capacités cognitives semblables à celles de l’animal. Elle suit la piste d’un wapiti et anticipe les mouvements de sa proie – « She was already thinking ahead » (The Lives of Rocks, 31) – afin de la capturer. Selon Carlo Ginzburg, les opérations mentales auxquelles le chasseur a recours sont la manifestation d’une « intuition basse » qui « lie étroitement l’animal homme aux autres espèces animales » (Ginzburg, 294). Ainsi, Jyl a l’occasion d’entrevoir et de pratiquer une autre façon d’habiter et de traverser un territoire partagé avec l’animal. Cela implique néanmoins que la jeune chasseresse abandonne en retour un autre type de perception. Au début de la traque, le regard de Jyl se concentre sur sa proie – « there was nothing in her mind but elk » (28) – et adopte une vision

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tunnellaire et obsessionnelle qui l’amène à négliger le paysage qui l’entoure : « she did not allow herself to be distracted by the magnificent crown of antlers atop his head » (29). Or, une fois la traque achevée, Jyl peut prêter attention au paysage qui l’entoure : « Mountains in her heart now, and antlers, and mountain lions and sunrises and huge forests of pine and spruce and tamarack, and elk, all uncontrollable. […] The hunt showing her that » (45). En dépit de l’isolement du dernier terme de l’énumération (« elk »), qui distingue l’animal des autres éléments, l’effet de liste concourt à mêler les différents composants du monde animal, végétal et minéral sans relation hiérarchique. La polysyndète confère un rythme régulier à la phrase afin de traduire les pulsations du corps paysager. L’auteur s’emploie ainsi à montrer que loin de signifier la distance entre le chasseur et sa proie, la traque relie le monde des hommes à celui des animaux et plus généralement au monde non-humain. Cependant, au-delà de son entreprise de recréation d’une liaison entre l’homme et le monde non-humain, le premier récit de chasse de Jyl inscrit ce personnage dans une lignée de chasseurs. Le savoir cynégétique que Jyl détient lui a été transmis par son père et son souvenir est évoqué tout au long de la nouvelle. La rencontre avec Ralph et Bruce, deux frères chasseurs qui lui enseignent comment dépecer sa proie, permet à la jeune femme de gagner en expérience. Il apparaît alors que la traque que Jyl effectue dans cette première nouvelle n’a pas uniquement une visée téléologique. La chasse apparaît ici comme un rite de passage vers l’âge adulte au cours duquel la mise à mort de l’animal importe moins que l’apprentissage d’un savoir cynégétique inscrivant Jyl dans une communauté de chasseurs : « [she] understood in that moment that she, too, was a hunter, might always have been » (39).

16 En plus de retracer le récit de vies animales et de révéler les liens entre les hommes, la traque permet de relier les différentes étapes de la vie du chasseur. Jyl réapparaît dans la nouvelle « The Lives of Rocks » qui appartient au même recueil que « Her First Elk ». Il ne s’agit pas cette fois du le récit de la première traque que Jyl effectue sans son père ; dans « The Lives of Rocks », Jyl, désormais plus âgée et atteinte d’un cancer, s’apprête à vivre sa dernière chasse. À travers ces deux textes, l’auteur dresse un portrait fragmenté du parcours de la chasseresse. De la même manière que Jyl retrouve la piste de ses proies à partir de fragments, le lecteur doit composer avec les indices laissés par l’auteur afin de reconstituer le parcours du personnage qui, en l’espace de deux nouvelles, est passée du statut de jeune fille inexpérimentée à celui de chasseresse accomplie. Les échos à la première traque de Jyl – « She had seen the giant elk once » (The Lives of Rocks, 115) –, les allusions à son père et les similitudes dans le déroulement des deux chasses – après avoir perdu sa proie de vue, Jyl la retrouve, immobile, au cœur de la forêt – jouent dans le récit le même rôle que celui des empreintes, des odeurs ou des touffes de poils laissées par les animaux. Tout comme le personnage de Jyl qui doit reconstruire le parcours de l’animal, le lecteur doit recréer l’histoire de l’héroïne en s’appuyant sur des signes9. La composition du recueil The Lives of Rocks concourt aussi à créer une lignée narrative qui donne les jalons d’une existence, depuis la jeunesse jusqu’à l’approche de la mort.

Le cheminement de l’écriture

17 Dans les nouvelles de Bass, les traces ne remplissent pas uniquement un rôle de balises dans la progression du récit ; elles mènent aussi le texte de fiction vers des issues

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inattendues. Dans un entretien, l’auteur fait une analogie entre la marche, activité qu’il pratique quotidiennement, et l’écriture : “The most important thing in fiction for me, what makes fiction gratifying and challenging,” Bass says, “is not knowing what the end is going to be, not knowing where it’s going. It is like the glory of setting off early in the morning on a long summer day, maybe with a map, maybe without a map, but not having ever been in the territory into which you’re going.” (Washburn, 56)

18 De même que les randonnées entraînent l’auteur vers des espaces inexplorés, de même sa fiction renonce aux schémas narratifs fixes. Comme la marche, l’écriture de fiction s’ajuste aux variations du monde naturel. Dans son essai « Walking », Thoreau rappelle que le terme « sauntering » évoque à la fois la marche du pèlerin et les errances du marcheur « sans terre ». L’ermite de Walden envisage la marche comme une forme de vagabondage non seulement physique mais aussi intellectuel. Il s’agit moins d’errer sans but que de s’aventurer hors des sentiers battus dans l’espoir d’accéder à une vérité10. Or, le cheminement de la fiction bassienne ne vise pas à atteindre une terre sainte, mais entraîne une réflexion sur l’acte d’écriture qui permet d’accéder à un lieu commun aux hommes et aux animaux. Dans les nouvelles de Bass, le questionnement sur les modes de nomination du non-humain ne témoigne pas de l’échec du langage à représenter la dimension furtive des animaux et ainsi de l’impossibilité d’établir une relation entre les mondes humains et non-humains. En exposant le travail de son écriture pour tenter de s’ajuster aux mouvements des animaux, l’auteur propose dans sa fiction des exemples de cohabitation respectueuse entre les hommes et les animaux.

19 Selon qu’il écrit un texte de non-fiction ou de fiction, Rick Bass recourt à deux stratégies différentes pour représenter la fugacité de l’apparitions animale. D’une part, l’auteur choisit de ne pas se livrer à la description pourtant annoncée. D’autre part, il lui arrive de multiplier les définitions d’un même animal. Ces deux procédés en apparence contradictoires se retrouvent dans deux textes aux titres trompeurs. Dans The Book of Yaak tout d’abord, alors qu’il intitule un chapitre « Four Coyotes », Rick Bass prévient le lecteur qu’il ne parlera que de trois coyotes : « I will not speak the name of this mountain anymore, nor will I tell you about the fourth coyote in the story » (29). Le titre de ce chapitre, qui a la double valeur d’une prétérition et d’une dédicace – Bass joue sur l’homonymie entre « four » et « for » –, manifeste ainsi un refus de la part de l’auteur de procéder à une représentation exhaustive du monde non-humain. En annonçant qu’il ne décrira pas ce quatrième coyote et en recourant à une description in absentia, Bass inscrit en creux dans son texte une forme d’hommage à tous les animaux menacés. Il s’agit de rendre les autres animaux présents au lieu même de l’absence du coyote. En d’autres termes, le quatrième coyote agit comme une métonymie pour toutes les espèces en danger vivant dans la vallée du Yaak.

20 Au contraire, dans « Two Deer », l’auteur multiplie les traces scripturales et animalières. Non seulement l’auteur décrit ses rencontres avec quatre cerfs et non deux, comme l’indique le titre, mais il va jusqu’à proposer plusieurs récits enchâssés d’une même rencontre. Le premier récit, par exemple, consacré à la traque du troisième cerf, est celui donné par le chasseur de trophées qui a blessé et capturé un cerf avant de l’attacher sur le toit de sa voiture. Dans l’évocation de sa chasse, la présence d’adverbes d’emphase (« miraculously », « instantly ») indique le ton conquérant et triomphant du personnage. Le recours au discours indirect libre peut se lire comme une prise de distance de la part du narrateur face à une conception de la chasse dans laquelle l’homme domine nécessairement sa proie. Ce personnage

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conquérant est privé de voix propre. Le narrateur-personnage, chasseur lui aussi, prend alors le récit en charge pour faire émerger un second récit, celui d’une chasse fictionnelle. Il ne se satisfait pas du premier récit et de son issue – le cerf est parvenu à échapper au premier chasseur pour être finalement, et non sans ironie, à nouveau capturé par un autre chasseur de trophées – et va jusqu’à proposer le récit hypothétique de la chasse qu’il aurait lui-même effectuée et qui aurait été plus respectueuse de l’animal : « If it had been my deer, I wouldn’t have pushed it so hard, would have let it go off and lie down to rest and die in peace, and then I would have tracked it, but it wasn’t my deer » (The Hermit’s Story, 172). Les nombreux récits entrecroisés de « Two Deer » évoquent l’idée du paradigme fictionnel développée par Alexis Tadié : « Le texte […] construit son objet à partir de l’échec du raisonnement des personnages sur ces traces. Et le pouvoir de la fiction tiendrait précisément à cette ouverture des possibles à partir du paradigme indiciaire » (Tadié, 2007, 234). Ce qui importe, ce n’est pas ce qui s’est vraiment passé mais ce qui aurait pu ou dû se passer. La fiction se présente ainsi l’occasion d’offrir à l’animal un « territoire propre » (Grandjeat, 2011, 117), un espace dans lequel l’animal peut échapper au désir de conquête et de domination de l’homme.

21 L’une des caractéristiques des récits animaliers que font les narrateurs et les personnages de Bass est qu’ils ne se présentent pas uniquement comme un moyen de renouveler les relations entre les hommes et les animaux. L’auteur inaugure une forme de récit fictionnel susceptible d’illustrer, dans sa structure et dans sa substance même, la nécessité de créer non seulement des relations plus respectueuses avec le monde non-humain mais aussi des liens de solidarité entre les hommes. Dans « Two Deer » par exemple, lorsque les habitants de la petite ville participent à la traque du cerf, on assiste au passage d’une chasse solitaire à celle de toute une communauté : « We all followed the hunter at a trot—the crowd of us, like a posse: men, women, and children. It was as if the deer belonged to the whole community. » (The Hermit’s Story, 172) Dans L’Ouvert, de l’homme à l’animal, Giorgio Agamben rappelle que la philosophie a défini l’humanité en excluant sa part d’animalité11. Ainsi, « l’homme est l’animal qui doit se reconnaître humain pour l’être » (Agamben, 44). Or, dans les nouvelles de Bass, la communauté des hommes se construit non pas en excluant les animaux mais en leur donnant un rôle essentiel dans la création de récits de fiction. De nombreuses nouvelles ont pour décor des vallées dans lesquelles vivent des personnages souvent isolés, parfois solitaires, mais qui se réunissent lors de fêtes telles que Halloween ou Thanksgiving autour de récits de leurs rencontres avec des animaux. C’est notamment le cas pour quatre amis dans la nouvelle intitulée « The Hermit’s Story ». Ann raconte à ses invités l’aventure qui l’a menée, vingt ans auparavant, sous la surface d’un lac gelé avec Gray Owl et les chiens de ce dernier. Au cours de cette expédition, Ann est parvenue à entrevoir la manière dont les chiens perçoivent le monde. Or, c’est précisément parce qu’Ann ne veut pas tout dire que les liens avec son auditoire sont renforcés. En effet, son refus de dévoiler certains détails de son expérience conduit le narrateur à émettre des hypothèses sur les modalités de perception du monde des animaux, afin d’achever le récit d’Ann : Ann would never discuss such a thing, but I suspect that it, that one day and night, helped give her a model for what things were like for the dogs when they were hunting and when they went on point: how the world must have appeared to them when they were in that trance, that blue zone, where the odors of things wrote their images across the dogs’ hot brainpans. A zone where sight, and the

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appearance of things—surfaces—disappeared, and where instead their essence—the heat molecules of scent—was revealed, illuminated, circumscribed, possessed (17).

22 De même qu’Ann tente de se plonger dans les pensées attribuées aux chiens, de même le narrateur essaie de sonder les silences d’Ann. La mise en récit de l’aventure d’Ann devient l’occasion de faire s’entrecroiser différentes perspectives qui révèlent les liens entre les hommes et les animaux mais également les relations entre les membres de l’auditoire d’Ann et de tous les habitants de la vallée12. Semblables aux récits animaliers que font les personnages dans les nouvelles, l’écriture de fiction se présente comme un lieu commun, un espace qui permet de créer un lien communautaire entre les hommes.

23 Dans son étude de la trace, Emmanuel Lévinas affirme que cette dernière « dérange l’ordre du monde » car, même si elle peut être déchiffrée, elle a été laissée sans intention de signifier « quelque chose » (200). Dans l’écriture, la trace est au contraire envisagée comme un signe qui révèle « quelque chose » de la poétique de l’auteur. Dans les nouvelles de Bass, l’apparition de traces animalières perturbe le cours de la description et du récit et figure aussi le projet éthique et scriptural de l’auteur. En recourant à des descriptions animalières qui semblent lacunaires, Bass révèle la dimension fugace de l’animal tout en montrant que le respect de ce mode de vie fondé sur l’esquive peut, en dernier recours, régénérer les relations entre l’humain et le non- humain mais aussi entre les hommes eux-mêmes.

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SIMON, Anne. « Chercher l’indice, écrire l’esquive : l’animal comme être de fuite, de Maurice Genevoix à Jean Rolin ». La Question animale. Dir. Catherine Coquio et al. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, « Interférences », 2011, 167-181.

---. « Renouvellements contemporains des rapports hommes-animaux dans le récit narratif de langue française ». Aux frontières de l’animal. Mises en scène et réflexivité. Dir. Annick Dubied et al. Genève : Droz, 2012, 103-117.

TADIÉ, Alexis, « De la trace au paradigme fictionnel ». L’Interprétation des indices : enquête sur le paradigme indiciaire avec Carlo Ginzburg. Éd. Denis Thouard. Lille : Presse Universitaires du Septentrion, 2007, 227-239.

THOREAU, Henry David. Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings. 1854. New York : Norton, 2008.

WASHBURN, Michael. « Imagination is Not a Straight Line : a Profile of Rick Bass », Poets & Writers, septembre/octobre 2013, 50-56.

NOTES

1. Cette étude, consacrée aux nouvelles de Rick Bass, ne fera pas mention des romans publiés par l’auteur, notamment Where the Sea Used to Be et All the Land to Hold Us, même si l’on y retrouve les mêmes stratégies descriptives du monde non-humain. 2. Dans son ouvrage Les Neurones de la lecture, Stanislas Dehaene rappelle que les premières peintures animalières, dans la grotte de Chauvet par exemple, consistaient davantage en des formes graphiques qu’en des représentations réalistes : "Très tôt donc, les premiers Homo sapiens ont découvert qu’ils pouvaient évoquer sur l’os, l’argile ou la paroi d’une grotte, l’image reconnaissable d’un objet ou d’un animal – et que le simple tracé du contour de la forme suffisait. […] Quelques traits de la main suffisent pour tracer un contour que l’œil reconnaît immédiatement comme un bison ou un cheval." (240-241). 3. Dans The Book of Yaak par exemple, Bass s’interroge sur la manière la plus respectueuse de représenter la vallée de la Yaak dans laquelle il vit. L’auteur hésite notamment entre le recours à la science ou à l’imagination pour interpeler ses lecteurs sur l’urgence qu’il y a à préserver sa vallée, et plus généralement les derniers espaces sauvages des États-Unis : « you have to decide whether to use numbers or images—whether the fight requires art or advocacy » (87) 4. Je m’appuie sur les travaux de Philippe Hamon dans lesquels le critique définit la description comme une « mise en cadastre du réel et de ses lexiques » (Hamon, 184). 5. Dans son article « Styles animaux », Macé propose d’envisager chaque animal comme un style particulier : "On pourrait en effet regarder chaque espèce animale comme une manière d’être, un élancement stylistique, et mettre ainsi en lumière quelque chose comme une stylistique du vivre, la conviction que l’être se découpe en styles. Si chaque espèce est un style, alors c’est, avec la leçon animale, toute l’attention aux « formes de la vie » qui se déploie et se

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rénove" (Macé, 97). Selon Marielle Macé, les écrivains peuvent observer et reproduire l’infinité de ces styles, la diversité des « phrasés » des animaux (Macé, 2011, 97). 6. Carlo Ginzburg émet l’hypothèse selon laquelle les chasseurs, grâce à leur capacité à lire et déchiffrer les traces animalières, auraient été les premiers à raconter des histoires. En analysant les empreintes de leur proie, les chasseurs donnent lieu à une « séquence narrative ». (Ginzburg, 242) 7. Dans son article « Réinventer la nature : vers une éco-poétique », Thomas Pughe s’applique à montrer comment l’écriture poétique permet de renouveler notre relation à la nature, notamment par le biais de procédés littéraires qui transcendent la séparation entre nature et culture. 8. C’est notamment le cas dans les nouvelles « Choteau » (The Watch) et « The Distance » (The Hermit’s Story). 9. Dans son article « Chercher l’indice, écrire l’esquive », Anne Simon développe l’analogie entre chasse et écriture. D’une part, le chasseur est envisagé comme un lecteur qui cherche à déchiffrer le livre déceptif de l’animal : « Tout se passe […] comme si le corps animal […] usait de figures rhétoriques (synecdoques, asyndètes, ellipses…) et rédigeait une phrase » (Simon, 2011, 174). D’autre part, le lecteur qui tente de comprendre un récit de chasse avec des termes parfois techniques qui lui sont étrangers « devient un chasseur virtuel, qui traque le sens en décryptant des signes » (Simon, 2011, 176). 10. « Walking » s’achève sur l’évocation d’un soleil couchant, image qui suggère qu’une expérience directe avec le monde non-humain peut mener à une meilleure compréhension du monde et de soi : "So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn" (Walking, 287). 11. Dans cet ouvrage, Giorgio Agamben appelle à arrêter ce qu’il nomme la « machine anthropologique », un système scientifique et philosophique grâce auquel l’homme s’est créé avec et contre l’animal. Le philosophe italien, s’il s’inscrit dans une tradition philosophique qui reconnaît l’animalité de l’homme, s’oppose à la séparation entre l’homme et l’animal telle que Heidegger l’a énoncée. Avec la machine anthropologique, l’humanité se définit en excluant son animalité. 12. Dans La Communauté désoeuvrée, Jean-Luc Nancy rappelle que la communauté s’organise autour du « partage et de la diffusion ou de l’imprégnation d’une identité dans une pluralité dont chaque membre, par là même, ne s’identifie que par la médiation supplémentaire de son identification au corps vivant de la communauté » (Nancy, 30).

RÉSUMÉS

Dans les nouvelles de Rick Bass, les descriptions animalières semblent le plus souvent fragmentaires. Plutôt que de viser une représentation exhaustive des animaux, l’auteur recourt à des bribes descriptives qui manifestent la fugacité du monde non-humain. Ces traces montrent ainsi que quelque chose résiste au désir d’appropriation intellectuelle et physique des animaux par les hommes. Lorsqu’un animal surgit dans le territoire comme dans le texte, il dérange l’ordre du récit. Or, loin de menacer le cours de la diégèse, ces apparitions animalières permettent à l’auteur de s’interroger sur les modes d’écriture du non-humain. À travers des

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descriptions d’animaux qui tentent de se dérober au regard de l’homme, Rick Bass met en œuvre un processus d’approche scriptural et physique qui permet non seulement de réinventer le mode descriptif mais aussi de renouveler les relations de l’homme au monde non-humain. Le questionnement suscité par les apparitions furtives d’animaux apparaît en définitive comme un mode de renouvellement des relations entre les hommes.

In Rick Bass’s short stories, the descriptions of animals often seem fragmentary. Rather than aiming at an exhaustive representation of animals, the author resorts to fragmentary descriptions that show the elusive dimension of the nonhuman world. These traces thus show that something resists the human attempt to intellectually and physically capture animals. When an animal appears in the wilderness or in the text, it disturbs the course of the narrative. However, far from threatening the course of the story, the appearances of animals allow the author to question his ways of writing about the nonhuman world. Through descriptions of animals that try to hide from man’s gaze, Rick Bass creates a scriptural and physical approach that not only allows the author to redefine the descriptive mode, but also renews the relations between man and the nonhuman world. Surprisingly enough, the elusive dimension of the animals ultimately contributes to reinvent the relationships between humans.

INDEX

Keywords : Rick Bass, animal, traces, short stories, description, nature writing, ecopoetics Mots-clés : Rick Bass, animal, traces, nouvelles, description, écriture de la nature, écopoétique Thèmes : Hors-thème

AUTEUR

CLAIRE CAZAJOUS-AUGÉ Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès

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Actualités de la recherche

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Conférence d’Emory Douglas, ancien ministre de la Culture des Black Panthers, peintre et illustrateur Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 16 octobre 2015

Alice Morin

1 Le 16 octobre 2015, le Centre de recherche sur l’Amérique du Nord (CRAN) (équipe CREW, EA 4399) de l’université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle a reçu Emory Douglas, ancien ministre de la Culture des Black Panthers, peintre et illustrateur, pour une conférence spéciale sur son travail et ses activités de militant. Cette intervention, organisée par Pierre Cras, doctorant du CREW, a porté à la fois sur les productions artistiques d’E. Douglas et sur ses activités militantes – approche profondément transdisciplinaire, (re)présentant l’histoire des États-Unis à l’aune de l’avènement d’une nouvelle culture graphique et permettant de croiser l’historiographie sociopolitique avec une approche relevant de la culture matérielle.

2 Après une brève introduction de Pierre Cras, qui prépare une thèse sur les représentations stéréotypées des Noirs dans les films d’animation sous la direction d’Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, le public a pu revoir ou se familiariser avec l’œuvre d’Emory Douglas pour les Black Panthers, à travers un court documentaire (8 minutes) produit en 2015 par la compagnie indépendante Dress Code, qui retrace son implication dans l’organisation noire et son invention, pour l’occasion, d’un langage graphique réellement singulier.

3 Le contexte du mouvement pour les droits civiques, depuis le début du combat jusqu’à la frustration croissante menant à sa radicalisation et à la création du Black Panther Party (BPP) en 1966, est ainsi bien rappelé. Le film insiste également sur la mise en place d’une presse noire d’abord underground puis assez populaire, mettant en lumière les enjeux de pouvoir économique et politique de l’époque, alors que, comme le rappelle Emory Douglas, « le champ de la publicité était très majoritairement blanc ». Ainsi, on apprend qu’Emory Douglas a rejoint le BPP rapidement après sa création, après déjà quelques années de militantisme l’ayant presque mené à l’incarcération, et

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suite à un passage par la California Youth Authority (institution de redressement dans laquelle il a participé à l’atelier d’imprimerie) et par le San Francisco City College, où il a étudié l’édition de presse. Il commence alors à créer des séries graphiques inspirées de son engagement dans le mouvement étudiant, il est repéré par Bobby Seale et Huey Newton, les créateurs du BPP, et rejoint leur parti émergent, en tant que membre de la communauté et non pas en tant qu’intellectuel : « The idea was to inform, to enlighten and to educate people in the community about the basic issues and to tell the story from our own perspective », déclare-t-il au sujet de l’hebdomadaire qu’il contribue à fonder en 1967 avec Eldridge Cleaver, sur une idée d’Huey Newton. Lancé dans un petit atelier, disposant de moyens très modestes, le journal, sobrement intitulé The Black Panther, atteint pourtant, à son plus fort, un tirage de 400 000 exemplaires. On retiendra finalement du film, composé principalement d’interviews d’Emory Douglas, les anecdotes sur la réalisation du journal – comment, par exemple, une contrainte financière (l’impossibilité d’acheter plus d’une couleur, souvent une couleur primaire, variant au fil des numéros, en plus du noir pour l’impression de la publication) se transforma en un signe distinctif de leur production pour la période.

4 Lors de la conférence proprement dite, Emory Douglas a présenté son travail d’illustrateur sur plusieurs décennies, qui commence avec son engagement auprès des Black Panthers. Il a ainsi évoqué les discussions menées avec les fondateurs du parti afin de faire connaître leurs combats dans des communautés noires, d’abord locales, dans lesquelles les populations avaient souvent un niveau d’instruction peu élevé. La place de l’image était donc primordiale, comme l’était l’invention de symboles forts, renvoyant par là à une politique de visibilité (voire de provocation visuelle) menée d’abord par les premiers militants pour les droits civiques aux États-Unis, puis par leurs héritiers plus radicaux – en réalité, par tous les mouvements contestataires des années soixante et au-delà. D’ailleurs, E. Douglas a tracé un parallèle entre ses recherches artistiques et le poing levé des athlètes Tommie Smith et John Carlos aux Jeux Olympiques de Mexico en 1968, en ce que les photographies de ce geste – concerté à l’avance pour mettre en avant leurs revendications d’égalité – ont eu une forte portée symbolique. Ainsi, Emory Douglas est revenu sur son travail d’élaboration de certaines figures devenues emblématiques du BPP, en particulier la panthère, ou le porc, qui représente ceux qui abusent de leur autorité. Comme il le note, ces images ont transcendé la communauté africaine-américaine et sont reprises par des Latino- Americains comme le groupe Los Siete de la Raza (leur « Latino brothers ») et par d’autre militants anti-impérialistes, y compris lors de la révolution cubaine. Il souligne également l’existence de « mots-symboles » comme freedom, très récurrent dans les discours, les manifestations et les objets culturels, comme dans la publication The Black Panther ou dans ses autres dessins.

5 Avant de revenir sur cette solidarité, qui a conduit à une internationalisation croissante de sa production, Emory Douglas s’est penché sur le processus d’élaboration de ses illustrations d’alors, destinées à illustrer des articles dans la publication du BPP, et dont il a montré de nombreux exemples. Si l’on y retrouve régulièrement un recours à la provocation, Emory Douglas insiste sur le fait qu’elles sont « based on facts » et que c’est leur interprétation qui est provocante. Il rappelle ainsi le travail d’intériorisation et de « consiousness raising » – alors beaucoup pratiqué et estimé nécessaire par Seale et Newton – qui s’effectue à travers l’émergence d’un style graphique reconnaissable au premier coup d’œil. D’ailleurs, il dit s’être beaucoup inspiré de photographies pour réaliser ses illustrations du journal, probablement pour créer une tension entre le

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réalisme des images et la relecture en question. Il a parfois utilisé des photographies de lynchages dans le Sud pour éveiller les consciences par le choc de ce qu’on ne peut pas (ou plus) ne pas voir, mais aussi des portraits de jeunes scolarisés à Oakland, en Californie, et considérés comme des cas sans espoir, à qui il a redonné une histoire et une voix, atteignant ainsi l’un des buts de l’organisation.

6 À ce sujet, Emory Douglas rappelle à quel point l’action politique et sociale et les images étaient liées, notamment à travers le medium imprimé, et combien la notion de communauté, d’abord locale, puis de plus en plus étendue, jusqu’à atteindre un niveau national, était centrale à la vision des Black Panthers. Il relaie ainsi, par exemple, l’initiative des « free breakfast programs » dans les écoles, qui fut ensuite reprise par l’État de Californie, ce qui tend à montrer l’impact politique réel du parti, au-delà de son seul héritage symbolique. Les initiatives sociopolitiques se multipliant, avec par exemple le « Free Food Program » ou le « Free Clothes Program », elles étaient relayées par l’organe de presse, qui sollicitait des dons afin de les mener à bien, de redresser et d’éduquer des communautés, tout en renforçant et en amplifiant ainsi les réseaux locaux existants. Cependant, la dimension de provocation, mais surtout de dénonciation, reste une composante importante de l’esprit du journal. Ainsi, lorsque l’État californien investit dans des hélicoptères pour prévenir la criminalité dans certains quartiers sensibles, le Black Panther pointe du doigt la mauvaise gestion d’un argent qui aurait été mieux employé à l’éducation des jeunes dans les quartiers défavorisés – question toujours très actuelle.

7 De même, des événements nationaux contre lesquels le BPP s’élève publiquement sont caricaturés par celui qui devient bientôt leur « ministre de la Culture et de l’Information » (titre qui rappelle les liens entre information et propagande en temps de guerre, « chaude » ou froide) : les jeunes Noirs mis en prison de manière quasiment systématique sont dépeints en « prisonniers politiques », tandis que le « face trial » de Bobby Seale est mis en scène dans les pages du Black Panther, et que les violences policières y sont régulièrement dénoncées et mises en regard avec des boîtes d’allumettes ornées de visages colorés, symboles d’une résistance noire prête à s’enflammer. Le journal dénonce aussi la collusion entre le système raciste et le système capitaliste, mettant en parallèle l'exploitation des Noirs des villes et des ouvriers agricoles latinos qui tentent alors de se syndiquer, ce que la publication soutient, tandis que le système pénitentiaire est lui aussi dénoncé pour sa volonté de prospérer aux dépens des Africains-Américains.

8 C’est cet esprit que Douglas et d’autres membres du parti ont souhaité s’ouvrir à d’autres combats « frères ». Ainsi, une forte solidarité avec certains groupes d’Amérique latine (notamment les mouvements étudiants mexicains à partir de 1968) donnera naissance à des affiches que Douglas destinait à des réunions et à des événements internationaux, mais aussi à des œuvres hybrides. Un poster de Lazaro Abreu pour l’OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity of the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America) à Cuba illustre ce phénomène : représentant des guérilleros aux origines variées et surtitré « Solidarity with the African American People » (1968), il reprend deux illustrations de Douglas en modifiant les couleurs originales de ces deux dessins et en recentrant le propos autour de questionnements plus étendus – permettant par la même occasion au coup de crayon de l’auteur original de se faire connaître internationalement.

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9 Une telle expansion correspond d’ailleurs à la chute du mouvement des Black Panthers, sapé par la section CoInTelPro du FBI qui (comme le rappelle le film documentaire) tente notamment de saper le journal, en retournant les imprimeurs et fabricants contre les créateurs, profitant de leur jeunesse et de leur manque d’expérience. Mais alors que l’organisation se défait, son héritage commence à grandir et ses symboles prennent une vie propre. L’œuvre postérieure d’Emory Douglas se développe à partir de là, avec, d’une part, une série de portraits des grands leaders noirs héroïsés (Malcolm X the Warrior, Martin Luther King the Dr. etc.) stylisés, très colorés, comme en mouvement ; et avec, d’autre part, une série de portraits de Noirs pauvres, travailleurs agricoles ou ouvriers dans l’industrie, à qui il continue ainsi de prêter voix. Après plusieurs décennies, ce travail de dissémination d’un héritage et d’une mémoire donnera lieu à sa production de « celebration posters », réutilisant ses orignaux de l’époque comme base de collages, mêlant superpositions et télescopage de symboles. Un autre aspect de la continuité entre ses activités au sein du BPP et son travail plus récent est son implication militante récurrente, au fil des années, dans des pays tels que l’Afrique du Sud ou la Nouvelle-Zélande, entre autres, et son constant exercice de la satire politique, comme en témoignent la reprise d’un portait d’Obama avec pour légende « Nobel fraud » ou encore la dénonciation de la corruption capitaliste, couplée avec l’action sur le terrain. À ce titre, Emory Douglas rappelle son travail avec des enfants à Manchester, au Royaume-Uni, pour les aider à augmenter leur estime d’eux-mêmes.

10 Il est intéressant de noter, pour conclure, que ce travail, s’il est toujours en cours et en constante évolution (la critique et les réflexions offertes lors de la conférence s’inscrivant bien dans la perspective d’une relecture contemporaine), intéresse de plus en plus les institutions, comme on l’a vu avec le travail de mémoire. Il fait l’objet d’une patrimonialisation croissante, avec l’organisation d’expositions personnelles dans des lieux culturels reconnus (au New Museum de New York, au MoCA ou à la galerie Ze Dos Bois de Lisbonne), où sont installées des fresques commémoratives rassemblant ses œuvres les plus célèbres, mais aussi des réinterprétations modernes plus ou moins populaires de ces dernières (revisitées, par exemple, sous forme de broderies). Emory Douglas lui-même semble approuver un tel usage de sa production qu’il faut, considère- t-il, reprendre, retravailler sans cesse et adapter aux causes actuelles.

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEUR

ALICE MORIN Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3

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“The Cultures and Politics of Leisure in the British Isles & the United States” Université Paris-Sorbonne – November 6th-7th, 2015

Auréliane Narvaez and Sarah Leboime

1 This international conference was hosted by the research group “Histoire et Dynamique des Espaces Anglophones” (HDEA) and organized by Nathalie Caron, Laurent Châtel, Thibaut Clément and Andrew Diamond. After an introduction by Pascal Aquien, Vice-President of the Research Board at Université Paris-Sorbonne, Nathalie Caron presented HDEA, insisting on the usefulness for researchers in American and British studies to work together and find common approaches, leisure being a rich and engaging common ground. The conference spread over two days and four sessions were presented each day.

2 The first two sessions tackled the issue of “situating and materializing leisure,” with a first panel on “the territories of leisure,” chaired by Aurélie Godet (Université Paris Diderot). Elsa Devienne (Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre) gave the first presentation, entitled “Building the Beach for the Modern City: Urban Planning and the Making of New York and Los Angeles Beaches (1930s-1970s).” Like urban parks, urban beaches are hybrid spaces, both natural and artificial. From the 1930s to the 1970s, various groups competed for the right to use these areas and Devienne sought to understand how urban planners, assisted by engineers and the business elites, transformed New York and Los Angeles beaches and their impact on visitors. She first focused on the 1930s beach crisis, when erosion and sewage pollution issues arose, and on the subsequent creation of the first beach associations. She then moved on to Robert Moses’s Jones Beach (New York) and the invention of the modern beach, enhancing the urban elite’s efforts to turn the beach into an ideal middle-class leisure space: clean, respectable, and automobile-friendly. She eventually emphasized the building of beaches for the white middle-class family in the 1950s and 1960s, when hygiene and cleanliness were seen as a way to turn crowded, dirty beaches into family-friendly spaces. Yet beach modernization also went hand in hand with what the urban elites considered to be

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sexual perversion, as beaches had become spaces of social encounter for the gay community. While New York and Los Angeles beaches in the 1930s were often private, overcrowded, polluted and dirty, two decades later, most of the same beaches were public, clean and equipped with modern facilities. Yet, as beaches were modernized, the leisure spaces of more marginalized communities like the gay community were destroyed. Devienne evoked beach segregation and grassroots involvement during the Q&A period.

3 Nicolas Martin-Breteau (Université de Lille 3) was the second speaker with a paper entitled “‘Patient and Tolerant to an Extreme’: the Desegregation of Baltimore’s Leisure Areas in the ‘Long Civil Right Movement’ (1930s-50s).” He drew a parallel between the long struggle for racial equality and the new modes of consumption emerging along with the black middle class. He emphasized the parallel between the struggle for the desegregation of leisure areas, like golf courses, and the shift in African-American civil rights tactics. The black Monumental Golf Club for example became the spearhead of protest and its members both enhanced the respectability of black golfers and launched a legal battle to desegregate golfing facilities. Yet the segregation of beaches and swimming pools persisted in the 1950s, as the fear of racial and sexual promiscuity remained deeply rooted in the minds of many Americans. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling did not affect the enforcement of “separate but equal” rules on Baltimore’s public beaches. Swimming pools and beaches were eventually desegregated but white supremacists’ resistance was massive. So the struggle over access to territory was crucial in Baltimore, not only in mandatory spaces like schools, but also in voluntary places of leisure. In the Q&A period, Martin-Breteau developed the idea of a “Long Civil Right movement” (J. Dowd Hall) and the distinction between private and public spaces, as well as city and the state levels.

4 Hélène Quanquin (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) chaired the second session, which focused on the notion of “Bodies at Play.” Lawrence McDonnell (Iowa State University) opened with a paper entitled “Dancing up a Storm: Elite Leisure and Gender Confusion in the Old South (1840s-50s).” At the core of his presentation was the Pinneville club, a small young planters’ club in the South Carolina Lowcountry, which held an annual dance party each spring. McDonnell argued that the records of this local club tell a lot about politics and culture in the antebellum American South. Interestingly, the young men’s frequent meetings leading up to the dance came to matter more than the dance itself. These meetings were important social and political events, as the young men strove to preserve and enhance their ranks, titles, and conservative way of life. They were about playful work or serious play, about power and honor. Jousting tournaments were sometimes organized to validate their standing as honorable men and assert their nobility of character. As McDonnell made it clear, men could assert their gender identity and social prominence in Pinneville club meetings, while they interacted with one another in fraternal and sometimes more intimate ways under the cloak of dancing with young women. In some way, antebellum culture was epitomized by the Pinneville club, where male voices were prominent and honor was everything.

5 Enhancing the socially and politically charged dimension of swimming in early 20th century America, Olaf Stieglitz (University of Cologne) presented a paper entitled “Debs and Surf Queens – Swimming and Modern Female Bodies in the US, 1900s-1930s.” In the early 20th century, both swimming and the swimming suit came to symbolize the slim, athletic beauty modern women were supposed to exhibit. Progressive Era swimming

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textbooks enhanced its benefits, both in terms of health and physical appearance. Swimming was considered to be a democratic physical activity, available to the old and the young, men and women, the well-off and the working class. The crawl style mirrored the movements of modern life while swimming itself paralleled the modern norms and ideals of physical appearance, ability, performance, and achievement. Then Stieglitz turned to race, gender, and class lines, with a specific focus on gender: swimming was a recurring topic in fashion magazines and female athletes were transformed into objects of desire. Not only did photographs teach swimming techniques, but they also displayed the athletic body’s sex appeal. Stieglitz insisted on both the materiality (pools, swimming suits, textbooks) and political dimension (exclusion and segregation) of swimming in the first decades of the 20th century.

6 The afternoon’s keynote address, “Remaking Leisure for the Modern World: Changing Practices, 1750-1914,” was presented by Emma Griffin (University of East Anglia) and introduced by Laurent Châtel (Université Paris-Sorbonne). Although the pre-industrial period was often considered to be a golden age of leisure, one should not fall for the romanticized picture of pre-industrial peasants enjoying simple yet blissful lives. Furthermore, one should not look at leisure in 19th century Britain through the limited lens of decline, doom and deterioration. After underscoring that leisure was underestimated in the historiography of 19th century Victorian Britain, Griffin raised the question of the amount of leisure people actually had. In the countryside, Sunday evening was often the only time of recreation – in summertime, people enjoyed various outdoors activities, while during winter months they engaged in indoors activities like storytelling, singing or reading. The annual fair was the only time when people actually spent money on leisure. The experience of leisure changed with urbanization. Rural societies’ paternalism, allowing employers to control employees’ leisure-time activities, declined in towns as a whole new world of commercial entertainment became available. Reading also became more accessible and more private, as books got cheaper and could be borrowed from libraries. Town-dwellers started watching sports rather than playing them. Alcohol also became cheaper and virtually unrestricted; drinking was mainly a male urban phenomenon that did not decline until the First World War. Griffin briefly developed the questions of sexual behavior and gambling during the Q&A section.

7 The third session of the conference, entitled “Engagement, Resistance, Repression,” was chaired by Paul Schor (Université Paris Diderot). The first speaker was Sarah Pickard (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) whose presentation focused on “Serious Leisure, Serious Pleasure: Applying the Serious Leisure Model to Political Participation among Young People in Britain.” Pickard assessed the usefulness and limitations of the Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP), a theoretical framework developed by Robert Stebbins in the 1970s, especially his concept of “serious leisure,” i.e. “the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer core activity that is highly substantial, interesting, and fulfilling and where, in the typical case, participants find a career in acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge, and experience.” According to Pickard, several variables are omitted in this framework, such as gender, social class or age. Furthermore, Stebbins almost never takes politics into account, even though leisure can also involve confrontational behavior and police repression, nor does he focus on the pleasures and rewards of protest, or on the enhancement of collective identity through a sense of shared membership.

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8 The following presentation, by Michael S. Foley (University of Groningen), was entitled “We Are the One: Subcultural Leisure and Politics in Early San Francisco Punk.” When it comes to the punk scene, San Francisco has often been overlooked and overshadowed by cities like London and New York. Foley described Punk as an anti-hippie pose and emphasized the political dimension of San Francisco’s punk scene in the second half of the 1970s. Although the word leisure would probably have been rejected by punks as a bourgeois notion, politics and leisure – or fun, escapism – were entangled in the punk subculture. For instance, benefit concerts were given to support miners and railway workers or to defend a woman who used her gun against her rapist. Despite living on the margins of society, punks were committed to their community and often took a clear stand on issues like housing, homelessness and the promotion of diversity, confronting the police in the streets when necessary. According to Penelope Houston, the lead singer for the Avengers, they enjoyed great freedom: they shared flats in affordable neighborhoods, set up a system of mutual aid with the surrounding community, they had their own geography of cool places, worked part-time jobs and had enough time to write songs, play gigs, record their music. Work and fun went hand in hand as punks created a micro-model of society – a utopia? – in which anything and everything seemed possible.

9 Peter Marquis (Université de Rouen) concluded the panel with a paper on “The Politics of Leisure: Baseball and Anti-Communist Containment in Cold War Brooklyn.” He emphasized the political dimension of postwar baseball, and more precisely the forms and functions of its anti-communist rhetoric. Between 1947 and 1957, anti-communist propaganda was omnipresent and baseball became an essential tool in containing communism and promoting the American way of life. During the 1950s, several notorious anti-communists, among whom General Douglas MacArthur, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Congressman Richard Nixon, were invited to attend games at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Moreover, not only did anti-unionism pervade the baseball sphere but Marquis also insisted on the Dodgers’ youth charities, like the Amateur Baseball Foundation and the Dodgers Knot Hole Club. Getting young Americans “baseball-minded” was seen as a potential weapon against juvenile delinquency and communism, as well as a way to maintain the color line. The Dodgers managed to tap into the popularity of the anti-communist rhetoric to serve local interests. Marquis concluded by opening up a number of questions: was this strategy efficient? Who did it benefit? Who orchestrated it? How did the Dodgers’ fans respond? And was baseball even construed as leisure?

10 The last session of the conference’s first day, chaired by Franziska Heimburger (Université Paris-Sorbonne), focused on the politics of leisure and more precisely on notions of boundaries and nationalism. Karine Chambefort (Université Paris-Est Créteil) opened the panel with a presentation on “Outdoor Leisure Activities in Simon Roberts’s We English Photographic Project: Re-writing Landscape and Nation.” She was particularly interested in the representations of leisure, and especially of outdoor activities like angling, sunbathing, hunting, etc. A certain sense of national identity, of Englishness goes hand in hand with this cultural theater of leisure. Chambefort enhanced both the project’s documentary dimension and the pictures’ narrative quality. She drew a parallel between Roberts’s project and John Constable and Martin Parr’s works, thus establishing a sense of lineage, memory and continuity. The photographer’s work becomes his contribution to the creation of a constantly

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reproduced “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson). The pictures take on a social dimension, emphasizing the connection between people in public spaces like beaches and parks. Chambefort highlighted the photographs’ political dimension, as Roberts’s visual language produced an inclusive narrative of nationality formation and belonging, as well as their moral dimension, as the moral geographies of leisure help maintain order and control in increasingly standardized activities. To conclude, Chambefort insisted on the very personal and complex depiction of cultural identity in Roberts’s project.

11 Expanding on this idea of nationalism and leisure, Kristin Hass (University of Michigan) examined “Militarism and Tourism in 21st Century Washington: High Stakes, Deep Play on the National Mall.” She insisted on the militarized, racialized, and gendered dimensions of the National Mall in Washington, DC, one of the most symbolic and popular sites in the United States. Since 1982, three major memorials and three minor ones have been built, while many additional proposals were submitted. Hass first enhanced the late 20th century memory boom, which encompassed various periods and events, especially the Holocaust, the Cold War and the Vietnam War. It marked a new awareness in terms of history, legacy and memory, a new conscience of anniversaries and an urge to repair and restitute. After the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in 1982, it attracted millions of visitors but it also terrified the military elite, who feared it would prevent young people from enlisting. The Korean War Veterans Memorial was meant to be the opposite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: it was heroic and celebratory, it glorified American heroism and inspired people to join the military. It was created as a fantasy of a military that had never existed. The sculptor, Frank Gaylord, was asked to make the figures as masculine and racially neutral as possible. Since hair is a racial indicator, helmets had to cover the soldiers’ hair and their features were to convey a sense of hyper-masculinity. Hass finally referred to the permanent exhibition entitled “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War,” which opened in 2004 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

12 The first day of the conference ended on a completely different aspect of leisure by focusing on “the British Sports Car and American Leisure, 1945-85,” a paper presented by the curator of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Jeremy R. Kinner. He emphasized the enthusiasm for racing in postwar America, as people were looking for more speed power and individuality. The automobile was considered to be at the forefront of the democratization of American leisure. Sports cars, which originated in Europe in the late 1930s, offered a fun, alternative automotive experience for a demanding sporting community. A variety of cars quickly became available for consumers, from middle-class Americans to millionaires. In the 1950s, magazines like Time and Playboy showed sports cars in virtually every issue. There were many women sports car enthusiasts and a significant number of female racers (Denise McCluggage, Donna Mae Mims). However, the world of sports cars was also shaken by class tensions, police persecution and pressure from trade unions to remain loyal to American work rather than import foreign sports cars. Among other problems raised by the automotive culture were the rise in deaths on the roads and in CO2 emissions. Stricter safety standards were introduced and car speeds were capped in the 1970s. While production largely decreased in Britain in the early 1980s, the baby boom generation did keep their parents’ passion alive. In the early 21st century, the passion for British

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sports cars took on a new meaning as car enthusiasts celebrated Great Britain, the mother country, for language, culture, and cars.

13 The second day of the conference opened with the fifth session chaired by Pierre Lurbe (Université Paris-Sorbonne). Entitled “Communities of Leisure,” the panel addressed the question of leisure as a means of emancipation and self-empowerment, but also as a tool for unsettling the traditional high versus popular culture binary.

14 In her paper “‘Making the Art of Fun Freely Available’: Leisure Practices as Tools of Emancipation in Community Art Experiments in Britain in the 1970s,” Mathilde Bertrand (Université Bordeaux-Montaigne) examined how the community arts movement that emerged in Great Britain in the 1970s placed leisure at the center of its projects promoting social changes. Investigating how artistic and political alternatives were conjointly pursued, Bertrand focused on several community art projects such as Interaction or Jubilee Arts and showed how they addressed access to culture as a class issue. Taking the lack of leisure as the starting point for action, community artists engaged in a variety of local initiatives and experiments such as converted buses, meeting spaces for women’s organizations, facilities for children, to foster genuine cultural pluralism, promote diversity in cultural practices and transform disadvantaged communities’ self-perception through the arts. By challenging hierarchies and elite definitions of art, community artists elicited new forms of agency in underprivileged social groups, making leisure a force for social empowerment.

15 Tracing the politically charged trajectory of gardening in Great Britain, Arnaud Page’s paper “Work or Leisure? The Politics of Allotment Gardening in Great Britain” tackled the evolutions of early allotments in the broader context of the politics of leisure. Interpreting them as a means for the working class to reclaim their lives through leisure activities, Page (Université Paris-Sorbonne) called for a reappraisal of gardening in 19th century Britain and questioned the traditional perception of early allotment gardening as being merely based on subsistence culture and devoid of any political implications. While allotment gardening in 19th century Britain is often interpreted as a form of charity and a means for landowners to discipline agricultural workers and deflect their discontent, gardening is in fact a hybrid ground entwining the useful and the esthetic, the natural and the man-made, work and leisure, discipline and empowerment. Throughout the 19th and early 20 th centuries, allotment gardening represented an ideal of self-improvement and empowerment, and a potential cure to social disruptions. A patriotic activity during the two World Wars, gardening is today a means for citizens to address environmental questions, engage in the political debate about sustainable agriculture and, like their 19th century forerunners, reclaim a form of social agency.

16 Entitled “Institutions of Leisure,” the sixth session chaired by Nathalie Caron (Université Paris-Sorbonne) opened with Claire Delen’s presentation on “Organized Leisure at Huntley and Palmers’ Biscuit Factory (1841-1976).” Outlining four main periods from 1841 to 1971, Delen (Université Paris-Sorbonne) examined how leisure gradually developed from a paternalistic instrument of social control into a social institution where men and women, directors and employees could socialize and cultivate a sense of shared identity and loyalty to the firm. Leisure first developed between 1841 and 1870 as a means to educate workers by providing free entertainment and a place to meet outside work. Leisure became institutionalized between 1880 and 1910, with the creation in 1898 of the Recreation Club and the diversification of

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activities such as cricket, football, choral and drama sections. Although the two World Wars put the development of the Recreational Club to a halt, leisure activities resumed in the post-war period with the opening of new activities, popular sports, but also dancing clubs and a Film Society where men and women could meet. As an opportunity to find a future spouse, leisure at the firm was also a chance for women to engage in activities traditionally reserved to men.

17 Turning to a more lucrative aspect of leisure, Emmanuel Roudaut (Sciences Po Lille) examined the various attempts at providing a satisfactory policy on gambling in his paper “Tote Clubs, Dog Tracks and Newspaper Competitions: Moral Panics and Popular Leisure in Interwar Britain.” Initially focused on sports betting, gambling was banned in 1823 and remained illegal until the 1960s. Yet, the paternalistic attempt to prevent working-class gambling by prohibiting cash betting failed to preclude this form of leisure. Indeed, gambling moved to the streets and became a distinctive feature of the underground economy, facilitated by a high level of police corruption and the development of an unofficial administrative regulation. Though illegal, street betting remained highly popular after World War One, giving rise to a debate between supporters of a gambling regulation and defenders of the prohibition status quo. In the Interwar period, the introduction of pool-betting represented a significant evolution with the invention of the totalizer, or the “tote,” a form of betting controlled by government and racing organizations appointees. However, the “tote” never challenged the influence of bookmakers even though it contributed to legitimizing betting and developing cross-class entertainment.

18 Building on the potentially manipulative dimension of leisure, Thibaut Clément (Université Paris-Sorbonne) examined how Disneyworld’s rhetoric and imagery exploit the properties of play in order to enforce specific emotional and social reactions. In his paper “‘Adults Are Only Grown-up Kids Anyway’: Play and its Practical Uses at the Happiest Place on Earth,” Clément underscored the three-fold dimension of playing in Disneyland’s commercial strategy, identifying play as a) leisure time outside the time of productive time, b) playacting, and c) a reality-building activity whereby social norms are elaborated and negotiated. An extension of the Disney Company’s studio and television activities, the park is a place where the studios’ staging techniques cross- fertilize and canonical environments are reproduced in order to immerse visitors in a world of predetermined fiction. The customers’ subjection to a prearranged script extends to employees. Indeed, Disneyland’s managerial policy relies on the internalization of official emotional guidelines, which blurs the distinction between personal feelings and professional behavior. Despite the wide array of procedures conducive to a “willful suspension of disbelief,” visitors willing to subvert the rules can sometimes regain control of the attractions’ storylines. The resistance to the behavioral imperatives prescribed by Disneyland questions the park’s social and emotional norms and thereby proposes an alternative form of creative playacting.

19 The afternoon sessions resumed with the second keynote address “Dangerous Play: Racial Conflict in Twentieth-Century Urban Amusements” delivered by Victoria Wolcott (State University of New York at Buffalo) and introduced by Andrew Diamond (Université Paris-Sorbonne). Wolcott reconsidered the struggle for racial equality through the lens of recreational places and expanded the scope of the historiography of the Civil Rights Movement by showing how African-Americans challenged segregation at amusement parks, swimming pools, and skating rinks throughout the 20th century.

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Contrary to the commonplace image of urban amusements as places of democratic leisure, segregation and violence were also key features of these spaces. Thus, African- Americans challenged racially exclusive recreational facilities and vindicated their rights to access them. Indeed, desegregation in the 1960s coincided with disinvestment in recreational places increasingly associated with African-Americans, while narratives about juvenile delinquency and the necessity of segregation for violence prevention flourished. In this context, violence in recreational spaces played an ambiguous part, both as an imagined narrative linked with African-Americans, and as a strategy used by white mobs attacking recently desegregated recreational facilities in order to have them shut down. The decline and devaluation of collective recreational spaces ensued in the 1970s when white consumers started to shun these places, many of which were either closed down or privatized in the years following desegregation. The current nostalgia for urban recreation therefore ignores the violence of racial exclusion, which remains a blind spot in the historiography of Jim Crow segregation.

20 The seventh session, “Playing Indian, Indians at Play,” was chaired by Guillaume Marche (Université Paris-Est Créteil) and opened with Fabrice Delsahut’s presentation “Du Baggataway au Lacrosse: Sportivisation des Jeux Amérindiens.” After tracing the origins of Lacrosse and underlining the religious dimension of Baggataway, Delsahut (ÉSPÉ Paris-Sorbonne) examined the transformation of Baggataway into Lacrosse. The question was raised as to whether the translation of a ritualized practice into a professional sport and a form of leisure could be considered as an epistemological break or a hybridization process. Baggataway was considered by Native American populations as both sport and worship insofar as playing was a propitiatory ritual and a means to communicate with the spirit world. The practice was also appropriated by Canada in an effort to promote its national identity. The institutionalization of Lacrosse as a sport derived from Baggataway resulted from a strategy to inscribe modern Canadianism in a lineage of Native American sports, differentiate Canada from the United Kingdom and the rest of the Commonwealth, and encourage immigration from Europe. Despite its folklorization of Native American practices, Lacrosse remains indebted to the original spirit of Baggataway insofar as the violence inherent to the traditional practice has resisted the codification of the game.

21 Moving to more Southern parts of the North American continent, Suzanne Berthier- Foglar (Université Stendhal – Grenoble 3) reflected on the link between politics and recreation in the context of the conquest of New Mexico by the United States. In her paper “Indian Detours in New Mexico: Primitivism Pastime or Tools of Integration,” Berthier-Foglar showed that the development of the railroad in the mid-19th century contributed to the emergence of tourism in the territory of New Mexico with the first hotels built along the tracks in 1898 and 1902. The Fred Harvey Company played a central role in this process by perceiving that Native cultures and populations might appeal to people traveling by train in the Southwest region and eventually boost tourism in New Mexico. Buildings, Navajo rugs and other traditional artifacts were intended to attract tourists and potential buyers, and promote a sort of local color conducive to the development of the Native economy. In the 1920s, the increasing popularity of the automobile further bolstered tourism in the Southwest region as the concept of “Indian Detour” emerged. Automotive tours were meant to divert passengers from the railroad and drive them through New Mexico from Indian sites to living pueblos. Despite the colonial undertone of these projects, Native American

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populations, especially women could also find in this economy a means of empowerment.

22 Mathieu Charle’s paper “Public Festivals, Private Rituals: An Analysis of Contemporary American Indian Pow-Wows in the Northwest” explored how Native Americans negotiate the tensions between the need for continuity and adaptation to changing environments through the practice of pow-wows as both festive and ritual events. Reflecting on the ambivalent nature and functions of this recreational activity, Charle (EHESS-LIAS) argued that despite the public nature of the reunions, pow-wows represent a deeply private and communal moment as well as a means to reclaim Indians’ presence in space and time. Although pow-wows declined in the second half of the 19th century, Indians regained control of the practice during the 20th century as the power of missionaries weakened and tensions between the federal government and indigenous tribes abated. Underscoring their symbolic quality as unintelligible spaces to the uninitiated, Charle argued that pow-wows were not only recreational and performative activities but also places where births, deaths, political alliances, marriages and the redistribution of goods could be honored and celebrated.

23 The last session, “Technologies of Leisure,” chaired by Laurent Roesch (Université d’Avignon) opened with Yves Figuereido’s paper entitled “The Uses of Photography and the Definition of Leisure Practices in California and the West (1880s-1910s).” Reflecting on the history of conservation ecology, Figuereido (Université Paris-Sorbonne) explored the role of photography in the development of early preservationism in the West by examining the personal trajectory of Theodore P. Lukens. A successful investor who conceived forestry as a central element of his real estate activity, Lukens was also a keen photographer who blurred the line between work and leisure. Lukens undertook to document the development of his tree nursery and reforestation in a didactic way that contrasted with the sublime esthetics of 19th century landscape photos and their emphasis on grandiose wilderness devoid of human presence. Underscoring the ambivalence of Lukens’s photos, neither strictly personal, nor truly professional, Figuereido contended that taking pictures and comparing them over time would contribute to a better understanding of natural processes and enrich the history of forest conservation two generations before the institutionalization of landscape preservation in the 1930s.

24 In his paper, “Leisure and Technical Milieu in the 21st century: Inhabiting Fantasy Worlds through Video Game Playing and Literary Reading,” Pierre-Louis Patoine (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) examined how fantasy literature and video games rely on the inhabitation of secondary fantasy worlds. Patoine investigated the political and economic consequences of immersing oneself in literary or digital landscapes, and argued that the codes of videogames transform the practice of leisure. After stressing the influence of fantasy and science fiction novels on video games, he showed how the construction of fantasy narratives around explorable universes promoted immersion in and contemplation of the environment, highlighting the touristic and genuinely esthetic dimensions of exploration in role-playing games. For Patoine, contemplation is subversive because it is detached from the demands of teleological activity: this calls for a reassessment of video games’ esthetic quality and of the notion that they are antisocial and anti-productive.

25 The conference concluded with Olivier Frayssé’s paper “Leisure in the Age of the Internet: Solution and Dissolution.” Rather than opposing work and leisure, Frayssé

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(Université Paris-Sorbonne) explored the theoretical parameters at stake in the dialectic of labor and leisure, and examined how their relationship was refashioned in the digital age. After reminding the audience that capitalism distinguished between the realms of production and reproduction, with leisure pertaining to the latter, Frayssé conceptualized leisure by pointing the limits of the sphere of obligation, and interrogated the degree and type of control required in the leisure sphere. As a counterculture born out of a reaction against cultural Fordism and characterized by a dual process of revolution and dissolution of the distinction between labor and leisure, the digital age provides a blueprint for new labor regimes. Frayssé ended by outlining the way this new framework was produced and underscored how various factors – the maximization of the production sphere, the commercialization of labor, the increasing surveillance and monitoring of leisure time, but also the intensification of unpaid labor time and labor necessity – refashion the relationship between leisure and labor and blur the two categories.

INDEX

Subjects: Actualité de la recherche

AUTHORS

AURÉLIANE NARVAEZ Université Paris-Sorbonne

SARAH LEBOIME Université Paris-Sorbonne

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Journée d’étude « Le témoin et l’écriture de l’histoire » Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, vendredi 29 janvier 2016

Jessica Jacquel

1 Lors de cette journée d’étude, les intervenants se sont interrogés sur des problématiques liées à l’écriture de l’histoire depuis les marges. Certaines communications ont exposé la manière dont les premiers historiens africains- américains, d’anciens esclaves pour la plupart, ont tenté de réécrire une histoire nationale plus exhaustive ou, à tout le moins, plus inclusive de l’expérience africaine- américaine. D’autres intervenants se sont plus particulièrement intéressés aux difficultés de publication et de diffusion souvent rencontrées par ces auteurs considérés comme marginaux. La deuxième partie de la journée était consacrée aux modalités de reconstruction de l’histoire, souvent peu documentée, de populations marginalisées et, de ce fait, passées sous silence, voire effacées. En l’absence de témoignage direct, les historiens ont été contraints de s’appuyer sur tout document susceptible de témoigner de cette présence silencieuse. La question des sources et de leurs inévitables limites était ainsi au centre des discussions.

Réécrire l’histoire depuis les marges

Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Université Paris Diderot), « The Negro in the American Rebellion : His Heroism and His Fidelity de William Wells Brown (1867) »

2 Marie-Jeanne Rossignol s’est penchée sur la trajectoire de l’ancien esclave et abolitionniste africain-américain William Wells Brown. Elle s’est d’emblée demandé dans quelle mesure les travaux de l’auteur ont contribué à la culture intellectuelle américaine. Si la publication de son récit d’esclave en 1847 place Brown en position de témoin, il n’en est pas moins devenu un historien à part entière. Bien que les Africains- Américains n’aient pas été son unique public cible, le récit historique The Negro in the

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American Rebellion suggère que Brown était un auteur dévoué à sa communauté. Il déplorait le manque de considération des historiens blancs pour la population noire et l’omission de pans importants de l’histoire américaine, notamment de l’esclavage, dans leurs publications. En quête de justice, Brown s’est ainsi engagé à compléter la science historique existante. En effet, The Negro and the American Rebellion retrace l’histoire des Noirs durant la guerre de Sécession en apportant un éclairage différent sur l’histoire de la nation. L’ouvrage révèle par ailleurs l’afro-centrisme des écrits de Brown qui, paradoxalement, était prêt à arranger certains aspects des faits racontés pour appuyer leur authenticité. En somme, Brown est parvenu à s’affranchir des codes imposés par les historiens blancs et a peut-être ainsi contribué à populariser la science historique émergente.

Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (Université Paris 8), « The Reason Why, un pamphlet “noir” diffusé au cœur de la “Cité blanche” : la délicate genèse d’un pamphlet controversé »

3 Claire Bourhis-Mariotti s’est intéressée aux difficiles conditions de publication et de diffusion du pamphlet The Reason Why The Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, co-écrit et publié en 1893 par plusieurs militants noirs, dont Ida B. Wells et Frederick Douglass. Selon elle, l’historiographie aurait éludé la controverse autour de cette publication qui était loin de faire l’unanimité. Le pamphlet a vu le jour dans le cadre de l’exposition universelle de Chicago dont les Africains-Américains ont rapidement été écartés. Wells et Douglass décidèrent alors de publier un pamphlet afin d’attirer l’attention des visiteurs sur cette mise à l’écart et, plus largement, sur la condition des Noirs aux États-Unis. Néanmoins, l’originalité du document tient davantage à son moyen de diffusion et à sa dimension internationale qu’à sa nature militante. Pour financer le document, Douglass lança un appel aux dons dans une lettre ouverte intitulée « To the Friends of Equal Rights » relayée par la presse noire. Certains journaux africains-américains s’opposèrent à la publication du pamphlet, affirmant qu’il ne servirait qu’à intensifier l’hostilité envers les Noirs, et l’appel fut peu entendu. Ils parvinrent à récolter, dans des églises noires de Chicago, quelques fonds pour distribuer le pamphlet gratuitement aux milliers de visiteurs venus du monde entier. Enfin, au-delà de ces difficultés, les documents présentés dans le pamphlet constituent en eux-mêmes un témoignage de la violence infligée aux Noirs en cette fin de XIXe siècle.

Matthieu Renault (Université Paris 8), « Lorenzo Greene : Une histoire des révoltes sur les navires négriers »

4 Matthieu Renault a étudié les pratiques de Lorenzo Johnston Greene, historien africain- américain qui a su lier recherche scientifique et engagement militant. Soucieux de ne pas faire de la propagande, Greene croyait en une histoire impersonnelle et objective. Matthieu Renault s’est alors interrogé sur la division présumée, dans le travail de l’historien, entre engagement militant et pratique scientifique. Ainsi, la thèse de doctorat de Greene sur les Noirs de la Nouvelle-Angleterre aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, The Negro in Colonial New England, s’attaque au « mythe » de la droiture des puritains : malgré une certaine bienveillance envers les esclaves, considérés comme des membres

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de la famille, de sévères punitions leur étaient parfois infligées. Par ailleurs, Greene réfuta l’idée d’une docilité naturelle du Noir dans la servitude et s’attacha à montrer les efforts abolitionnistes des esclaves eux-mêmes en retraçant des pans de l’histoire des « Black Patriots ». Ainsi, il publia dans la revue Phylon, fondée par Du Bois, un article sur les révoltes d’esclaves à bord des navires négriers, illustrant sa conception des rapports entre savoir historique et engagement politique. Dans cet article, une vision tragique de l’histoire noire nuance également l’attachement de Greene à une histoire impersonnelle. L’enjeu est alors à la fois de redécouvrir l’œuvre des historiens noirs qui ont écrit depuis les marges et d’examiner dans quelle mesure cette histoire décentrée s’introduit dans l’histoire de la discipline historique dans son ensemble.

Claire Parfait (Université Paris 13), « Histoire et militantisme : William Cooper Nell »

5 Claire Parfait a examiné la manière dont les publications de l’historien William Cooper Nell furent partagées entre histoire et militantisme. Les premiers historiens africains- américains, dont Nell faisait partie, charchaient à réinscrire les Noirs dans l’histoire américaine en proposant un large panorama de leurs capacités. Il s’agissait, avec un objectif militant avéré, de dénoncer à la fois l’injustice de l’esclavage au Sud et de la ségrégation au Nord. Par ailleurs, convaincu que l’ignorance des Noirs constituait un obstacle à leurs progrès, Nell s’attacha à dépeindre une histoire empreinte de gloire. Pour ce faire, l’historien rassembla des preuves de la bravoure des Noirs communiquées par des vétérans de la Révolution et de la guerre de 1812. Dans Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812, il travailla ainsi sur Crispus Attucks, esclave fugitif tué lors du massacre de Boston en 1770, afin de le réinscrire dans l’histoire. Les états de service des soldats noirs y sont décrits pour souligner la contribution des Africains- Américains à l’histoire nationale. Nell travailla plus tard sur un nouvel ouvrage finalement publié en 1855, malgré le manque de financement. À ce titre, la publication, tout autant que l’écriture de l’histoire, constituait un acte militant pour ces auteurs qui s’attachaient à éclairer le passé en vue de combattre les problèmes du présent.

Michaël Roy (Université Paris Nanterre), « “[N]ot planned for the scholars” : Benjamin Quarles et l’écriture d’une histoire africaine- américaine grand public au temps des droits civiques »

6 La communication de Michaël Roy a porté sur Benjamin Quarles, historien africain- américain de la période des droits civiques dont la production scientifique se caractérise par une volonté de mettre en avant la dimension collective de l’expérience africaine-américaine avec une vision « optimiste » des progrès à venir. En effet, Quarles était convaincu que la nation allait aligner ses pratiques raciales sur ses principes démocratiques. Il s’agissait alors de replacer les Noirs au centre de la scène historique en intégrant, dans une approche dire révisionniste, l’histoire noire à celle de la nation. En 1964, dans un contexte de développement des études africaines-américaines, Quarles publia une synthèse de l’histoire noire pour le grand public : The Negro in the Making of America. C’était un livre de poche bon marché, écrit dans une langue fluide et alerte, susceptible de plaire à un large public non restreint aux seuls cercles académiques. Dans la continuité de William Cooper Nell, Quarles s’attacha à présenter

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une histoire exhaustive des Africains-Américains en insistant, notamment dans son chapitre sur l’esclavage, sur l’agentivité des esclaves, leur capacité de décision et d’action. Cet art de la synthèse développé par Quarles a fait de lui un historien reconnu et de son livre un ouvrage de référence.

Reconstruire l’histoire des marges

Nicolas Gachon (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), « Mémoire palimpseste et écriture de l’histoire : le cas John Ware (Gorée, 1807-1841) »

7 Nicolas Gachon a proposé de mettre en lien les questions de mémoire et d’écriture de l’histoire. Il a pour cela comparé la mémoire familiale de descendants français d’un négrier anglais nommé John Ware aux traces archivistiques disponibles qui attestent l’existence d’un simple commis marchand. Ce statut social, non conforme à ce que retient la mémoire familiale, semble remettre en question jusqu’à l’origine anglaise de John Ware. On retrouve effectivement à Gorée un certain Thomas Lewis John Ware, « habitant indigène de l’île de Gorée », dont l’acte de décès l’inscrit dans une lignée métisse de rang social élevé. La confusion vient vraisemblablement de la présence attestée d’un soldat anglais du nom de John Ware affecté à Gorée en 1807. Par ailleurs, la figure controversée du fils de Thomas Lewis John Ware, Jacques Etienne Ware, soldat du bataillon de tirailleurs sénégalais, vient clarifier le processus mémoriel familial. En effet, la trajectoire peu enviable de Jacques Etienne, décédé au bagne en Guyane, subit un effacement administratif et mémoriel dans l’acte de mariage de sa fille qui élude le lieu de décès et le dernier domicile du père. Il semblerait alors que la mémoire familiale ait à la fois condensé deux générations et fusionné deux individus, le soldat anglais et l’habitant indigène de Gorée, par un processus de « fictionnalisation » qui tend à retracer une trajectoire plus acceptable.

Claudine Raynaud (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), « Bearing Witness : The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave (1850) »

8 Évoquant le récit d’esclave de Sojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, écrit par une abolitionniste blanche, Claudine Raynaud a soulevé la question de « la vérité historique » de ce témoignage rétrospectif. En effet, l’écriture et la publication du récit d’esclave sont directement liées à une volonté abolitionniste de documenter l’histoire de l’esclavage, comme le montre l’inclusion à la fin du récit de témoignages de propriétaires d’esclaves. L’un d’eux explique que se porter témoin résulte en partie du devoir moral et religieux de vérité. Il souligne ainsi la figure de prédicatrice de Truth, qui représente son peuple à plus d’un titre et mêle les deux acceptions, historique et religieuse, de « témoigner » (testifying). Néanmoins, le récit de Truth met également en évidence sa vie de femme noire libre et la manière dont son corps se porte témoin des souffrances infligées par son maître. Claudine Raynaud s’est ensuite interrogée sur ce qui est écarté du récit, en particulier les événements majeurs de l’histoire de l’État de New York qui ont pu toucher Truth quand elle y vivait. Ces omissions découlent d’une volonté de livrer un récit personnel, témoignage de la spiritualité de Truth. Entre les

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lignes, se dessine cependant une image fidèle de l’esclavage dans l’État de New York, une écriture de l’histoire au féminin.

Anne-Claire Faucquez (Université Paris II Assas-Panthéon), « Comment reconstruire la présence africaine dans le New York du XVIIe siècle ? Quelques pistes méthodologiques sur la spécificité des sources à la période coloniale »

9 Anne-Claire Faucquez a exposé ses travaux sur la reconstruction de l’histoire en l’absence de témoin pour rendre compte de la présence africaine dans le New York du XVIIe siècle. Les rares sources disponibles se présentent sous différentes formes. D’une part, les sources « classiques », comme les registres des instances gouvernementales de la colonie et les livres de compte de marchands, permettent d’établir le prix de vente et la provenance de l’esclave. D’autre part, les sources juridiques soulignent avant tout les limites de l’esclavage comme institution. Mais certains documents administratifs apportent des renseignements démographiques, comme les recensements de population, les listes d’imposition et les registres de l’Église réformée néerlandaise. Anne-Claire Faucquez s’est également penchée sur des documents relatifs aux biens des propriétaires d’esclaves. Les testaments indiquent le nombre d’esclaves possédés, leur nom, leur âge et leur « race », bien que le mot « Negro » puisse s’appliquer indifféremment aux Africains et aux Amérindiens. Néanmoins, ces sources présentent plusieurs limites : par exemple, les esclaves peuvent, de manière fortuite, être comptés plus d’une fois, dans un acte de vente puis dans un testament, d’autant que le nombre exact d’esclaves n’était pas toujours précisé dans ce dernier type de document. Anne- Claire Faucquez est toutefois parvenue à recomposer, à partir de sources administratives inévitablement parcellaires, la présence d’une population qui était à cette époque résolument réduite au silence.

Elodie Peyrol (Université de Poitiers), « “Servant” et “slave” : difficultés de la terminologie employée dans les sources coloniales »

10 Élodie Peyrol a traité de la confusion entretenue dans les colonies anglaises du XVIIe siècle entre les termes « servant » et « slave » et, par extension, entre les statuts d’engagé et d’esclave. Ces deux termes, bien qu’utilisés de manière interchangeable dans les diverses sources disponibles, font pourtant référence à deux groupes de travailleurs non libres distincts : les engagés, noirs, blancs ou amérindiens, temporairement soumis à l’autorité d’un maître, et les esclaves asservis à vie. Ce flou terminologique suggère que la distinction entre les deux systèmes n’était, en réalité, pas toujours observée. En effet, si les engagés avaient des droits, la peur des représailles les décourageait souvent de les faire valoir contre leur maître. Certains reçurent des châtiments généralement réservés aux esclaves, comme le port d’un collier de fer, ce qui souligne également les similitudes entre l’expérience d’un engagé et celle d’un esclave. Pour pallier le manque de main-d’œuvre, un engagé pouvait aussi être contraint, sous divers prétextes, à servir au-delà de la période stipulée dans son contrat. En somme, malgré l’existence de deux systèmes d’asservissement juridiquement distincts, l’expérience et les conditions de vie des engagés

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s’apparentaient à celles des esclaves. Ce n’est que dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIe siècle que s’est précisée la distinction entre engagés blancs et esclaves noirs (au détriment de ces derniers), selon des critères raciaux maintenus au siècle suivant.

Lawrence Aje (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), « Écrire l’histoire des libres de couleur de Charleston, Caroline du Sud : difficultés terminologiques, obstacles archivistiques et enjeux épistémologiques »

11 Lawrence Aje a évoqué la difficulté d’écrire une histoire peu documentée et les défis posés par des catégories sociales et raciales placées à la marge de l’histoire. Il a ainsi exposé les modalités d’écriture d’une histoire totalisante des libres de couleur de Charleston, population hétérogène à plus d’un titre. L’ambiguïté de la terminologie pose le premier problème, la définition du groupe lui-même, car leur désignation raciale évolua au fil du temps de « Free Negro » à « Free people of color ». Par ailleurs, le métissage de la population était tel que la Caroline du Sud s’abstint de définir le statut juridique de « Blanc », attribué selon l’apparence physique, voire la réputation d’un individu. Ce refus de statuer sur deux catégories raciales distinctes reposait en partie sur l’existence de Noirs libres propriétaires d’esclaves. En outre, la précision du recensement concernant les métis peut être nuancée par les divers degrés de métissage des libres de couleur à cette époque. Au regard de l’hétérogénéité des expériences et des trajectoires individuelles, Lawrence Aje a souligné la nécessité de multiplier les approches (qualitative, quantitative, prosopographique, etc.) en vue de reconstruire le collectif à partir d’itinéraires singuliers et de réintroduire des acteurs historiques jusque-là en marge de l’histoire.

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEUR

JESSICA JACQUEL Université Paul-Valéry

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« Mobilisation(s) politique(s) des groupes ethno-raciaux dans l’Amérique d’Obama »

Roman Vinadia

Introduction

1 Le 1er avril 2016 a eu lieu à l’université de Cergy-Pontoise une journée d’étude intitulée « Mobilisation(s) politique(s) des groupes ethnoraciaux dans l’Amérique d’Obama ». Cette journée, organisée par Julien Zarifian, maître de conférences en civilisation américaine au département d’Études anglophones de l’université de Cergy-Pontoise, et Yohann Le Moigne, alors post-doctorant en civilisation américaine à l’université de Cergy-Pontoise, a rassemblé une quinzaine de chercheurs, professeurs et doctorants américanistes. Son objectif était de faire un bilan de la situation des minorités à la fin de la première présidence noire de l’histoire américaine et à la veille d’une campagne électorale où les déclarations anti-immigration, racistes et xénophobes dans le camp républicain posent la question de ce qui a été accompli au cours des huit dernières années. Plus qu’un simple bilan des politiques d’Obama vis-à-vis des minorités, cette journée visait à interroger le concept même de minorité en tant que bloc identitaire ou électoral.

2 Les intervenants ont notamment interrogé la pertinence et la solidité des concepts de « race » et d’ethnicité dans leurs dimensions politique et identitaire. Il s’agissait également d’analyser et de comprendre les nouvelles formes de mobilisation inter- et intra-minoritaires. La journée était composée de six ateliers thématiques, avec deux intervenants et un modérateur pour chacun. A d’abord été évoqué le renouveau de l’activisme noir avec l’émergence de Black Lives Matter, puis la question de la mobilisation électorale du sleeping giant hispanique, les relations entre les minorités et l’administration Obama, l’activisme politique des minorités en tension avec la préservation de leur propre identité, la problématique de la réforme du système

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migratoire et des modes d’actions de la société civile pour pallier les inadéquations du système institutionnel, et enfin les conflits inter-minorités.

3 Le sujet des minorités ethnoraciales aux États-Unis est si complexe qu’une seule journée ne permettait de l’éclairer de manière exhaustive. Lors de son introduction, Julien Zarifian a ainsi constaté que les travaux sur les Noirs et les Hispaniques étaient relativement nombreux tandis que, par exemple, aucun ne traitait spécifiquement de la communauté musulmane, globalement peu étudiée et pourtant de plus en plus au centre des débats. Cette journée d’étude a cependant permis d’évoquer de multiples autres communautés, tels les Asiatiques, les Amérindiens et les White Ethnics.

Continuités et ruptures

La création d’une continuité historique comme facteur de mobilisation

4 Les intervenants ont souvent mis l’accent sur l’utilisation par certains mouvements militants ethnoraciaux de la continuité historique vis-à-vis du moment fondateur qu’est le mouvement des droits civiques des années 1950-1960. Cette continuité s’exprime à la fois dans les discours mis en avant par les minorités et dans les modes d’action militants employés.

5 Charlotte Recoquillon (Université Paris 8) et Nicolas Martin-Breteau (Université Lille 3) ont ainsi retracé la genèse et l’inspiration du mouvement Black Lives Matter à partir de cette tradition. Ils ont montré que ce mouvement se rattache à une narration de l’expérience africaine-américaine fondée sur l’analyse d’une continuité dans l’exploitation des Noirs, de l’esclavage et de la ségrégation aux violences policières d’aujourd’hui. Ce récit s’inscrit pleinement dans la continuité des analyses d’un racisme institutionnel et systémique formulées par le Black Panther Party. L’accent a donc été mis sur la perception selon laquelle les quartiers africains-américains sont avant tout, aux yeux des forces de l’ordre, des territoires ennemis à contrôler. Pour la population, la police est perçue comme une force d’occupation. Cette représentation est renforcée par la militarisation croissante de la police et par le recours à ce que Nicolas Martin- Breteau a qualifié de « mises à mort extrajudiciaires » qui ont pour objectif le contrôle et la mise au pas de la population noire. Cette continuité de l’expérience militante africaine-américaine se retrouve aussi dans les modes d’organisation, notamment le recours au community organizing, qui rappellent celles du Black Panther Party.

Une rupture générationnelle

6 Parallèlement à cette continuité historique, les intervenants ont évoqué l’idée qu’il y aurait une rupture générationnelle au sein même des groupes sur la question des revendications et, plus fondamentalement, en termes d’expression identitaire. Ici, deux dynamiques sont ressorties : d’un côté, la réaffirmation d’une identité ethnoraciale qui ne cherche plus à se « blanchir », mais bien à s’affirmer en tant que telle ; de l’autre, la volonté de créer des connections entre les différents mouvements identitaires, qu’ils soient ethnoraciaux ou non. Dans les deux cas, ces objectifs sont plus généralement mis en avant par une nouvelle génération de militants qui, bien que s’inscrivant dans la

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continuité narrative de la lutte de leurs aînés, rompent avec leurs modalités et avec leurs objectifs.

7 Ce phénomène semble transcender les groupes ethnoraciaux. Selon James Cohen (Université Paris 3), à Tucson, Arizona, une population blanche se considérant comme pionnière dans un territoire en réalité déjà largement habité par une population hispanique native, a elle-même créé un récit identitaire pour cette ethnie. Si cette population hispanique native était intégrée au folklore de la région dans l’imaginaire des colons blancs, les vagues migratoires mexicaines de la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle ont apporté avec elles des revendications identitaires propres et ont cherché à s’extraire de cette folklorisation imposée par la majorité blanche. Loin du message pro- assimilation porté notamment par des organisations telles que LULAC, les nouveaux arrivants ne cherchent pas à se fondre dans la communauté. Leur modèle d’intégration n’est pas le melting pot mais plutôt l’image inverse du salad bowl.

8 Comme l’a montré Nicolas Martin-Breteau, un phénomène similaire émerge dans les communautés noires où les jeunes se retournent contre les buts du mouvement des droits civiques qui préconisait le blanchissement et l’assimilation des Noirs à la société blanche. Aujourd’hui, les revendications identitaires prennent le dessus et les nouveaux types de mobilisations ne visent plus à présenter les minorités comme assimilées à la communauté blanche (sameness), mais bien à s’affirmer en tant que communauté dotée d’une identité propre et revendiquée.

9 De même, dans les relations inter-minorités, Yohann Le Moigne a montré que les vagues d’immigration successives à Compton, en Californie, ont mis en conflit les nouveaux arrivants hispaniques et les populations noires locales. La cohabitation entre Noirs et Hispaniques n’était pas problématique dans les années 1960, mais à partir des années 1980, l’arrivée de nouvelles populations hispaniques revendiquant une identité propre commença à créer des conflits, notamment en termes de représentation politique.

10 Côme Pérotin (Université Paris 8) observe le même phénomène à Williamsburg, dans l’État de New York, où, face à une problématique de gentrification, les organisations locales hispaniques se retrouvent divisées par un conflit entre la vieille garde des dirigeants des années 1970 et les personnalités plus jeunes qui l’ont progressivement remplacée.

11 Il y a donc une véritable rupture générationnelle dans la formulation identitaire des mouvements ethnoraciaux qui, plutôt que de chercher à masquer les différences, prônent leur affirmation. Comme l’a rappelé Denis Lacorne (Science Po Paris), ce n’est pas propre aux minorités, mais le phénomène est présent dans l’ensemble de l’électorat américain. La primaire démocrate l’atteste particulièrement, vu la séparation nette en termes d’âge entre les supporters d’Hillary Clinton et ceux de Bernier Sanders. Ce dernier domine l’électorat jeune, toutes catégories ethnoraciales confondues.

Affirmation de l’identité multiple de l’individu

12 Ces nouveaux mouvements cherchent aussi à s’allier les uns aux autres, parfois dans un but stratégique, parfois parce qu’ils considèrent la multiplicité des causes d’oppression en termes d’identité personnelle plurielle et pas seulement d’appartenance à un groupe ethnoracial.

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13 Ainsi, Charlotte Recoquillon et Nicolas Martin-Breteau ont mis l’accent sur les profils spécifiques des fondatrices de Black Lives Matter : toutes trois se revendiquent comme féministes et sont issues de milieux militants. L’une militait à l’origine pour la cause LGBT, l’autre pour les droits des prisonniers et la troisième pour les droits des immigrés. Ces trois femmes symbolisent la volonté du mouvement d’étendre son combat au-delà de la seule question de la minorité noire pour prendre en compte la multiplicité d’identités de chaque individu. En ce sens, Nicolas Martin-Breteau insiste sur le fait que Black Lives Matter est un « réseau pluriel, […] une fédération de personnes marginalisées ». De même, Hilary Sanders (Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès) a expliqué que les communautés asio-américaines cherchent à encourager la solidarité avec Black Lives Matter à travers le lancement de #AsiansForBlackLives.

14 Enfin, James Cohen et Mathieu Bonzom (Université d’Orléans) ont montré que les modes d’action militants des groupes ethnoraciaux fusionnent et se fédèrent, notamment sur la question des immigrants sans-papiers. La diversité identitaire des milieux activistes, notamment à Tucson, atteste une certaine désethnicisation de cette question. De même, les nouveaux modes d’action qui émergent à partir de 2006, notamment la notion de coming out et plus généralement l’idée de sortie de l’ombre des populations opprimées, sont empruntés à la communauté LGBT. De plus le retour aux sit-in et aux freedom rides, et bien sûr les manifestations de Black Lives Matter montrent l’importance de la visibilité et de la solidarité des victimes. Ce mot d’ordre se retrouve d’un groupe à l’autre.

Les minorités et le pouvoir politique sous Obama

15 L’un des thèmes centraux de la journée d’étude concernait sur les relations entre minorités et pouvoir politique, notamment celui de l’administration Obama. Le bilan de l’administration démocrate du premier président noir des États-Unis semble plus que mitigé sur l’avancement des droits des minorités, essentiellement parce que les intérêts du pouvoir politique finissent souvent par primer.

16 De plus, l’identité ethnoraciale n’est pas un facteur suffisant pour peser lourd dans la balance électorale. Ainsi, Émilie Bonnet (Université de Rouen) analysait l’élection du maire de San Diego, en Californie, au lendemain de la création d’une nouvelle circonscription comptant une majorité de minorités. Conformément au Voting Rights Act, les circonscriptions électorales à toutes les échelles doivent faire en sorte d’assurer une bonne représentation des minorités devenues majoritaires sur certains territoires. Ce fut le cas à San Diego. Malgré la tentative d’encourager les Latinos de ce nouveau district à venir voter pour David Alvarez, candidat démocrate, hispanique, activiste et portant la confiance des Latinos de la ville, la jeunesse du 9e district ne lui a pas permis d’emporter un nombre suffisant de voix pour battre son opposant républicain. L’identité ethnoraciale n’est donc pas toujours suffisante pour mobiliser électoralement une population homogène dans la mesure où un district nouvellement créé ne fait pas sens pour elle.

Quand le pouvoir politique divise les minorités

17 Julien Zarifian a exposé les relations difficiles entre Barack Obama et la communauté arménienne. Cette dernière a largement soutenu sa candidature en 2008, mais les

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relations entre cette communauté et la présidence se sont détériorées du fait qu’Obama n’a pas tenu sa promesse de reconnaître officiellement le génocide arménien. Barack Obama était pourtant considéré comme le sénateur le plus pro-arménien avant de devenir président. En 2012, l’Armenian National Committee of America a retiré son soutien au président sortant et, au moment du colloque, n’avait toujours pas pris position dans la campagne 2016. Pour Julien Zarifian, si l’administration Obama n’a pas justifié le retrait de son soutien à la cause arménienne, la situation géopolitique au Moyen-Orient et le rôle central de la Turquie dans ces questions semblent démontrer que l’intérêt national tel que perçu par les dirigeants surpasse souvent l’attachement à des questions identitaires.

18 Dans cette relation entre groupes minoritaires et pouvoir politique, la polarisation qui paralyse le pouvoir fédéral a des répercussions directes tant sur les minorités que sur les relations qu’elles ont les unes avec les autres.

19 Mathieu Bonzom a notamment démontré la paralysie non seulement du système migratoire, mais aussi des possibilités de réforme. La solution serait un compromis offrant à la fois une restriction des entrées et une possibilité d’obtenir des titres de séjour pour les sans-papiers déjà présents. Mais le climat politique fédéral n’est absolument pas propice au compromis entre les deux camps, d’autant plus que la question migratoire se trouve au centre d’une campagne électorale particulièrement polarisée. Face à cette inaction fédérale, Mathieu Bonzom a noté la multiplication d’initiatives locales et étatiques sur la question des sans-papiers. Celles-ci sont parfois extrêmement pénalisantes dans les États républicains, mais parfois plus favorables dans les États démocrates.

20 James Cohen a expliqué que la question de la migration sans-papier a été instrumentalisée dans la lutte partisane pour le contrôle de l’Arizona. L’adoption de lois extrêmement restrictives pour les migrants irréguliers ne vise pas seulement à faire respecter une certaine vision de la loi ou à pallier les manquements du pouvoir fédéral en matière de réformes migratoires. C’est également un enjeu politique certain : les républicains entendent réduire le nombre d’Hispaniques afin de préserver leur contrôle politique de l’État, étant donné la difficulté qu’ils auraient à convertir cet électorat à leur cause.

21 Dans une dynamique similaire, Côme Pérotin a montré que le désengagement de la politique fédérale peut engendrer une situation de conflit inter-minoritaire. Avec la mutation néolibérale de la gestion municipale de New York dans les années 1980, la coexistence des communautés juive hassidique et hispanique s’est tendue. En effet, au fur et à mesure de la gentrification du quartier de Williamsburg, la communauté juive hassidique a réussi, grâce à une culture de la propriété immobilière, à garder sa place. En revanche, les Hispaniques, dont le taux de propriété est très faible, ont rapidement été obligés de quitter le quartier. Des organisations se sont alors créées pour pétitionner le gouvernement afin qu’il intervienne, mais en vain. Les relations entre ces deux minorités se sont alors détériorées et le désengagement du niveau fédéral a poussé les organisations de quartier à faire l’intermédiaire entre les propriétaires fonciers et les populations. L’homogénéité de la communauté juive hassidique et sa forte propension à la propriété ont assuré une stabilité de ces organisations. Celles mises en place par la population hispanique, en revanche, sont beaucoup plus instables car cette dernière se renouvelle perpétuellement en raison de la hausse des loyers.

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22 Enfin, Yohann Le Moigne a parfaitement illustré cette problématique en montrant que l’accession au pouvoir d’un groupe ne signifie pas, malgré la volonté d’alliance des nouveaux mouvements militants, l’éradication de l’oppression ethnoraciale. En effet, à Compton, les Hispaniques et les Noirs sont en forte rivalité dans une dynamique désormais bien installée. Les Noirs, arrivés à Compton à partir des années 1960, contrôlent l’appareil politique local. Avec les vagues de migration hispanique des années 1980-1990, ils se sont retrouvés minoritaires, mais maintiennent leur contrôle politique de la ville, ce qui crée des rivalités importantes entre les deux communautés. Compton, ville pauvre, devient donc un terrain de lutte entre minorités pour l’obtention du pouvoir politique et l’élite politique africaine-américaine reproduit l’oppression qu’elle a elle-même subie de la part de la population blanche.

23 L’obtention du pouvoir politique et la relation entre pouvoir politique et minorités sont donc une question très complexe aux États-Unis. L’élection de Barack Obama n’a pas eu d’incidence particulière sur les relations entre pouvoir politique et minorités, que ce soit au plan local ou au plan fédéral.

Alliance des minorités face au pouvoir politique

24 Dans d’autres cas cependant, l’alliance entre groupes permet effectivement de peser sur le pouvoir politique fédéral et parfois même de le faire fléchir. Céline Planchou (Université Paris 13) a illustré ce phénomène à travers l’opposition des Amérindiens au projet de pipeline Keystone XL. Les communautés amérindiennes ont été les premières à se mobiliser contre le projet, mais les résultats ne furent pas probants. Comprenant alors que faire respecter leur droit souverain sur une portion du territoire américain ne serait pas suffisant, les Amérindiens ont modifié leurs discours et se sont fédérés avec d’autres groupes, notamment écologistes et ranchers. Ces derniers ayant instrumentalisé la question des droits collectifs des Amérindiens, la coalition a réussi à faire fléchir le gouvernement fédéral qui a annulé le projet. Si les tribus ont obtenu ce qu’elles désiraient, il est néanmoins important de préciser qu’elles ont fini par être marginalisées dans cette lutte.

25 Le militantisme de groupes ethnoraciaux face aux pouvoirs gouvernementaux prend parfois des tournures surprenantes. C’est ce qu’a démontré l’intervention de Célia Belin (Université Paris 2) sur la question de l’activisme du lobby juif pro-israélien dans les négociations entre la Maison-Blanche et le Congrès pour faire voter l’accord sur le nucléaire iranien. Cet épisode a montré deux choses particulièrement importantes. D’une part, les lobbies pro-israéliens sont de plus en plus déconnectés de l’orientation politique de la communauté juive. Si les premiers restent particulièrement conservateurs et proches des républicains, cette dernière vote toujours massivement démocrate. D’autre part, comprenant qu’ils perdent progressivement le soutien de la communauté juive, les lobbies conservateurs pro-israéliens se tournent désormais vers les chrétiens évangéliques. Non seulement cette population est particulièrement ouverte au point de vue ces lobbies, mais elle est numériquement plus importante que la communauté juive américaine. Ainsi, les sénateurs juifs ont tous voté en faveur du traité et ce, malgré l’opposition quasi unilatérale des lobbies pro-israéliens, exception faite de J-Street, pro-Israël mais très critique de la politique de Netanyahou. Cet événement démontre que les minorités sont parfois déconnectées des groupes qui

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cherchent à les représenter. Cela pose aussi la question de la pertinence même des catégories ethnoraciales, dernier axe de cette journée d’étude.

La pertinence des catégories ethnoraciales

26 Rappelons que la « race » et l’ethnicité, telles que comptabilisée par le Census Bureau, sont avant tout fondées sur l’auto-déclaration des sondés dans un éventail de choix limité.

La catégorie ethnoraciale comme facteur d’identité ?

27 Céline Planchou a précisé que la catégorie « Amérindien » n’est pas seulement une identité ethnique, dans le sens de l’appartenance par le sang à une communauté particulière. C’est aussi, à la différence des autres catégories ethnoraciales, une identité politique. En effet, aux États-Unis, le statut légal d’Amérindien est attribué par l’État fédéral aux membres d’une tribu. Ce statut donne à ses porteurs des droits politiques particuliers. Dans son analyse du mouvement pour les droits des sans-papiers à Tucson, James Cohen a posé la question de savoir à quel moment la catégorie ethnoraciale devient un prisme trop limité pour comprendre réellement cette mobilisation : puisque le mouvement est multiracial, il est difficile, voire dangereux de sur-ethniciser la question des sans-papiers. De même, le prisme racial reproblématise la question de l’intégration des immigrants, qui s’était posée lors des premières vagues migratoires blanches, notamment irlandaise et italienne. Contrairement à leurs aînées, les minorités ethnoraciales d’aujourd’hui ne cherchent plus nécessairement ce fameux « path to whiteness », comme l’ont rappelé Mathieu Bonzom, James Cohen, Hilary Sanders et Nicolas Martin-Breteau.

La catégorie ethnoraciale masque les différences

28 Ces catégories deviennent aussi problématiques, comme l’ont souligné Hilary Sanders et Marie-Laure Mallet (Université Paris 1), dans la mesure où elles construisent dans l’imaginaire populaire une perception de communautés uniformes : les Asio- Américains, les Latinos etc. Or cette uniformisation des communautés masque des différences importantes et est facteur de perpétuation des discriminations.

29 À partir de nombreux entretiens, Marie-Laure Mallet a montré que, dans le « cocktail » que représente la catégorie hispanique, il existe des différences, voire des animosités, en fonction notamment du pays d’origine des personnes interrogées. Ainsi, plus on se penche sur ces catégories, plus on en découvre les incohérences. Marie-Laure Mallet a ainsi identifié plusieurs degrés de stéréotypage, d’abord entre Hispaniques des Caraïbes et ceux d’Amérique centrale ou du Sud, puis à l’intérieur de ces ensembles géographiques.

30 Le stéréotype du travail acharné et de la réussite sociale uniformise la communauté asio-américaine et pousse ses membres dans des domaines très compétitifs, notamment en termes d’éducation. En contrepartie, il occulte la profonde hétérogénéité de cette population et empêche de voir que les Vietnamiens, les Cambodgiens et les Laotiens ont le plus fort taux de pauvreté de toutes les minorités. De même, des procès sont en cours

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contre des universités de l’Ivy League qui discriminent contre les populations asio- américaines qu’elles perçoivent comme trop conformistes et pas assez créatives.

31 Enfin, selon Hilary Sanders, l’existence d’une division au sein de la communauté asio- américaine remet en cause la notion de path to whiteness. Cette communauté représente en effet, aux yeux de la majorité blanche, un modèle d’intégration par excellence, en raison du peu de revendications politiques qu’elle exprime et de sa manière d’associer les valeurs confucéennes à un protestantisme valorisant le travail et l’effacement de soi. Mais au sein des communautés asio-américaines, les taux élevés de mariages interraciaux (essentiellement entre Blancs et Asio-Américains), bien supérieurs à ceux des Hispaniques ou des Noirs, entrainent un rejet des Blancs-Asiatiques.

Conclusion

32 La question ethnoraciale a été au centre de la vie politique sous la présidence d’Obama. S’il n’a pas pu concrétiser le message d’espoir sur lequel il s’est fait élire en 2008, une fois libéré par son inéligibilité, il prit en 2016 une série de décrets pour pallier l’inaction du Congrès. Comme pour de nombreuses autres questions de politique publique, la paralysie parlementaire fédérale particulièrement sensible au cours de ces quatre dernières années empêché de répondre efficacement à la problématique ethnoraciale. La multiplication des bavures policières, la réponse à la crise de l’eau à Flint, ville du Michigan à grande majorité africaine-américaine, la vague d’enfants immigrants fuyant l’Amérique centrale sont pourtant autant d’événements qui en prouvent l’importance. La tendance démographique aux États-Unis montre que les minorités dans leur ensemble seront amenées à peser de plus en plus lourd lors des élections et l’impact qu’elles auront sur les discours des partis n’en sera que décuplé. Pour conclure, il est intéressant de rappeler qu’à la suite de la défaite de Mitt Romney en 2012, le Republican National Committee avait publié un mémorandum intitulé Growth and Opportunity Project recommandant au Parti républicain de se montrer plus inclusif des minorités ethnoraciales, de la communauté LGBT et des femmes. Quatre ans plus tard, Donald Trump a dominé la course à l’investiture républicaine grâce à la multiplication de commentaires désobligeants envers ces mêmes groupes. Est-ce le signe que le Parti républicain est en passe de se marginaliser aux yeux d’un électorat de plus en plus diversifié ?

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

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AUTEUR

ROMAN VINADIA Institut Français de Géopolitique, Université Paris 8, Vincennes – St Denis

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Colloque « Bible et Amériques du XIXe siècle à aujourd’hui : métamorphoses, diffractions et métissages de la Bible dans les Amériques » Université Bretagne Sud, Lorient, 28 avril 2016

Mariannick Guennec

1 Le colloque « Bible et Amériques du XIXe siècle à aujourd’hui : métamorphoses, diffractions et métissages de la Bible dans les Amériques » s’est tenu le 28 avril 2016 à la Maison de la Recherche de l’Université Bretagne Sud, à Lorient. Il était organisé par Madame Marie-Christine Michaud, Professeure des Universités en études nord- américaines, et Madame Patricia Victorin, Professeure des Universités en langue et littérature médiévales, toutes deux membres du laboratoire Héritages & Constructions dans le Texte et l’Image (HCTI – EA 4249), avec le soutien du GIS Institut des Amériques.

2 Les 15 interventions s’inséraient dans le programme de recherche mené par le laboratoire sur Bible et littérature, d’une part, et sur les Amériques, d’autre part. Ce colloque se voulait « une réflexion ouverte et transdisciplinaire sur les enjeux et les métamorphoses de la Bible dans les Amériques, puisque la Bible est au cœur de l’histoire des Amériques, de leur constitution, de leur origine1 », et que ce texte est « fondateur de la culture américaine ». Les deux organisatrices proposaient une expertise au croisement d’analyses littéraires, linguistiques, historiques, sociologiques, anthropologiques, politiques et idéologiques du discours biblique au sein du continent américain en privilégiant la culture contemporaine.

3 La Bible dans les Amériques a ainsi été abordée en tant que texte fondateur mais également à travers son influence actuelle, tant politique que source créative ou prosélyte, aux États-Unis, au Canada, en Jamaïque et dans plusieurs pays hispano- américains (Argentine, Chili, Pérou, Mexique).

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4 L’importance de la religion chrétienne est visible aussi bien en Amérique du Nord que du Sud. Jean-Louis Benoît (HCTI, Université Bretagne Sud), dans « Lectures de la Bible dans les Amériques aux XXe et XXIe siècles. De la mystique au politique » et Mokhtar Ben Barka (CALHISTE, Université de Valenciennes), dans « La Bible, document fondateur de l’Amérique », ont rappelé les raisons de la venue des puritains du Mayflower au XVIIe siècle. Fuyant les persécutions en Europe, ils s’identifient au peuple hébreu et voient dans le Nouveau Monde un nouvel Israël. Ils sont les rédacteurs de la première charte américaine, devenue le texte fondateur de la démocratie états-unienne. Le rêve américain est alors indissociable de la Genèse et de l’imaginaire biblique, et tout événement est interprété en lien avec les mythes fondateurs : peuple élu, construction de la Nouvelle Jérusalem, traversée du désert, paradis terrestre, rédemption, pèlerinage. Les prêches, les lectures de la Bible, servent à revivifier les formes institutionnelles de la religion protestante. L’idéal américain se transforme en exemple pour l’ensemble du monde, depuis la Jérusalem terrestre, « the City Upon a Hill » de 1630, jusqu’à l’époque contemporaine avec, par exemple, le Président George Bush voulant poursuivre l’ « Axe du Mal ».

5 Cette importance historique est visible dans la toponymie, analysée par Pascale Smorag (CRIT, Université de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté) dans « De Bethlehem à Zion, l’Amérique bénie de Dieu : la toponymie religieuse au centre des débats ». Même si tous les pays ont leurs lieux sacrés, les noms donnés aux villes états-uniennes, notamment par les Mormons expulsés pendant l’hiver 1846-1847 de New-York, permettent d’établir une continuité historique avec l’exode biblique. Parmi les toponymes les plus courants nous trouvons Salem, Eden, Bethel… L’Ancien et le Nouveau Testament inspirent ainsi 1,3 % des toponymes états-uniens. À titre de comparaison, cette toponymie biblique ne se retrouve pas au Canada et les Canadiens ne se considèrent pas comme des exemples pour sauver le reste de l’humanité. Pascale Smorag souligne que l’engagement religieux est tout sauf confidentiel ; il faut faire connaitre au monde entier la Terre Promise. La toponymie donne lieu aujourd’hui à de nombreuses discussions sur la Toile, pour (dé)montrer que la nation américaine est là pour sauver la planète, avec des cartes des villes ayant le plus de « pensée biblique » et une violence qui serait justifiée par la proximité de l’Apocalypse. Cette thématique est d’autant plus sensible après les attentats du 11 septembre, même si elle n’est pas nouvelle comme le montre Maurice Birckel (Centre d'études de géographie tropicale, Université Bordeaux III) dans « Israelitas del Nuevo Pacto », mouvement religieux péruvien des années 1960 qui renvoie aux tentations apocalyptiques et à l’espoir d’une Terre promise. Avec le 11 septembre, les athées sont une nouvelle fois en ligne de mire, avec des conceptions de l’évangélisation qui diffèrent selon la religion.

6 Les pasteurs ont pour rôle d’aider les fidèles à comprendre la Bible ; Mokhtar Ben Barka parle de « biblicisme », qui consiste à considérer que toutes les réponses sont dans la Bible. À l’opposé, les prêtres dictent l’interprétation de celle-ci. La conception même de l’évangélisation varie en fonction de la religion. Pour les protestants, les prêches et les lectures de la Bible, ont pour objectif de revivifier les formes institutionnelles de la religion protestante. L’évangélisation s’appuie sur la diffusion de textes de la Bible, la présentation de son histoire. Chaque famille lit assidument la Bible, au point que certains considèrent la pratique communautaire comme non nécessaire, même si la réunion en congrégation est un acte social. Marie Chosson (INALCO), dans « Motif biblique dans la tradition orale maya : modalités et enjeux de la transformation de la

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figure du Christ », souligne les différences fondamentales avec l’évangélisation catholique au Mexique pendant la période coloniale espagnole. Cette fois, l’objectif est que les populations rencontrées intègrent au plus vite le catholicisme. Les prédicateurs ont par exemple intégré les caractéristiques majeures des divinités mayas, appris les langues autochtones, adopté leurs formes linguistiques, favorisant le syncrétisme. Celui-ci a en outre été favorisé par la présence uniquement ponctuelle des prêtres, tandis qu’indigènes et métis vivaient séparés des Blancs. Ces conceptions différentes de l’évangélisation ont des répercussions sur la société.

7 Les répercussions sont visibles notamment lors des interprétations, ou réinterprétations, du texte fondateur. Ainsi, Steve Gadet (Université des Antilles), dans « l’Église Noire contre l’ordre esclavagiste : le cas des États-Unis et de la Jamaïque », montre comment les origines religieuses de la société nord-américaine ont influé sur la communauté noire. L’Église a justifié la séparation des Noirs et des Blancs. Mais l’Église Noire, aux États-Unis comme en Jamaïque, a été comme un mouvement de libération. Il montre par exemple le rôle de George Leile (1750-1820), Nat Turner (1800-1831), Harriet Tubman (1820-1913) et Denmark Vessey (1767-1822), dans les mouvements de libération des esclavagés.

8 Autre forme de libération plus récente, Nicolas Dobrowolski (CECILLE, Université de Lille III) étudie, quant à lui, le rôle de Rubén Dri dans « Rubén Dri, une lecture socialiste des Actes des Apôtres au service d’un projet politique révolutionnaire pour l’Amérique latine ». Pour Rubén Dri, à l’origine du mouvement des prêtres du Tiers Monde puis de la Théologie de la Libération, la société repose sur une fondation socialiste : les apôtres mettent tout en commun, « selon les besoins de chacun » ; l’Eucharistie marque le partage du pain entre les pauvres ; le Nouveau Testament marque la création d’un homme nouveau. Le Royaume de Dieu se fait par conséquent sur Terre, avec des relations conviviales.

9 Aux antipodes de cette conception socialiste, nous trouvons la conception puritaine de la vie, avec le lien entre le protestantisme et le capitalisme souligné par Max Weber et exposé par Mokhtar Ben Barka. Selon cette analyse, travailler et être occupé est une vertu, ce qui permet le salut de l’âme. Le travail devient l’équivalent de la prière, l’accomplissement de la volonté de Dieu dans sa providence.

10 Ces deux conceptions contradictoires amènent à envisager la Bible non plus comme texte fondateur mais pour son influence actuelle.

11 L’importance de la Bible dans les Amériques a été traitée, lors de ce colloque, sous les aspects politiques, créatifs et de marketing.

12 D’un point de vue politique tout d’abord, et en complément de ce qui a été dit précédemment, Mokhtar Ben Barka a analysé la « religion civile » aux États-Unis. Bien que laïque, cette religion est intensément religieuse. Mokhtar Ben Barka a précisé qu’entre 80 et 95 % des Américains disent croire en Dieu ou dans un être suprême, mais qu’il fallait relativiser ces chiffres car il était très mal vu, d’un point de vue social, de se déclarer agnostique. La religion est ainsi visible sur les billets de banque (« In God we trust »), dans la toponymie, dans les tribunaux (serment sur la Bible), lors des investitures présidentielles (« So help me God ») et les discours politiques (« God Bless America »), pour ne donner que quelques exemples. La présence de la religion sur la scène politique s’est renforcée depuis Jimmy Carter, dont les convictions pacifistes sont indissociables de sa foi baptiste, et George Bush, qui a voulu lutter contre l’ « Axe du Mal ». L’idéal américain est devenu un exemple pour l’ensemble du monde, ce qui a

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justifié l’expansionnisme et l’interventionnisme états-uniens. À l’opposé, l’intervention de l’Église catholique officielle est dénoncée par Rubén Dri lorsqu’elle soutient la conquête de l’Amérique par la couronne espagnole ou les juntes militaires dans la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. Elle serait responsable d’une mauvaise interprétation biblique et serait devenue une Église de pouvoir et non plus une Église prophétique. Selon Nicolas Dobrowolski, Rubén Dri montre également l’opposition entre les théories néo-libérales de Carlos Menem et les thèses défendues par Jésus. Pour Rubén Dri, l’Église doit demeurer aux côtés des pauvres et l’Amérique latine serait la plus à-même, par son histoire, de recevoir le message christique.

13 D’un point de vue social, ce n’est pas seulement l’Église officielle, mais la religion dans son ensemble qui est critiquée, par exemple parmi les immigrés italiens installés au Canada, d’après Marie-Christine Michaud (HCTI, Université Bretagne Sud), dans « Religion et canadianisation. La représentation de la religiosité des Italo-Canadiens dans The Italians de Frank Paci ». À travers l’histoire d’une famille italienne qui a émigré au Canada, et en particulier l’expérience des trois enfants, la Bible est dénoncée pour son influence sur les hommes et les femmes qui subissent leur existence au lieu de la construire. L’Église les empêcherait de prendre en main leur destin. Ainsi, ce roman met en exergue l’expérience des Italo-Canadiens de la seconde génération, soit en montrant une attitude passive face à l’influence de l’Église, soit en présentant un comportement rebelle face à la religion. L’objectif dans les deux cas est de trouver sa place dans la société canadienne, Frank Paci pensant que l’individu peut choisir de se rebeller contre le mode de vie et l’Église de sa communauté pour ne pas être exclu dans son pays d’adoption.

14 Loin d’être sclérosante, la religion est considérée par de nombreux auteurs comme source d’inspiration. Le colloque « Bible et Amériques du XIXe siècle à aujourd’hui » a abordé la Bible comme source de créativité chez des auteurs aussi variés que Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon ou Alejo Carpentier. Sandra Gondouin (ERIAC, Université de Rouen), dans « Métamorphoses, diffractions et métissage de la Bible dans l’œuvre de Rubén Darío », traite de l’influence sur Rubén Darío de la Bible, notamment la figure de Moïse, dès ses premiers poèmes. Mais ce livre est avant tout une source d’inspiration récréative et esthétique pour créer des personnages, des images mêlant sources bibliques, mythologies grecque et latine, nordiques ou orientales. Sandra Gondouin souligne l’association entre modèles bibliques et sensualité ainsi que le rapport très distendu à la Bible, le profane l’emportant toujours sur le sacré. L’auteur nicaraguayen se rapproche en cela de Pablo Neruda, dont l’œuvre est décryptée par Dominique Casimiro (Université d’Artois), dans « L’Évangile selon Pablo Neruda », même si les convictions religieuses des deux auteurs les opposent. Les motifs religieux sont en effet utilisés pour leur pouvoir d’évocation par Pablo Neruda, qui leur enlève toute valeur religieuse. La rhétorique et les images bibliques sont récupérées par l’auteur chilien, mais avec un détournement et une critique violente du clergé. Thomas Pynchon, dont l’œuvre est analysée par Gilles Chamerois (HCTI, Université de Brest) dans « Mason & Dixon de Thomas Pynchon et la quête du Paradis terrestre au dix-huitième siècle », revisite quant à lui la naissance de l’Amérique et la mission de Christophe Colomb, marquée par l’échec puisqu’elle n’a pas permis de trouver une nouvelle route vers les Indes. Cet échec le relierait à Adam et Ève, expulsés du paradis terrestre, Thomas Pynchon établissant un lien, lui aussi, avec d’autres figures mythiques comme Orphée ou Perceval, précurseur en cela des auteurs

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hispano-américains précédemment cités. Selon Edwige Calios (CRINI, Université de Nantes), dans « Rejeu narratif et épistémologique des mythoï bibliques aux origines et dans le rendu politico-discursif du “réel merveilleux” d’Alejo Carpentier », le syncrétisme n’est plus lié à la mythologie européenne, mais à la Santería afro-cubaine : cet auteur cubain la conçoit comme « le manifeste de résistance des populations esclaves africaines à l’aliénation occidentale2 ». Quant à Julien Roger (CRIMIC, Paris Sorbonne), dans « Jorge Luis Borges. Pour une Babel heureuse », il se focalise sur Babel, à la fois dans la production de l’auteur argentin (« La bibliothèque de Babel », nouvelle parue en 1941) et pour la revue et la maison d’édition « Bibliothèque Argentine de Bonnes Éditions Littéraires » qu’il a créées.

15 Cette forte influence de la Bible comme source d’inspiration créative dans la littérature ne se limite toutefois pas à celle-ci, comme le souligne Marie Chosson, déjà citée, ou Anath Ariel de Vidas (CNRS), dans « Le Tonnerre, Quetzalcóatl et le prophète Élie chez les Teenek veracruzains (nord-est du Mexique) ». Marie Chosson observe la réécriture des récits, le Christ devenant le principal protagoniste, tandis que la toponymie autochtone et certaines spécificités géographiques locales sont parfois intégrées au récit. Anath Ariel de Vidas fait un travail similaire sur les « personnages bibliques [qui] sont renommés selon une nomenclature autochtone3 ».

16 Entre créativité et marketing, ce colloque a également abordé la question de l’évolution des pratiques religieuses et le rôle du cinéma. Mokhtar Ben Barka a précisé que, chaque année, 63 000 catholiques étaient convertis par les protestants, mais que les catholiques restaient la première force religieuse unie, avec 27 % de la population aux États-Unis, tandis que le protestantisme est hétérogène. Dans un cas comme dans l’autre, s’adapter apparaît comme une nécessité, d’où la place croissante de la musique, l’organisation de cérémonies diffusées par internet ou à la télévision, la construction de méga-églises. Le cinéma joue alors un rôle non négligeable. C’est ce qu’a démontré Nathalie Dupont (HLLI, Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale), avec « Bible et cinéma : une source d’inspiration très américaine ». Si l’Ancien et le Nouveau Testament ont inspiré de nombreux films qui furent d’importants succès commerciaux, il y a également une industrie du cinéma chrétien, la Bible et ses préceptes servant de matrice pour un public chrétien qui représente un marché réel. Véritable best-seller, la Bible et les films qu’elle inspire sont « rentables », comme le sont, dans les années 90, les parcs à thèmes, les maisons d’édition, les maisons de disques, les documentaires à destination des fidèles et des méga-églises qui peuvent accueillir 30 000 spectateurs. La Passion du Christ, de Mel Gibson, en araméen et latin, attire plus de spectateurs que Jurassic Park. Nathalie Dupont en vient à parler de « Godlywood », avec ses propres oscars et un public qui n’est pas seulement chrétien, d’où des campagnes marketing différenciées chrétiens / non chrétiens. Toutefois, ce phénomène est essentiellement américain et les films produits sont souvent difficiles à exporter. En outre, les critiques sont également présentes aux États-Unis, avec dans certains cas un refus du prosélytisme. Nathalie Dupont en vient alors à poser la question de la Godxploitation et des limites du genre.

17 Ce colloque a ainsi permis d’aborder la question de l’influence présente et passée de la Bible, aussi bien parmi les catholiques que parmi les protestants, dans l’Amérique hispanophone et anglophone, depuis la conquête jusqu’à l’époque actuelle. Il en ressort une présence à la fois constante et variable dans ses formes et ses effets. Elle reste, quoi qu’il en soit, un élément déterminant, y compris pour les non-croyants.

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NOTES

1. Cette citation, comme la suivante, sont extraites de l’appel à communication diffusé pour le colloque. 2. Citation extraite du résumé fourni par l’auteure. 3. Citation extraite du résumé fourni par l’auteure.

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEUR

MARIANNICK GUENNEC Université Bretagne-Sud, EA 4249, HCTI, F-56100 Lorient, France

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International Ecopoetics Conference “Dwellings of Enchantment : Writing and Reenchanting the Earth” Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, June 22-25, 2016

Diane Deplante, Caroline Durand-Rous and Fanny Monnier

1 This first edition of the International Conference on Ecopoetics organized by Bénédicte Meillon, under the aegis of the research center CRESEM (Centre de Recherche sur les Sociétés et Environnements en Méditerranée) of the University of Perpignan Via Domitia, explored the literary manifestations of diverse interactions linking humans to the non-human. The conference gathered a hundred scholars, novelists and poets who addressed the artistic means of promoting a biocentric view of the world. In so doing, they engaged with an ongoing reflection upon the interrelatedness of critical approaches beyond the usually assigned labels and categories of “ecofeminism,” “nature writing,” “environmental literature,” or “literature of place.” The communications, arranged in thematic panels, contributed to revealing how written words can re-infuse the land with magic and meaning, and thus how they can “reenchant the earth.”

Ecopoetics and Language

Françoise Besson (Université de Toulouse, France), “Nature Speech and Storytelling : The Voice of Wisdom in the Non-Human”

2 In her paper, Françoise Besson explored the link between human and non-human voices and the possibility of orality granted to the non-human world through literature. Asserting that “the communication has been broken with earth,” she invited us to apprehend landscapes as places of enchantment, enchanted places, that “appear

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as a storytelling,” thus allowing for the mingling and interaction of human and non- human voices and worlds. Through literary, but also zoological and biological examples, Françoise Besson showed that “the non-human voice must be heard for us to understand our human world and voice” in order to “watch over what is unlike us, not break it.”

Charles Holdefer (Université de Poitiers, France), “Necessary Wonder : Promises and Pitfalls of Enchantment”

3 Throughout his paper, Charles Holdefer showed that, thanks to the concept of literarity, a text, and in particular ecopoetic writings, could become a “dwelling of enchantment,” re-enchanting suggesting the return to a prior state. “A pre-condition to enchantment is to be under the influence of a charm, a spell,” he said. Charles Holdefer stated that the text is a territory of its own and that it serves as a source of wonder, thus offering the required pre-condition. According to him, it is necessary to admit that there is a lack of art to talk about nature and that nature is “masticated” by our language. However, literature remains the very medium that allows to change one’s point of view and that lets other voices be heard ; “it is an escape into the world, and not from the world.”

Rediscovering Nature

Bénédicte Meillon (Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, France), “The Ecopoet(h)ics of Interspecies Connections in Barbar Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer”

4 In Prodigal Summer (2000), Barbara Kingsolver illustrated a biocentric vision of the world, thus educating her readers about ecology. Bénédicte Meillon analyzed the novel in a threefold study of this literary depiction of an interconnected web of life forms. In a part called ‘Revealing Natural Wonders’, she addressed the intersections between narratives and a literary tapestry inspired by natural patterns. In ‘Becoming Animal’, Bénédicte Meillon highlighted the ambiguity of animal representation in the novel : partly anthropomorphic and partly acknowledging the inaccessibility of this otherness. However, a pervasive animalizing of human reactions and some parallels sensually experienced through common textures reveal the possibility of substantial exchanges between realms. In ‘Being Attuned and Re-enchanting’, quoting Scott Knickerbocker, she compared Barbara Kingsolver’s writing to a “sensuous poeisis” that expresses the wild music of the earth and gives a central role to the sense of smell in deciphering the world : drawing on the common etymology of the terms “humus”, the French verb “humer” and the notion of humility, she concluded with the necessity to ground ecopoetic analyses back in the sensual experience of the fertile soil.

Frédérique Spill (Université de Picardie, France), “Ron Rash’s Stories of ‘the world’s understory’ : Renewing Wonder in Above the Waterfall”

5 In his latest novel, Above the Waterfall (2016), Ron Rash blurred categories to show how difficult it was to understand and preserve the world. This hybrid object, multiplying

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explicit echoes to literature and other arts (Hopkins’ poetry, Johnny Cash’s music, Hopper’s paintings, Lascaux...), plays on interactions between text and images, conveying a sense of freedom to its form. Furthermore, Frédérique Spill showed how the author questions the arbitrary form of words as developed by Saussure. Indeed, throughout the novel, Becky, the main character, comments on the animal signifiers, trying to find a correspondence between reality and naming. In Above the Waterfall, nature is made of words and subsequently needs to be further invoked by new words that Becky invents in order to reflect her physical experience of the world, thus developing a musical language characterized by alliterations and assonances.

Native American Cosmovision

Maxime Petit (Université de Toulouse, France), “Our Land is This Land : Old and New Ways of Filming Indian Land in Native American Documentary Filmmaking”

6 Maxime Petit first drew on Nanook of the North (1922) to remind the audience of the imagery of early documentaries about Native peoples which aimed to show the remaining traces of a “vanishing race”. Quoting Steven Lerhold’s assertion that “Native American documentary constitutes an emerging genre,” he then moved to contemporary examples of Native filmmaking that, reversely, aim to show a history of survival. Abenaki film director Alanis Obomisawin has thus followed a tribal court fight against the expansion of a golf course on Mohawk territory. Choosing to shoot the Native presence on this contested space, she has illustrated the ancient belief that land is an area of both material and spiritual survival for the band. Their relation to trees is especially significant in that regard. In the documentary, trees materialize the permanency of the Iroquois Confederacy as well as the transmission of tradition from the previous generations to the next.

Lionel Larré (Université de Bordeaux, France), “Seeing the Indigenous Beauty of the Land : A Reading of John Joseph Mathews’ Work”

7 This communication explored Native writer John Joseph Mathews’ writings and more specifically his statement of a “placental attachment to earth.” Lionel Larré studied Mathews’ depiction of the visceral need for empathy towards natural elements. Seeing culture from the vantage point of nature, John Joseph Mathews intended to retranscribe the chant of nature that unfolds an invisible landscape only perceptible to the beings attuned to their territory. Underlining the issue of dislocation and the experience of uprootedness of most indigenous peoples, Mathews asserts the natural urge for expression, acknowledging however the limits of words and symbols to convey the song of the land. Arguing for a poetic promotion of land ethics, the Osage author gives voice to a mystical re-enchantment of the earth.

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Ecopoetics in the West

Éliane Liddell (Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, France), “Reenchanting the West’s Ecological Dialogue with the World : What a Long Way to Go. Reflections on the 2014 US Documentary Years of Living Dangerously”

8 To Éliane Liddell, the documentary genre reaches a large public and plays a powerful role in shaping our perception of the global ecological crisis, since it makes visible the changes and the destruction operated by human activities on landscapes and ecosystems. In her presentation, Éliane Liddell focused on a 2014 Showtime TV documentary entitled Years of Living Dangerously and more particularly on the second episode, starring Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger, in which the issue of palm oil plantations along with deforestation in Indonesia is tackled. The “complacent tone” of this episode towards Indonesia led Éliane Liddell to raise the following question : “How can the West install a new dialogue with poor countries to heal the planet ?”

Paul Linholdt (Eastern Washington University, USA), “Thinking like a River”

9 Many aquatic ecosystems, as well as indigenous people, have been endangered by damming in the United States. Fish and tribes have been “dewilded,” a word coined by Paul Lindholdt, echoing the term “rewilding”—meaning, from an ecological point of view, a mass restoration of ecosystems and, from a humanitarian point of view, becoming wild ourselves by working on behalf of nature and taking risks in being activists. Paul Lindholdt’s paper focused on the impacts of dams on ecosystems and people, and on the rewilding of the US rivers by “artivists.” These artists of rewilding, along with their productions, represent what it is like to “think like a river.” Thus, they show that “wildness is very vital to humankind in a performative mode.”

David Latour (Université d’Orléans, France), “Sean Penn’s Into the Wild or Filming Nature with/and Passion”

10 David Latour’s paper focused on Sean Penn’s depiction and filming of nature, in his 2006 movie Into the Wild, through the hero’s passionate, though lethal, relationship with nature and the landscapes. David Latour enhanced the latter’s naive vision of nature, and drew a parallel between Christopher “Supertramp” McCandless and Thoreau ; both wanted to get away from an oppressive civilization and both found their “Walden,” although what appeared as a welcoming and loving nature to Christopher eventually led him to meet his end prematurely. David Latour explored Sean Penn’s personal reading of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (2008) and emphasized how, in the process of filming this literary non-fiction, Penn reflected upon the political and philosophical implications of such a return to the wild. Likewise, he analyzed how the director managed to convey the protagonist’s admiring and naively enthusiastic vision of nature.

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Questioning Representations

Pierre-Antoine Pellerin (Université de Lyon, France), “Of (Dying) Mice and (Crying) Men : Masculinity, In/significant Others, and Jack Kerouac’s Ecopoetics”

11 In his paper, Pierre-Antoine Pellerin focused on Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical cycle of fourteen novels, and particularly on Desolation Angels (1965), in which the narrator tries to escape from the feminizing effects of civilization and goes into the wilderness to regain masculine virtue and courage, and to fight against his domestication by reconquering an authentic masculine identity through contact with nature and wild animals. However, Pierre-Antoine Pellerin revealed the gendered bias on animality as being linked to an undomesticated, untamed form of masculinity, and showed that Kerouac’s main teaching from the animal world is compassion ; the relationship between masculinity and animality may lead to intersubjectivity through a process of identification, questioning man’s cruelty towards animal life.

Teaching Ecology through Wonder

Ansul Rao (University of Delhi, India), “Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior : A Lesson in Ecological Humility”

12 In her paper, Ansul Rao explored Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior (2012) starring the monarch butterfly as its main subject and critical force, going away from anthropocentrism. Ansul Rao showed that Kingsolver merged anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches and reckoned that all forms of life are in danger. “All species are endangered by human activities, including humans themselves” was how Ansul Rao interpreted the strong parallels between displaced butterflies and displaced humans. As Ansul Rao put it, notions of reciprocity, interrelatedness, interdependence, non- hierarchical relationship between humans and nature are at the core of Kingsolver’s writing and they participate in this lesson she taught us in ecological humility, as defined by Josh A. Weinstein.

Matilde Martín González (Universidad de La Laguna, Spain), “Lorine Niedecker’s poetics of Cyclic Renewal : The Material-Semiotic Perspective in ‘Wintergreen Ridge’”

13 Matilde Martín González focused on surrealist, imagist and objectivist Lorine Niedecker and her poem “Wintergreen Ridge” (1967) which she considered as a “material” ecocritical text. In this 94-tercet sequence without punctuation, she highlighted the co- presence of human and non-human life where butterflies, men and rocks are placed on the same level, where matter is invested in a community of living creatures. This environmental poetry was consequently informed by the world’s material phenomena and interpreted them. Matilde Martín González showed that, this way, Lorine Niedecker’s text managed to convey “the material-semiotic reality” of the poet’s world through the poetics of entanglement among different life forms.

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Carmen Flys Junquera (Universidad de Alcalá, Spain), “Listening and Seeing Nature : Mutual Discovery and Disclosure”

14 Through the study of Linda Hogan’s Solar Storm (1994) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Carmen Flys Junquera showed how both works illustrate Val Plumwood’s notion of “dialogical interspecies ethics,” for nature becomes a subject of its own, allowing for mutual discovery. According to Carmen Flys Junquera’s analysis, both authors convey, in their texts, the notions of reciprocity—observing and being observed—and similarity—putting humans and non-humans on the same plane. But they both acknowledge the human bias, human centeredness. She stated that literature allows to experience a sense of wonder as well as the diversity of ways and paths leading to knowledge. Likewise, mutual respect and recognition between human and non-human worlds subjectify nature and establish a dialogical and reciprocal relationship, which, according to Carmen Flys Junquera, enables the discovery of the self through the confrontation with an other glance, offering a “non-anthropocentric perspective” and enhancing humility towards nature.

Ecofeminist Perspectives

Margot Lauwers (Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, France), “‘Oh how brilliant, I have just added aesthetic sensitivity […] as way to save the world.’ Ellen Meloy or How to Reinhabit the ‘Empty’ Desert”

15 Ellen Meloy, an American author, wrote four novels within a decade before her death in 2004. Margot Lauwers’ analysis focused on three of her books : The Anthropology of Turquoise (2002), Eating Stone (2005) and The Last Cheater’s Waltz (1999). Known as a desert writer, Ellen Meloy gives voice in these novels to the numerous life forms present in the desert. Indeed, the landscapes are often personified and nature becomes a protagonist. Furthermore, she connects the human world and nature arguing that no species is superior to another and that humans can learn from nature. Asserting that she has received knowledge from the animals—a knowledge that does not require language to be understood or transmitted—Ellen Meloy warns us about the greatest threat for humans : the lack of imagination that stems from the absence of the natural world. Calling to the reader’s sense of “answerability,” Ellen Meloy seeks to re-enchant a land that is seen as empty by most people.

Dwelling in Landscapes

Lee Schweninger (University of North Carolina, USA), “‘Where language touches the earth’ : Need, Naming, and Knowledge”

16 Quoting Native American author N. Scott Momaday, Lee Schweninger wondered if by losing the ability to accurately name places, mankind had not also lost the ability to relate to such places. He highlighted the general impoverishment of our knowledge of nature when confronted to the multiplicity of species. Subsequently, we now have to deal with the impossibility to phrase the environmental problems we are currently

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facing. Lee Schweninger then elaborated on a common political belief : “If we cannot phrase the problem then the problem does not exist.” He furthermore addressed the irreversible process at work when the stories are lost, highlighting the fact that we have no means to retrieve those forgotten words. Finally, arguing that language is our only chance for survival, Lee Schweninger advocated the rediscovery of a landscaped- based language through scholarly dialogues about nature writing.

Wes Berry (University of Western Kentucky, USA), “Singing the Body Electrified, or Poetics of the Bardo from Walt Whitman to Gretel Ehrlich”

17 In this talk, Wes Berry explored American author Gretel Ehrlich’s notion of “organscape” which acknowledged the body as our first landscape, a place where we learned fundamental lessons. A graphic trauma having alienated her from her own body, Gretel Ehrlich needed to find healing through immersion into nature. By doing so she put into perspective the body as a bioregion, our very first home, paralleling outer bioregions. In his study, Wes Berry referred to the Buddhist concept of Bardo envisioning a transient place where the soul rests after death before going back to earth to inhabit a new body. Indeed, in her memoir, Gretel Ehrlich erased the limits separating her recovering body and the transient spaces where she successively settled down, by describing natural phenomena through the vocabulary of the body and, reversely, by personifying wind and water.

Online Resources

18 The program, abstracts, biographies, and videos of the keynote addresses and of the interviews of the guest writers are available on the Ecopoetics project website : http:// ecopoeticsperpignan.com/

INDEX

Subjects: Actualité de la recherche

AUTHORS

DIANE DEPLANTE Université de Perpignan Via Domitia

CAROLINE DURAND-ROUS Université de Perpignan Via Domitia

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FANNY MONNIER Université de Perpignan Via Domitia

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Fiction Rescues History: Don DeLillo Conference in Paris Paris Diderot University and Paris Sorbonne University, February 18th – 20th, 2016

Luca Ferrando Battistà, Maud Bougerol, Aliette Ventejoux, Béatrice Pire and Sarah Boulet

1 The Don DeLillo conference which took place in Paris from Thursday, February 18th to Saturday, February 20th, 2016 was a major event graced by the presence of the author himself and prestigious DeLillo scholars, and attended by a numerous audience. It was hosted by Paris Diderot University and Paris Sorbonne University, and organized by Antoine Cazé, Karim Daanoune, Jean-Yves Pellegrin and Anne-Laure Tissut.

2 In the call for papers, the organizers remarked how “Don DeLillo unearths the mechanisms of history by securely anchoring his fiction in historical reality” and how “the stuff of history is constitutive of his fiction”. The numerous Don DeLillo scholars who attended did indeed try to “focus on the shaping power of history in DeLillo's work.”

3 On Friday evening, the performance of DeLillo’s play The Word for Snow at the Cité internationale, attended by the author, added a welcome counterpoint to the conference.

4 Although the following account does not cover all the workshops of the conference, it nevertheless gives an idea of the areas covered

Thursday, February 18

5 The conference started with a speech given by Don DeLillo, a reflection upon time and writing. From the kid from the Bronx that he used to be till the last, recently published novel Zero K., DeLillo’s speech rotated on some key concepts: Time, How deep is time? how far down in the life of matter do we have to go before we understand what time is?. The Image, both seen as the visual quality of writing and the frequent use of photography and pictures in his novels; the Word, the beauty of the alphabet in its inner plasticity, the

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possibility of words to describe in their physiognomy alone just what the writer means; the Room, the power of those spaces and of the men enclosed in them.

6 The speech took shape around the writer’s room and what gradually comes into sight, from his notebook to the typewriter (Do I remember the novel? I remember the typewriter): every object has a light that can retrospectively illuminate all the work required to write a novel and that may often be forgotten.

7 The speech ended after the author answered some questions raised by the public as to the relationship between the novel and history, opening onto a discussion on the power of narrative to give history a meaning and, somehow, to rescue it.

Workshop 1: Violence and History (Moderator: L. Barrett)

8 In the first workshop, three papers were presented and they all concerned time to some extent.

Paolo Simonetti (Università di Roma La Sapienza): “History of Futures Past: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge”.

9 Paolo Simonetti introduced a comparison between Cosmopolis and Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Both novels were read in the light of Melville’s Confidence Man since, as Simonetti argued, “Melville systematically challenges the chronological time and the rational transparency of mechanical or organic time that foster ideological progress.” Cosmopolis and Bleeding Edge deal with time in a similar way, more specifically the cosmological time of such a cosmopolis as New York and its relation with technology. The temporal dislocation of the main characters, the obsolescence of the city and the narrative fragmentation recall Derrida’s differAnce. According to Simonetti DeLillo and Pynchon’s characters live in a Derridean “futur antérieur”, “a future that has not come yet and so it has not been determined, but which retrospectively defines that past which will make it possible.” Living in the “futur antérieur” is tricky because it is possible to change it and, in Simonetti’s point of view it is through this concept of time that fiction can rescue history.

Isabel Lane (Yale University): “Representing the Arms: Time and By-product in the Russian-American 1990s”

10 The manipulation of time performed by the nuclear weapon and waste was the main theme of the second paper, presented by Isabel Lane. She also quoted Derrida to describe the cold war particular timing status, continuously dealing with the “never experienced”. Comparing DeLillo’s Underworld and Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard Lane argued that “the nuclear has altered the time” and space of the novel. She also underlined the complex relationship between the bomb and its nuclear by-product which are linked in a cycle. In Underworld the bomb blast allows the final destruction of the waste, while in Blue Lard it is instead the by-product that travels through time and makes the explosion possible.

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Matt Kavanagh (Okanagan College): “American Bloodline: on the Origins of Libra”

11 The first day ended with Matt Kavanagh’s paper which first brought to light a sixteen pages’ film script written by DeLillo while working on the Rolling Stone essay “American Blood.” The script tells the story of a young woman who coming back to her parent’s house finds out she has a half-brother who was given for adoption at birth. The search for her brother becomes a quest that defines her own identity, and ends when she finds him in Mexico City involved in an American Cuban conspiracy to kill Kennedy. What is interesting according to Kavanagh is the singular perspective from which the conspiracy is looked upon as it is approached only laterally in the script, completely leaving out the real Lee Harvey Oswald.

Friday, February 19

Workshop 2: The Suspension of History (Moderator J. Zubeck)

Nicholas Manning (Université Paris-Sorbonne, France): “The Uses of Boredom. Don DeLillo and the Emotional Disengagement with History”

12 Nicholas Manning explores boredom as “a shield from deeper feelings”, as Don DeLillo put it in Players (1977). According to him, the response of De Lillo’s characters when faced with threatening historical affects is a form of despondency, boredom becoming a defence mechanism against the endangerment of the self. Consequently, boredom defines the self by “keeping man from engaging with the world”. Manning suggests that for characters like Pammy, it even becomes an act of rebellion, because it defends and frees the self from the restrictions of self-definition. He quotes Nietzsche and his conception of boredom as the shield and what is shielded against, which leads to a paradoxical conception of boredom: a barrier both against the disappointment of the desires being met and the fulfilment of those desires. According to Manning, boredom thus appears as a disconnection from community and history, the collective becoming of this community. Boredom in Don De Lillo’s novels works alongside the difficulty of constructing a coherent narrative of history. Things change but the self does not change with them, so boredom allows the experience of time and meaning within the self. According to Manning, we, as readers, are similarly absorbed. The characters also seek boredom as a form of attention. The quest to forge a personal history is linked to the notion of attention in Don DeLillo’s work because the act of making sense and attention are on the same hermeneutic plane. The characters are absorbed, in a state of suspension, which paves the way for the historic real. According to Manning, the self is a historical being, so it is accepted that it cannot be constructed outside of time. Boredom, however, is the disturbing possibility that it can.

Mark Osteen (Loyola University Maryland, USA): “The Living and the Undead: Don DeLillo’s Late Style”

13 According to Mark Osteen, Don De Lillo’s “lateness” can be defined by “crafting moments of being, motionless and static”. The author is fascinated with death, loss and mourning. In his late works, he explores lateness in themes and characters rather than style, through experiences of suspended life. His late works focus on “undeath” rather than death. The characters occupy non-normative bodily and mental spaces, in

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particular in Falling Man and White Noise. Don DeLillo thus frames the posttraumatic state of his characters. In Love-Lies-Bleeding, Alex’s condition represents that of the other characters: they are all in a form of vegetative state, using his body as a blank canvas on which they can project everything they want. They feed on his essence, which makes more striking his emotional absence. In Point Omega, the shadow of the “undeath” of Mrs. Bates, through 24 Hours Psycho, looms over the plot, even Jessie is more present after her disappearance. In his most recent fiction, “The Starveling”, the characters live at pause, in a state suspended between the living and the dead. These suspended figures represent “our liminal age, dangling between two worlds”.

Linda Kauffman (University of Maryland, USA): “History and Slow Time: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega”

14 Linda Kauffman explores historical consciousness in Point Omega, which is framed by portraits of two serial killers. In the first part, Gordon cauterises a classic with 24 Hour Psycho, through serial repetition: we are shuttered into the sensations of the character who watches the film. The second part deals with serial repetition through the figure of Elster, who excels in linguistics and used his expertise to convince the American people of the validity of his actions. 24 Hour Psycho and The Fog of War – a film in which each frame is “seared in the World’s collective memory” – converge through history and slow time: fiction rescues history. Through the transactional nature of new technologies, the spectators become active, “masters of remediation”. The subject of war remains an open wound in the American consciousness. According to Kauffman, there is more blindness than insight in the characters of Point Omega. As with McNamara and Rumsfeld, DeLillo’s serial killer goes free.

Plenary Lecture by Michael Naas (DePaul University, USA): “DeLillo’s contraband”

15 Michael Naas explores what has made Don DeLillo a “true American original”: his ingenious exploitation of literary contraband and of literature as contraband. Don DeLillo “smuggles” his unique narrative technique into prose through a “contrabanded relationship” between words and things. Beyond the use of items of contraband such as knives and firearms in his stories, Don DeLillo focuses on secret organizations which “circulate in a contraband discourse and secret codes” such as the mafia, religious groups and cults, sometimes indistinguishable from the organizations they are supposed to combat. According to Michael Naas, “it’s never band against contraband, but always one underground against another”.

16 Michael Naas explains that Don De Lillo’s novels deal with language in a way that covert communications one thinks one can control actually dwell just below the surface. This leads to the emergence of an underground language in which subtleties and ambiguities aim at simplicity to create a contraband “in and of language”. Don De Lillo’s mode of writing is a form of counterlanguage supplying a web of contraband narratives in which incongruous elements are “smuggled in”, but meant to be detected, while trying to pass undetected. According to Michael Naas, there is a back and forth movement between “band and contraband”, “narrative and counternarrative”, triggered by shifts in language and changes in register. The “contraband effect”, which is the emergence of a new “track” in the narrative, takes place as words and things become confused, allowing the reader to see the movement between the two “bands” to

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the point where they intersect without ever merging or being absorbed because “one is never the dialectical counterpart of the other, but irritates it”.

17 Michael Naas uses Don DeLillo’s “organic shrapnel” to explain how, in the case of 9/11, the images of the event interrupt, infect and ultimately contraband the event itself. In the same mode, the codes and secret languages of ideology, ubiquitous in his prose, “enter and become” the reader, the inorganic revealing itself as something different from what we thought it was. According to Michael Naas, literature “smuggles” within us little bits of language, fragments, words that Don DeLillo has signed, “infected”, periods and commas that are like little bits of shrapnel delaying the identification of the subject.

18 According to Michael Naas, the contraband is what makes the band possible.

Excerpts from Workshop 3: The Refuse of History (moderator C. Davedon) and Workshop 5: Inside and Outside History (Moderator: L. Kaufman)

Aleksandra Vukotic (University of Belgrad, Serbia): “A Second Chance for the Anathematised: (Re)Entering the Narrative”

19 Aleksandra Vukotic focuses on a number of characters in DeLillo’s fiction, who are desperate to secure their own place in history and who struggle to reclaim the narrative stolen from them. She opposes these characters, unremarkable people who become misfits, to another group made up of important historical or public figures. For the villains, terrorists and other invisible outcasts, violence becomes the ultimate way of entering the system. Analyzing, among others, the example of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra and Hammad in Falling Man, she explores the opposition that appears in DeLillo’s fiction between the margins (with characters under the historical radar) and the center, where one finds important historical figures. She argues that exclusion from society is part of the construction of DeLillo’s villains. As a consequence, they try to rewrite the narrative that was stolen from them, while at the same time fighting for visibility rather than trying to change the system. Vukotic argues that the stories of DeLillo’s misfits are lost to history, and shows how his novels relate the importance of understanding evil rather than stigmatizing it. She emphasizes the role of the media and celebrity culture in the fight for visibility, as well as the connection between the lack of media ethics and violence. She concludes her paper by asking if DeLillo’s novels show sympathy for these outcasts, stressing that the author rather tries to understand the villains in a wider historical context. According to her, fiction rescues history by granting the villains a chance to reclaim their stories and see their humanity restored. Thus she reminds us of the importance of the voice of fiction to look at the stories of misfits, and grant them a right to their own narrative.

Rebecca Harding (University of Sussex, England): “‘To float this image free of history’: Ahistorical Forms in Mao II”

20 Rebecca Harding interrogates the relationship between image and text and focuses on the form and complex status of the photographed face. She argues that photography plays an important and intriguing role in DeLillo’s fiction and that the author’s interest lies not only in the medium of photography, but also in the possible exchange of

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meaning between people and photographs. In order to illustrate this questioning regarding the nature of the photographed face as well as the relationship between image and text, she focuses first on an interview given by DeLillo about his writing process, in which he stresses the importance, for him, of a photograph of Borges. Studying the personal and evocative engagement of the writer with the photograph, she goes on to analyze DeLillo’s approach to writing, the visual specificity of the photographed faces that appear in his fiction, more particularly that of Mao in Mao II. She analysis Warhol’s screen prints as opposed to Betty Grable’s image, an icon prior to the television age and with a direct connection to the passage of history itself, whereas Warhol’s icons are equivalent and can be exchanged. Thanks to these examples, she lays stress on the possibilities of the image to express what language cannot.

Luca Ferrando Battistà (Université Paris Diderot, France): “‘The Room a World’. The room: narrative device and space of progressing in Great Jones Street, Libra, The Body Artist, Falling Man and Cosmopolis”

21 Luca Ferrando Battistà focuses on two aspects of the idea of the room in DeLillo’s work: the fact that it has a double meaning, and then its metropolitan nature. First, the room is both a physical and a mental space. It allows a new temporality to emerge, utterly different from that of the outer world. Taking the examples of Great Jones Street and The Body Artist, Battistà underlines the difference between two ways of experiencing time: the objective time of history on the one hand, and personal temporality on the other. It is only by going out of the room that the characters can get back to the world’s temporality, but exiting the room can be devastating.

22 Battista also insists on the metropolitan character of the room which, in DeLillo’s fiction, is most of the time located in New York. Without this metropolitan quality, the room is altogether isolated from the world and can become a terminal location. The room also functions as a space where the characters can create their counternarratives.

23 Rooms are shown as spaces allowing a transformation, where characters also undergo a change of temporality: time escapes from its boundaries, external time increasingly resembles internal time.

Workshop 4: The Subject of History (Moderator M. Osteen)

Laura Barrett (State University New York, USA): “’Living in the third person’: Don DeLillo’s Uncanny America”

24 Laura Barrett explores the concept of home in Don DeLillo’s fiction. According to her, “homes are ambiguous signs, haunted by the eerie sounds of technology”. The characters move between home and homelessness, safety and exposition. For example, in Americana, the home is “a space that illustrates the uncanniness of the American dream/nightmare”. The reality becomes flimsy in the relationship between the uncanny self – another human or something inhuman –, but also between life and death. The intrusion of technology into the homes “destabilizes our understanding of what it is to be human”. She takes the example of the telephone, “trope of disindividualization”. According to Barrett, the unhomely is built in the fabric of home and thus every space bears a tension between comfort and alienation, particularly in Americana. The themes of death and life explored in the novel echo the liminal spaces

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that characterize the uncanny. The character of David tries to “eradicate his relationship with his country by doing an autobiography without an I, a home without a home”. He uses a motel room, a “space of casual connections, defined by transience, to soak the growing uniformity of American culture’, which results in the loss of the self. According to Barrett, home is less a place than a point of view, and America is less a country than an image, that of Americana. She concludes by saying that the American dream made “no solace for the truth between the symbols” on the model of the uncanny which appears here as the reenchantment of a world disenchanted by too much information and too little heart.

Aaron Smith (University Françoise Rabelais): “The Consolations and Delusions of Narrative: De Lillo’s Narrative Double Bind”

25 Aaron Smith explores Don DeLillo’s problematic concern for representing the historical. In a double approach of the subject, Don DeLillo exploits paradoxical conceptions of the historical, at times evocative, at times reclusive, sometimes present- oriented and sometimes future-oriented. His narrative structure is often neurotic, mirroring the problematical need for structure in the themes and on the characters’ part. According to Smith, there are organic links between narrative composition and historical agency in Don DeLillo’s prose. The characters are “on a collision course with a very messy reality”, they “fall prey to the delusions of history as a classical narrative or pattern”, and they are “betrayed by faith and design”. Smith explains that the reluctance to move beyond a linear vision of history leads to a dismal future for the characters. The emergence of counternarratives – alternative narratives, which are nonlinear – creates ambivalence in the prose between opposing narrative modes, notably in Falling Man and Cosmopolis. According to Smith, Don DeLillo undermines in his novels the delusional conception of a historical narrative through combining formalistic and anti-formalistic approaches, a double bind between a goal-oriented and a present-oriented fiction.

Cornelius Collins (Fordham University, USA): “‘Checking the Local Papers, Wherever I Happened to Be’: Don De Lillo’s Research and Rewriting of Contemporary History”

26 Cornelius Collins explores Don DeLillo’s relationship to history in his novels through his readings and research. As a novelist of globalization and global unrest, Don DeLillo exploits the discrepancy between what happened and his research, creating “a narrative style marked by ambiguity and distance”, focused on the margins of history. Through extensive research, Don DeLillo’s has shaped his perspective on globalization. However, according to Collins, he creates authorial space – and autonomy – by departing from his source material. Magazines and news reports are crucial to his research because he’s intellectually interested in public discourse, but literary and rhetoric arguments, as well as essays on global politics and debates also inform his prose. In his novels, he reflects on terrorism, totalitarianism and resistance. Ambiguity emerges from the text while he first articulates the product of his research, then reinterprets it. According to Collins, his creative expression is marshalled against the destructive forces of capitalism, most notably in Mao II.

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Workshop 7: Measuring History (Moderator C. Collins)

Mark Tardi (University of Nizwa, Oman): “The Calculus of History: Ratner’s Star, Gödel’s Incompleteness, and the Vicious Infinite Regret”

27 Mark Tardi focuses on math as a recurring motif in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star in which a child math prodigy is tasked with deciphering what is thought to be a message from space. He links the text with Gödel’s Incompleteness, a theorem that is a paradox. According to Tardi, the language of mathematics is poetic because theories are sometimes so abstract that they cannot be written down. All through Ratner’s Star, the mathematical and the dynamic sublime are paired, creating a conflation of both. The emergence of mysticism in the text makes the scientific elements seem more and more irrational. There’s a phenomenon of simultaneous expansion and contraction throughout the novel as Don DeLillo contracts words and names in increasingly smaller parts. Don DeLillo’s discourse on technology creating social regression echoes with mathematics, in which the consequences of the insights of the research are usually unknown at first. However, according to Tardi, regression doesn’t have to be negative, it is natural, a source of civilization that forces us to revert back to ancient sources.

Collin Meissner (University of Notre Dame, USA): “‘All that howling space’: Fiction as History in Don De Lillo’s Late Novels” Read by Karin Daanoune

28 Collin Meissner explores Don DeLillo’s concern with words and images that we can use to make sense of attacks such as 9/11. How we can move forward as a society depends on the tension between reality and fiction. According to Meissner, both history and how we have come to understand it frame Don DeLillo’s novels, notably in Point Omega. The language is “stretched to the breaking points”, the author creating gaps between what the characters say and what they mean, or between what they mean and what other people understand. In Don DeLillo’s novels, as terror thrives in a binary paradox, “the absence of knowledge is filled by a narrative”. According to Meissner, “the macronarratives of our moments embed themselves in our conscience to provide answers to questions we haven’t asked yet”. Don DeLillo’s narrative structure “moves in and out of patterns similar to PTSD”, which results for the reader and the characters in destabilisation, confrontation and finally escape. The reader is required to reconstruct a “mosaic of meanings” which results either in sensory overload – in Falling Man – or in sensory underload – in Point Omega –. According to Meissner, this process works towards exhaustion because in the end the novels reach a destination where the fictional/real point has ended, a form of “introversion” to quote Teilhard de Chardin.

Jacqueline Zubeck (College of Mount Saint Vincent, USA): “The Word for Snow and the Consequences of History”

29 Jacqueline Zubeck explores the conjunction of time and space in The Word for Snow. By using Bakhtin’s theories on space and time, she demonstrates how time becomes artistically visible in Don DeLillo’s work. The author visualizes future events as well as their impact on human consciousness. The Word for Snow focuses on the theme of global warming which diminishes the attention given to war and terror: it is a disaster for which there could be no cure. According to Zubeck, words make manifest our destructive tendencies: if “time is a lie”, it is because of the devaluation of the planet.

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The subsequent loss might make us question reality: if human culture is no more in place, then what will happen to our conception of time? The loss of our sense of space might give way to the loss of our sense of humanity. She also insists on the importance of the performance aspect of the play that might hint at a longing for embodiment: it displays a form of representational uncertainty. The small live audiences reflect the quotidian lives of the new millennium. They are built around the interdependent network of humans and their habitat which mirrors the interpenetration of nature and technology, economics and ecology. Moreover, the play hints at the conflict between reference and knowledge through the loss of reference. According to Zubeck, the artist is the seeker of the wonderful specificity and resonance of language in nature. Through the doomed experience portrayed in the play, the artist gives his perception of closure, which is the experience of meaning.

Saturday, February 20

Workshop 8: “Writing 9/11: The Seismic Tide of the Event” (Moderator: B. Pire)

Angeliki Tseti (University of Athens, Greece): “‘Living in a Place of Danger and Rage’: the Traumatic Residues of History in Don DeLillo’s Post 9/11 Short Stories”

30 Angeliki Tseti compares and contrasts the writing of Falling Man with short stories published after 9/11, mainly “Baader Meinhof” and “Midnight in Dostoievsky”. All, she argues, maintain the writer’s preoccupations with technology and the media and paint an image of America seized by fear, violence and melancholia. “Technology is our fate, our faith”. Settings are claustrophobic, spaces confined, immersed in emptiness, silence, motionlessness and dematerialization. Reenacting trauma, the characters are devoid of personal detail, evade reality and exhibit anti-social behaviors, stuck as they are in patterns of violation and isolation. Altered by its history America exhibits ‘the shadow of another life’ where the future is suspended. Living language however is not diminished and remains the necessary tool to combat confusion. But while Falling Man is based on structural fragmentation, broken phrases and ellipsis, the short stories beam in eloquent descriptions, artful expressions and clearly articulated feelings, simultaneously reenacting the traumatic residues of history and showing resistance to it.

Christina Cavedon (University of Bern, Switzerland): “Falling Man and American Culture’s Refusal to Historicize its Reaction to 9/11”

31 Christina Cavedon makes a distinction between DeLillo’s oeuvre and the trend that posited American history as starting at Ground Zero. White Noise and Cosmopolis help locate American cultural melancholia, by which Cavedon understands white middle class and white upper class Americans’ unwillingness to critically examine the reasons for their malaise, oppose liberal imagination and see the side effects of capitalism. Maintaining such state, she says, precludes a confrontation with myths such as the American dream and its failings. Falling Man, like DeLillo’s other pre-9/11 fictions, exhibits this American culture’s persisting melancholic texture denied by the interpretation of the event as national trauma.

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Françoise Sammarcelli (University Paris Sorbonne): “Writers and Terrorists at Work – or Decentered Voices in Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Falling Man”

32 Françoise Sammarcelli concludes this workshop entitled ‘The seismic tide of 9/11” by discussing the “curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists” and the relation between art and terror in Mao II and Falling Man. Using a terrorist as character in Falling Man contributes to a decentering of narrative that contrasts with Mao II where the action is focalized on the poet and not on the hostage-taker. Françoise Sammarcelli points out other differences between the two novels including Falling Man’s marginal reference to writers and powerful emphasis on visual artists. The central figure of the author is displaced in favor of the editor, the Alzheimer patients’ writing sessions, the art-critic or the voice of protest, brought by the reference to Shelley’s long poem Revolt of Islam and Martin Ridnour.

Q&A Session on Falling Man

33 The event of Saturday afternoon was a question and answer session between the audience and the author during which DeLillo mainly discussed his novel Falling Man with the Agrégation candidates and their teachers.

A first question concerned the recurrent reference to “speaking in tongues” in the play The Word for Snow performed the previous evening. Don DeLillo answered that what triggered his use of this reference was his fascination for people able to speak in tongues as well as the fact that he had not seen a reference to it in many years. The play was the place to address the matter of a language spoken by a very small number of people. He also explained that he had invented most of the words used in the play by the characters “speaking in tongues.”

Afterwards, a long series of questions on the novel Falling Man were put forth, among which a first question about DeLillo's experience of writing the novel. It took the author several years after the terrorist attacks in New York City before thinking about writing a novel on the subject. Once he had made his decision, it was very clear to him that the book had to go into the towers. It was not to be a novel in which the events and results happen at the periphery of the book. He decided that the book had to be direct, which is why the novel begins with a man leaving the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks. DeLillo also stated having been inspired by photographs of the event and, for instance, having decided to give a personality of its own to the briefcase held by a man leaving the towers in one of them.

Another member of the audience noted the refusal of pathos in the novel and asked the author about the conception of the characters, about the way he approaches them. DeLillo confessed that he did not know much about the characters before writing them. They developed without notes. He described the process according to which words became things, rooms, streets; with the characters building themselves in a mysterious way, both physically and mentally.

Then, a member of the audience asked whether the event of the 9/11 could have been replaced by another in this novel. To this, the author responded that what he saw became the book, so that it was this particular event which had made this novel.

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A next question concerning the description of Florence as a black woman was put. DeLillo argued that her being black was not important. She was one figure among others in the World Trade Center, and she “just happened to be a black woman.” Afterwards, the surprising gesture of the terrorist fastening his seatbelt before the crash was evoked, to which DeLillo answered that the terrorist simply fastens his seatbelt automatically, since he knows that the plane is about to crash, which produces a comical effect. Another member of the audience noted that there was no judgement passed upon the characters in the novel and wondered how hard it was to write this novel without judging. DeLillo explained that he had to show no fear of trying to understand.

Then, a following question addressed the importance of including the terrorists’ points of view. DeLillo argued that this was not a novelistic choice, but rather a personal choice, that it was part of not avoiding difficult challenges. Indeed, he needed to face that these men caused this catastrophe. He had to confront this level of difficulty.

A following question focused on what made the author include the character of Martin in the novel. The author tried to cast a global picture of a family. Then the character just came to mind. He was important to the entire complexion of things, to the dialogue, as a figure from another culture looking at this America.

Afterwards, a member of the audience wondered whether DeLillo's view of language had changed throughout his career. DeLillo affirmed that when he started writing, he had no particular view of language. He would simply write. It took him four years to write his first novel, and language belonged to the narrative, to the characters themselves. Afterwards he started to write very quickly. Then, from the 1980s onward, and particularly from The Names, which marked a turning point in his writing and conception of language, he took his time and began to think more deeply about language.

Another question concerned whether the author's fiction writing between the terrorist attacks in New York City and the writing of Falling Man was affected by the event, even though it did not address it directly. The author suggested that it was probably the case for his novel Cosmopolis, in which a sense of destruction is to be found. Finally, this session ended with DeLillo reading a passage from the novel.

INDEX

Subjects: Actualité de la recherche

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AUTHORS

LUCA FERRANDO BATTISTÀ Paris-Diderot University

MAUD BOUGEROL University of Rouen

ALIETTE VENTEJOUX Paris Sorbonne University

BÉATRICE PIRE Paris Sorbonne University

SARAH BOULET University of Rouen

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Les archives sonores de la poésie: production – conservation – utilisation 24-25 November 2016, Maison de la Recherche de Paris-Sorbonne Decrypting the archive: Scholars and archivists gather to preserve and grant access to poetry recordings

Chris Mustazza

1 As recent reports by the United States Library of Congress have shown, many historical sound recordings are in danger of degradation or destruction, due to the decomposition of the media upon which they are inscribed (Library of Congress; CLIR and Library of Congress). Reel-to-reel tapes, which have a stated shelf-life of 25 years, threaten to disintegrate into chips and powder as they await digitization in sometimes less-than-ideal archival storage. The same is true of acetate transcription discs, aluminum or glass core records that are covered in lacquer, used for many recordings in the 1930s; as the records age, the lacquer substrate peels away from the medium and destroys the recording.1 Given the many challenges to large-scale digitization, preservation, and access—economic, institutional, and intellectual proprietary—how can archivists and scholars respond to this situation with the proper degree of urgency? What are the theoretical implications of remediating physical media to a digital form? And how can these efforts go beyond preservation, providing access to wide audiences and raising new kinds of scholarly questions for researchers? Among the many kinds of recordings at risk are recordings of poets performing their own work, recordings crucial to study of poetry and poetics, as well as literary history at large.

2 On November 24th and 25 th, 2016, an international group of poetry audio scholars convened at the Maison de la Recherche de Paris-Sorbonne for a colloquium titled Les archives sonores de la poésie. Organized by Professors Abigail Lang (Paris-Diderot), Michel Murat (Paris-Sorbonne), and Céline Pardo (Paris-Sorbonne), the conference examined crucial questions around the theory and practice of archiving audio and

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video recordings of poetry performances. Preservation, access, use: these were the guiding principles around which the conversations took shape. It was clear from the presentations on a number of archival and phonotextual initiatives, all in different stages of development, that any successful project would need to address all three of these factors. For it’s obvious that one cannot use something that has not been preserved, but the conversation highlighted that the inverse is less accounted for: what’s the point of having an archive—especially a digital archive—if it can’t be accessed, widely and fairly by the world?

3 The conference began with a keynote by University of Pennsylvania Professor and co- founder of the PennSound archive Charles Bernstein. Bernstein’s talk, titled “Radio Free Poetry: PennSound@13” presented the history of the archive, emphasizing its commitment to access, and discussed how this founding principle has resulted in millions of downloads per year by listeners from the vast majority of the world’s countries. As associate director of Pennsound I had the privilege of giving the second half of the keynote,2 and talked about PennSound’s plans for the future, including an emphasis on the reconstruction of historical poetry audio archives, as well as work to distribute PennSound as a dataset, for use in what Tanya Clement has termed “distant listening” (cf Franco Moretti’s distant reading). Questions from the audience included how PennSound obtains permission to distribute recordings, the sonic fidelity of the human voice in historical recordings (how can we know, given technological mediations, whether the recordings are true to the sonic textures of the poet’s voice?), and what kind of academic publications PennSound has enabled.

4 Professor Clement was in attendance at the conference and presented her ongoing and transformative work titled “High Performance Sound Technologies for Search and Analysis” (HiPSTAS). The “High Performance” in the title is a reference to high- performance computing systems (sometimes known as “cluster computing”) used to “listen” to thousands of hours of audio in a condensed period of time and perceive scales imperceptible to humans. She detailed how the system she had developed can identify applause in poetry recordings with a high degree of accuracy and suggested scholarly questions that could follow: do male poets receive more applause than female poets? Is applause more prevalent in certain historical periods? Does the venue of the reading affect a poet’s reception? These questions around the algorithmic approaches to machine learning and large-scale corpus analysis were paired with a presentation by Jean Carrive, from the Institut National d’Audiovisuel, on automatic transcription of speech in television broadcasts. The presentations raised a number of questions from the audience, including how long it would take for machine learning to produce an interpretation as credible as one by, as the person who posed the question playfully suggested, Raymond Williams. Clement responded that the point is not to make the computer a literary scholar, but rather to leverage it for tasks for which it is uniquely suited. She channeled the Russian Formalists’ concept of ostranenie in her conclusion that machines can help to “make our existing arguments and assumptions strange.”

5 Moving from the experimental digital approaches to questions around the reconstruction of the history of poetic performance, the following panel featured a number of presentations of historical attempts to archive the ephemerality of performative immediacy. In addition to presentations about the fledgling days of sound recording (Professor Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus and Patrick Beurard-Valdoye), Professor Vincent Broqua explored Anne Waldman’s use of amateur audio (cassette tapes) in her

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work to develop the poetry audio archive for the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. Broqua highlighted Waldman’s having developed her approach by working with the poet Paul Blackburn, who is well known for his reel-to- reel recordings of live poetry performances (currently being digitized at the University of California, San Diego). From a media studies perspective, it was interesting to learn that Waldman had been inspired to record poems by Blackburn, yet selected the more “consumer-audio”-grade medium of cassette tapes, as opposed to the higher-quality reels that Blackburn used. Finally, Professor Gaëlle Théval gave a fascinating talk on the performance poetry of Bernard Heidsieck, particularly the value of video recordings of his readings of poems like “Vaduz.” I found it interesting that two of the talks on the panel contained the word “trace” in the title, which could very well be an engagement with Derrida’s famous notion of “la trace.” Perhaps in this case, the written poem always contains the trace of its performance, aural and visual.

6 The second day of the conference brought a number of theoretical considerations about the affordances of the poetry audio archive. Professor Jean-François Puff tracked the literary and performative afterlives of Paul Eluard’s “Liberté,” including the lyric’s composition and reapplication as a poem of protest, its refrain of “J’écris ton nom” sonically regenerating in performances from wistful to oppositional. A comment from American poet and professor Jennifer Moxley discussed poems that invite these adaptations and reinterpretations, such as W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” and its reemergence after September 11.3 While the two cases differ, they both highlight the ability for performative context to shift the meaning of a poem and add to what Peter Middleton has termed “the long biography of the poem.” The conversation progressed to think about how the poetry audio archive can further the afterlives of recorded poetry. Professor Will Montgomery’s talk then examined the meta-hearing that can occur in the archive, where we are able to hear poets hearing other poets. Professor Daniel Kane’s talk suggested that the poetry audio archive can serve as an ethnographic tool for studying poetry communities, and focused his talk on the New York School poets and intertextuality as community ethnography.

7 Access by the general public was the theme for a panel that included Professors Olivier Brossard and Anne-Christine Royère. Brossard examined Richard O. Moore’s series of television poetry documentaries, which included features on Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, and Louis Zukofksy. He claimed that the films become extensions of the texts and performances of the poems, and pointed to their didactic function for other poets, including Anne Sexton, who learned from watching the films, including the episode featuring Charles Olson. Professor Steve Evans presented his “Phonotextual Braid” theorization of the phonotext, calling for attention to the entwinement of “timbre, text, and technology.” The conference concluded with a very lively roundtable discussion on the opportunities for, and obstacles to, the creation of accessible poetry archives. The respondents, William Chamay (Centre Georges Pompidou), Pascal Cordereix (BNF), Eric Giraud (Centre International de Poésie Marseille), Emmanuelle Leroyer (Printemps des poètes), and Claude Mussou (INA), showed off current archival projects, such as BNF’s Gallica project (Gallica), and discussed challenges to open access, such as navigating copyright clearances. All in all, a tremendous breadth of topics was covered, and there was a sense that the participants were galvanized to further this important work.

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8 In a follow-up note, after the conference, Professor Murat wrote, poetically, “We are embedded in a beautiful project, which needs to be shared, and that gives life to poetry.”4 He’s right. Les archives sonores de la poésie was just the first step in an important series that must take place to preserve and make available our poetic cultural histories. The group is now considering the next steps for the preservation of poetry audio archives, as well as future colloquia. And a collection of essays based on the papers given in the conference will be published, in French, by Les presses du réel in 2017. The hope is for more scholars and archivists to become interested in these crucial considerations. In the meantime, let this conference report, and all of its grooves and contours, hereby be inscribed into the record. Council on Library and Information Resources, The Library of Congress. The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age. CLIR and LoC, August 2010, https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/reports/pub148/pub148.pdf. Accessed 31 January 2017.

“Library Announces National Recording Preservation Plan.” Library of Congress, 13 February 2013. https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-13-014/. Accessed 31 January 2017.

Gallica. Bibliothèque nationale de France. http://gallica.bnf.fr/. Accessed 31 January 2017.

Les archives sonores de la poésie: production – conservation – utilisation. 24-25 November 2016, Maison de la Recherche de Paris-Sorbonne. http://calenda.org/382947.

NOTES

1. “Lacquer discs are prone to unpredictable and sudden catastrophic failure due to surface delamination, which is often caused by storage environments with high humidity and/or temperature.” https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/phonodisc 2. In addition to my work on PennSound, I am also a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an IT director. 3. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/01/us/beliefs-after-sept-11-62-year-old-poem-auden- drew-new-attention-not-all-it-was.html 4. Translated from: “Nous voici embarqués dans un beau projet, qui demande à être partagé, et qui donne vie à la poésie.”

INDEX

Subjects: Actualité de la recherche

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AUTHOR

CHRIS MUSTAZZA University of Pennsylvania

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Journée d’étude « D’une crise à l’autre aux États-Unis (1929-2008) – Approches historiques et sociologiques des crises et des politiques sociales aux États-Unis » Université Paris-Diderot, 21 janvier 2016

Manuel Bocquier

1 À l’occasion de la parution récente de deux ouvrages portant sur les crises qui ont marqué le XXe siècle américain, s’est tenue à l’Université Paris-Diderot le 21 janvier 2016 la journée d’étude « D’une crise à l’autre aux États-Unis (1929-2008) – Approches historiques et sociologiques des crises et des politiques sociales aux États-Unis ». Dans un premier temps, elle a rassemblé les intervenants autour du sociologue Isaac Martin (University of California, San Diego) et de son ouvrage Foreclosed America (co-écrit avec Christopher Niedt) qui traite de la crise des saisies immobilières entre 2007 et 2012. Elle a ensuite porté sur The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics présenté par son auteur, Jefferson Cowie (Vanderbilt University), et portant sur la période d’égalité politique et économique encadrée par les crises de 1929 et des années 1970. Organisée par le Centre d’Études Nord-Américaines (CENA, EHESS, Mondes Américains) et le Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Cultures Anglophones (LARCA, Paris-Diderot, UMR 8225), cette journée d’étude a permis d’interroger dans une perspective comparative la diversité des trajectoires sociales des victimes des crises économiques aux États-Unis, le rôle et les moyens de l’État dans leur prise en charge, ainsi que la place des mobilisations populaires dans la prise de conscience de la situation par les médias, les pouvoirs publics et la société.

2 Dans Foreclosed America, I. Martin et C. Niedt s’écartent de l’habituelle étude des mécanismes économiques de la crise pour comprendre la diversité sociale et les multiples trajectoires des dix millions de personnes qui ont perdu leur logement à la suite de la crise financière de 2007. Le fait que les expulsions soient paradoxalement

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invisibles dans les médias s’explique par la difficulté à localiser les familles relogées et par la stigmatisation sociale dont elles font l’objet. Les auteurs étant les premiers à donner un échantillon représentatif de la population expulsée, la manière dont leur ouvrage déjoue les stéréotypes de classe et de race sur les expulsés a été saluée par les intervenants. L’échelle nationale adoptée dans l’enquête appelle ainsi à des analyses plus localisées pour comprendre les effets sociaux différenciés de cette crise (Camille François, Université Paris 8). Ce sont à la fois l’absence de stratégies d’organisation parmi les expulsés et l’incapacité de l’État à agir sur les saisies immobilières qui sont mises en cause dans l’invisibilité de cette population. Les mobilisations plus locales et les moyens alternatifs d’organisation ont ainsi été interrogés à la lumière des ressources dont pouvaient disposer les victimes pour former un bloc d’électeurs ou un groupe de pression afin de sensibiliser la société et d’influer sur la politique sociale, à l’instar des syndicats et de la presse locale (Gabriel Lattanzio, Paris-Diderot). La comparaison de cette crise avec celle de 1929 est un des outils de compréhension du retrait de l’État et de l’absence de mobilisation qui caractérisent la crise des saisies immobilières de 2007-2012. I. Martin et C. Niedt montrent que la réponse politique et l’organisation des personnes déplacées furent bien plus importantes lors de la Grande Dépression. À cet égard, les différences de politisation entre les victimes de ces deux crises ont été mises en valeur. La mobilisation des déplacés des années 1930 et l’engagement de l’État qu’elle a encouragé avaient été possibles du fait que la population rurale s’était déjà organisée sur le plan politique (Populisme), alors que les déplacés d’aujourd’hui semblent mis à l’écart de la vie politique et trop dispersés pour organiser une résistance (Alexia Blin, EHESS, Mondes Américains).

3 La deuxième partie de la journée d’étude a porté sur The Great Exception, ouvrage dans lequel Jefferson Cowie étudie, dans la période allant des années 1930 aux années 1970, la formation et le déclin de la prise en charge des intérêts collectifs par les politiques de l’État. La discussion a salué l’analyse multifactorielle qui permet à l’auteur de faire interagir les conditions d’émergence (religieuses, politiques, raciales…) de la coalition du New Deal dans les années 1930 et les raisons de sa décomposition quarante ans plus tard. Le prisme institutionnel et politique de l’auteur a été interrogé dans une perspective plus sociale pour mettre en valeur le poids des mobilisations populaires dans le développement de l’État-providence au cours de cette période. L’influence des activistes africains-américains sur la mise en place de politiques sociales permettant la reconnaissance des droits de la population noire a ainsi été soulignée (Caroline Rolland- Diamond, Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre). Le rôle de la suspension de l’immigration dans l’unité de la classe ouvrière autour des politiques du New Deal a également été interrogé à la faveur d’une analyse « par le bas ». Dans cette perspective, la permanence de la compétition entre les travailleurs immigrés durant cette période a orienté la discussion vers l’utilité d’articuler les prismes sociaux, institutionnels et politiques pour étudier les mesures prises par l’État lors des situations de crise économique et leurs effets (Paul Schor, Paris-Diderot). Le cadre chronologique de l’étude de Jefferson Cowie a aussi appelé à une discussion sur la périodisation à adopter pour comprendre le rôle joué par les débats antérieurs et par les évolutions à plus long terme dans le développement des politiques du New Deal. L’emploi d’un lexique ancien (« démocratie industrielle », « pouvoir d’achat ») dans les mesures prises dans les années 1930 et la pérennité de certains programmes (comme le Social Security Act) au-delà des années 1970 encouragent ainsi à placer dans une chronologie plus ample l’analyse de la

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formation de l’État-providence et de son déclin aux États-Unis (Jean-Christian Vinel, Paris-Diderot).

4 La discussion conjointe de ces deux ouvrages a mis en lumière l’importance d’analyser sur le temps long les crises économiques et leurs effets sur la population américaine. Si l’ère du New Deal a pris fin dans les années 1970, les intervenants ont souligné les nouvelles configurations sociales entourant les crises et l’action politique actuelles. L’étude des crises et des politiques sociales aux États-Unis montre qu’il est nécessaire de comprendre les moyens qu’ont les acteurs d’interagir avec l’État et d’influer sur l’orientation de ses mesures politiques. Cette journée d’étude a ainsi permis d’engager une discussion riche sur la diversité des effets sociaux des crises économiques et sur la capacité de plus en plus faible de l’État à les freiner.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Isaac Martin & Christopher Niedt, Foreclosed America, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2015, 101 p.

Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2016, 273 p.

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEUR

MANUEL BOCQUIER CENA, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

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Journée d’étude « Écritures féminines des diasporas asiatiques aux États-Unis » Université Bordeaux Montaigne, 1er avril 2016

Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni et Nelly Mok

Enjeux et objectifs de la journée d’étude

1 La journée d’étude s’ouvre sur les allocutions de Nathalie Jaëck (directrice du centre de recherche CLIMAS), et des organisatrices de la rencontre, Noémie Leduc (doctorante) et Nicole Ollier (professeure à l’Université Bordeaux Montaigne)1. Cette rencontre a permis d’aborder diverses représentations de la relation des femmes issues des minorités asiatiques à la guerre et à la violence physique, idéologique et politique dans le contexte actuel d’hostilité (inter)nationale. L’objectif est aussi de mettre en perspective et de faire dialoguer des productions qui traitent d’expériences relevant de la condition féminine, souvent dans ses manifestations les plus physiques, corporelles — productions dont la diversité vise à saisir un éventail complexe de facettes et de nuances.

2 L’idée de cette journée, insistent Noémie Leduc et Nicole Ollier, est née de leur désir conjoint de donner davantage de visibilité à la recherche sur le champ des études asiatico-américaines, encore peu exploré en France, et surtout de contribuer à instaurer une « continuité intellectuelle » (Nicole Ollier), un dialogue fructueux entre différentes générations de chercheurs qui se trouvent à divers moments de leurs réflexions sur des questions relevant de cette aire disciplinaire. Ce souci d’échange et de transmission « inter-générationnelle » et « inter-ethnique » (Noémie Leduc) sous- tend et anime d’ailleurs les récits et témoignages présentés lors de cette journée.

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Axes principaux de la journée d’étude

3 Les communications figurant à l’affiche de la journée d’étude, note Nicole Ollier dans son allocution, mettent au premier plan des femmes écrivaines illustrant la diversité de la diaspora asiatique — chinoise, coréenne, japonaise, cambodgienne et vietnamienne — publiées aux États-Unis et reconnues comme appartenant au canon des lettres étasuniennes même en traduction (c’est le cas par exemple de Yan Geling). La communication de Christine Lévy (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) s’intéresse plutôt au traumatisme « des femmes de réconfort » sud-coréennes exploitées par les soldats de l’armée impériale japonaise, mettant toutefois l’accent sur le poids des relations géopolitiques entre les États-Unis, le Japon et la Corée du Sud dans le processus compliqué de réparation envisagée pour les ianfu depuis la déclaration Kôno en 1993, puis à nouveau au XXIe siècle.

Violences et traumatismes multiples

4 La pluralité formelle des récits évoqués (témoignages écrits et oraux, textes narratifs et poétiques où se mêlent écriture autobiographique et fiction) révèle les tentatives multiples de ces femmes de mettre en mots le traumatisme, lui aussi polymorphe et aux origines multiples. Il est notamment infligé par la guerre (la guerre sino-japonaise, la guerre du Vietnam, le génocide khmer rouge) et par l’oppression colonialiste et/ou impérialiste (par le biais des camps d’internement des Nippo-Américains aux États-Unis pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, à travers l’esclavage sexuel des femmes coréennes sous la domination japonaise pendant la même période, ou encore des femmes chinoises au XIXe siècle dans les premiers Chinatowns américains).

5 La violence à laquelle sont confrontées les écrivaines et icônes féministes (les anciennes ianfu, évoquées par Christine Lévy), au centre des échanges de cette journée, si elle est physique et politique, générée par la guerre, s’incarne également dans le risque d’aliénation socio-culturelle, identitaire et esthétique qui pèse sur le cheminement de la femme américaine issue des minorités asiatiques et nécessairement en proie à la double contrainte de son sexe et de son origine ethnique. Noémie Leduc et Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni (Paris Ouest Nanterre) notent le poids des représentations orientalistes de la femme chinoise dans l’imaginaire euro-américain ainsi que la difficulté d’éviter les pièges des tendances homogénéisantes ou essentialisantes. De même, Sophie Rachmuhl (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) et Héloïse Thomas-Cambonie (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) insistent sur le processus coûteux de l’assimilation du sujet issu de l’immigration — japonaise, dans le cas d’Amy Uyematsu, et coréenne, dans les cas de Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cathy Park Hong et Suji Kwock Kim — processus dans lequel se rejoue le trauma de la perte.

Mise en mots et mise en voix du/des traumatisme(s)

6 Le spectre du passé traumatique rôde dans l’ensemble des textes analysés. Le trauma de la perte grève l’écriture de l’écrivaine américano-cambodgienne Loung Ung, présentée par Nelly Mok (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), celle de l’auteure vietnamo- américaine Lan Cao, dont l’esthétique de la hantise est soulignée par Élizabeth Lamothe (Université du Maine), ainsi que celle des écrivaines coréennes en proie à l’expérience

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du han, évoqué par Héloïse Thomas-Cambonie. Face à la menace de « sidération traumatique »2 s’élèvent les voix de ces femmes, contre le refoulement et l’oubli, contre le mutisme. Ainsi les stratégies de mise en mots — et de mise en voix dans le cas de la poétesse Amy Uyematsu, à laquelle s’intéresse Sophie Rachmuhl et dont les textes se prêtent à la fois au conte et au chant — de la douleur de la perte, de l’exil et des plaies héritées de la violence sont au cœur des travaux proposés. Sont alors explorées les diverses stratégies d’écriture pour dire le traumatisme et ainsi cheminer vers une plus grande cohérence psychique et ontologique du sujet fragmenté. L’acte de mise en mots est nécessairement polyphonique et dialogique. Le récit se conte à deux voix chez Lan Cao ; il devient échange transhistorique et transtemporel transgressant différents seuils narratifs chez Yan Geling. Dans la même dynamique, les écrivaines coréennes- américaines étudiées par Héloïse Thomas-Cambonie optent pour l’« écriture hétérogène » du postmemory han. C’est par le dire que ces femmes s’attellent à rompre le silence imposé par le déni des forces impérialistes : Elisabeth Lamothe évoque le « Vietnam syndrome », auquel fait écho le « Cambodian syndrome », en filigrane dans le texte de Loung Ung, présenté par Nelly Mok, à propos de l’amnésie stratégique des États-Unis concernant leur rôle dans le génocide khmer rouge. Les femmes évoquées lors de cette journée entendent également mettre un terme au mutisme des victimes : Christine Lévy insiste sur l’émergence difficile d’une expression artistique du traumatisme subi par les ianfu, ce que suggèrent les quelques exceptions littéraires et cinématographiques avant et après 1945, tandis que Sophie Rachmuhl note le souci de la poétesse Amy Uyematsu de contribuer à briser « le silence des pères », issus de la génération issei, sur les camps d’internement. C’est effectivement par le récit et le témoignage que le poids de la culpabilité de celles qui ont survécu à la guerre et se sont vues privées des leurs (en particulier Lan Cao et Loung Ung) devient supportable, que la survie devient légitime. Nelly Mok insiste, à propos de l’écriture autobiographique de Loung Ung, sur le « mythe du survivant » comme espace de reconstruction du sujet brisé par le chaos et la perte.

Récit/témoignage et mémoire culturelle

7 Toutes les communications désignent l’acte d’écrire/de dire comme un geste à la fois individuel et collectif, procédant d’une expérience transgénérationnelle du trauma et, par conséquent, œuvrant à la restauration d’un dialogue intergénérationnel, comme l’induit la notion de postmémoire. L’autoréférentiel assume des valences collectives et résonne non seulement en tant que mise en parole textuelle, mais également en tant que contribution à la création ou à la reconfiguration d’une mémoire culturelle. Il s’agit de témoigner contre l’effacement et l’amnésie, même dans leurs formes les plus organisées et supraindividuelles, étatiques et nationales. C’est par exemple le cas de Kim Hak-sun, ancienne femme de réconfort coréenne, évoquée par Christine Lévy, pour qui le simple fait de « se manifester » revient à poser la première pierre d’un « espace de légitimation » transnational et féministe et à initier un mouvement commémoratif, par le biais des halmoni et grâce à la création du musée des anciennes femmes de réconfort en 2005. Il en est de même pour Lan Cao, écrivaine d’origine vietnamienne appartenant à la génération 1.5 : Élisabeth Lamothe met en évidence sa conception de l’écriture comme « espace d’accueil de l’histoire » face notamment à l’absence de lieu consacré à la mémoire de ceux vivant avec « la guerre en héritage ». Nelly Mok souligne que cette conception est partagée par Loung Ung, dont l’écriture autobiographique est

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un acte de témoignage, un espace de dénonciation du génocide khmer rouge, et entend fournir une preuve irréfutable des crimes envers la population cambodgienne, toujours en attente de réparations nationales et internationales. Dans le même esprit, Yan Geling, « immigrante de cinquième génération » à laquelle s’intéresse Nicoleta Alexoae- Zagni, ausculte le corps de la femme chinoise, victime oubliée des systèmes migratoires du travail, afin de ranimer une voix étouffée sous l’emprise d’exigences nationalistes contradictoires. L’idée d’un (ré)éclairage de l’histoire à travers des micro-histoires marquées et hantées par la violence et l’exil traverse en réalité toutes les communications ; les textes étudiés, par nécessité polyphoniques, œuvrent à la construction d’une « mémoire à deux voix » (Elisabeth Lamothe) ou même « hétéroglossique » (Noémie Leduc) et, par ce même geste et par le biais de diverses stratégies de représentation aussi bien frontales qu’obliques, révèlent de fortes inflexions esthétiques et politiques des voix féminines (voire féministes) qui les génèrent, les portent et les animent.

Identités hybrides et transnationales

8 Il n’est alors pas étonnant que l’écriture et le texte se voient désignés non seulement comme caisses de résonance mais surtout comme moyens et instruments, des « armes » maniées au service de négociations et de redéfinitions identitaires dans des cadres marqués par l’hybridité, allant de la « biculturalité » analysée par Élisabeth Lamothe et mise en lumière dans la poésie d’Uyematsu étudiée par Sophie Rachmuhl, au « multiplement étranger » du sujet féminin coréen-américain cartographié par Héloïse Thomas-Cambonie. Dans cette même perspective, Christine Lévy évoque l’émergence du « féminisme transnational » dans les années 1990 à la suite des premiers témoignages des ianfu, tandis que Nelly Mok propose une lecture des espaces américain et cambodgien comme les composantes d’un chronotope identitaire transnational, caractéristique du sujet cambodgien américain de la génération 1.5 et mis en exergue par la mobilité géographique et la portée transculturelle de l’engagement humanitaire de l’écrivaine et militante Loung Ung. Des délimitations conceptuelles sont introduites ou reprécisées (comme celle du han) ; des mises en abyme originales sont proposées, comme celle de Noémie Leduc concernant l’écriture fictionnelle de l’histoire et l’écriture de l’histoire du roman, et s’appuyant sur les travaux de Linda Hutcheon sur le concept de « historiographic metafiction » ; enfin, à une autre échelle, des reconfigurations novatrices des canons littéraires (trans)nationaux font aussi naturellement partie des sujets débattus, en particulier la perspective LOWINUS, initialement théorisée par Werner Sollors et Marc Shell3, ou l’idée de « sinophonie » — the Sinophone — introduite par Shu-mei Shih.

9 Pour conclure, les rédactrices de ce compte-rendu partagent le sentiment d’avoir fait partie, pour une journée, d’une « community of like minds » à la manière de celle invoquée par la grande dame des lettres asiatico-américaines, Maxine Hong Kingston, dans The Fifth Book of Peace (2003), lorsqu’elle se rend compte de l’impossibilité de mener un travail en solitaire suite à de multiples traumatismes personnels et collectifs. Ainsi saluent-elles l’intention des organisatrices de cette journée de proposer prochainement un colloque international nourri des réflexions autour des questions évoquées lors de cette première rencontre, dont la majeure partie des travaux sera bientôt publiée dans Leaves, la revue électronique de CLIMAS.

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NOTES

1. Toutes trois rappellent que les questions et les enjeux de cette journée s’inscrivent dans les deux axes prioritaires de CLIMAS, « Trans/former, performer, partager » et « Puissance du mode mineur », ainsi que dans ceux d’EMMA, centre de recherche de l’université Paul Valéry à Montpellier et partenaire de CLIMAS dans l’organisation de cette rencontre, à savoir « L’Invention de l’autre » et « Mises en relation ». 2. Ce terme est employé par Régine Waintrater dans son analyse du rôle du témoignage dans le processus de guérison des victimes de génocide, Sortir du génocide : témoigner pour réapprendre à vivre, Paris : Payot & Rivages, 2003. 3. Le projet LOWINUS (acronyme de « Languages of What is Now the United States ») correspond à une nouvelle définition de la littérature américaine, justifiant la création d’un Institut à l’Université de Harvard qui y soit dédié et ayant déjà fait naître de nombreux ouvrages, dont les très connus recueils d’articles critiques édités par Werner Sollors Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of America (New York : New York University Press, 1998) ainsi que la Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (édité par Shell et Sollors, New York : New York University Press, 2000).

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEURS

NICOLETA ALEXOAE-ZAGNI ISTOM Grande Ecole d’Ingénieurs & CREA Paris Ouest Nanterre

NELLY MOK EMMA, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3

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International Conference “Staging American Bodies” Staging America – Seventh Annual International Conference, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, March 17-18, 2016

Yaël Pouffary

1 The seventh edition of the Staging America conference series tackled the various ways in which the human form has been staged and represented throughout history and in different media across the Americas. The term “staging” was not limited to the performing arts. The conference covered a wide geographical area and encompassed a large spectrum of disciplines ranging from literature to fine art, and from pop culture to drama. The Institut des Amériques, the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Récits Cultures Et Sociétés (LIRCES), and the Faculté des Lettres, Arts et Sciences Humaines of the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis endorsed the conference, organized by Nathalie Massip, Tiphaine Duriez and Yaël Pouffary.

Keynote Speeches

Plenary I: Audrey Goodman (Georgia State University), “From Fugitive Poses to Photographic Storytelling: Native Women Retell their Visual Histories” – Chaired by Nathalie Massip (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis)

2 Audrey Goodman argued in her keynote address that famous photographs such as those of Edward Curtis have both romanticized historical facts and demonstrated the power of photography in storytelling. The visual stories seem to have been cropped or even completely reinvented. One must ask oneself: what does a Native American portrait actually say or hide, especially when one knows how candid shots often can be ruined by the presence of a camera? As artist Jaune Quick-to-See comments: “portraits are deceptive because of what they don’t tell”. Audrey Goodman highlighted recurring terms used by contemporary female Native American artists about photos being “re-

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staged” or “suspicious representations” or even “treacheries”. Even so, pictures are important and, if incorporated in a storytelling process, “they can become a part of the decolonizing practice of claiming visual sovereignty”. Given that “visual storytelling can activate communal memories and direct tribal futures”, Audrey Goodman assembled a panel of contemporary female Native artists who have explored this new way of storytelling, far more faithful to the past: Joy Harjo, Leslie Silko, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, and Quick-to-see Smith, among others. In a way, these contemporary female Native artists see themselves as “keepers of the stories for those who don’t come back”.

Plenary II: Wendy Harding (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès), “Spectacle Lynchings / Textual Responses” – Chaired by Matthew Roudané (Georgia State University, Atlanta)

3 In her keynote address, Wendy Harding explained how African Americans were the subjects and targets of violent spectacles, even after the abolition of slavery. Their mutilated bodies were displayed in public spaces, as can be seen on photographs. Lynching acted as a melodrama; it was staged, it was “carnivalesque”. Oftentimes lynchings were exhibitions with a holiday mood, a moment where white supremacy was confirmed. Wendy Harding analyzed the staging of some of the photographs, drawing links with Christian paintings. She also drew from a corpus of African American writers who regained control of the staging and representation of African Americans’ bodies through different forms of art. Those artists included Alice Walker, who “suggests horror without ever showing it” in “The Flowers”, and Toni Morrison, who places the white characters off stage—out of view—in an oblique literary style, as in Sula and Beloved. African American writers like Morrison have “readdressed violence to the black community so that it became a means of affirming hope and regenerating life.”

Staging American Bodies and/in Photography – chaired by Nathalie Dessens (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès)

Kelly Dennis (University of Connecticut), “The Obscene Homeless Body in Documentary Photography”

4 By the mid-twentieth century, documentary photography had become recognized as high art, in part thanks to the contribution of Dorothea Lange’s photographs taken during the Great Depression, under the very careful eye of the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA). But after the Vietnam War, photographers “questioned the ethics of documentary practices”, wondering what is truly depicted, and whether the identities of those in the photographs are respected. Kelly Dennis presented what is labelled as “bum photography”, and the viewer’s need to “gawk at others’ misfortunes.” She illustrated her paper with works by two artists, Martha Rosler and Barbara DeGenevieve, who are perfect examples of the “re-invention of documentary photography”. In both artists’ exploration of homelessness, the bodies of the homeless

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are the focal point, yet the subjects are treated in two very different ways. Martha Rosler renders the subjects by their absence—leaving the homeless themselves out of the scene. She chooses to stage the photographs with what the homeless have left behind them (such as empty bottles). She also makes the choice to present her work as diptychs with the photographs on one side and found poetry on the other, thus pointing out “poverty” and “social inequality” by the absence of the bodies, and the complete removal of identity. Thirty years after Rosler, Barbara DeGenevieve decided to express the same misplacement of the homeless bodies by extracting these bodies from their natural environment and placing them in hotel rooms. In making her subjects take erotic poses, DeGenevieve juxtaposes exploration and photography, and thus becomes the exposer of the obscene. Consequently, in the photographs, “[the homeless’] private lives are carried out in public spaces”, inevitably soliciting the viewer’s ethical response towards upper/lower class interaction, or black/white power inequality.

Meredith Zaring (Georgia State University), “Arresting American Bodies: William Faulkner’s Literary Study of Eadweard Muybridge”

5 In this presentation, Meredith Zaring interrogated the interspace in which literature and photography meet, based on the study of William Faulkner’s literature and Eadweard Muybridge’s still photography. In Light in August (1932), William Faulkner introduced tableaus that became a “paradoxical study of still motion in an uncanny literary representation of Muybridge’s work”, such as Horse in Motion or Running Man. Faulkner reverted to transgression, for instance putting a woman in the place of a man, and eroticizing the poses. Muybridge’s will to “temporarily manipulate time” also applied to “far stranger scenes often of nude women” where the women’s bodies are eroticized and grotesquely reanimated. Meredith Zaring detailed the literature and visual correspondence of both works and how it prompted a wider field of study attributed to American bodies, especially the female bodies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Staging American Bodies and /in Literature and Pop Culture – chaired by Christian Gutleben (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis)

Candice Lemaire (Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté), “All the soul-and-body scars: Robert Frost’s Synecdochial Geography of Pain”

6 In this paper, Candice Lemaire chose to discuss some of Robert Frost’s lesser known poems, from the West-Running Brook collection, along with his three World War I poems. In these works, Frost concentrates on the “declining bodies” with a serious tone; the notions of addition and mutilation take on a deeper meaning, if not a sort of melancholy. Throughout her presentation, Candice Lemaire analyzed the “staging of the poetic personae’s wounds, scars and illnesses” which placed on the main stage the “fragmented synecdochial poetics of pain”, to “unveil a gallery of persecutors and

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victims”. Through Frost’s poetry, one is confronted with the suffering body and one’s reactions to a dying limb, for instance: “Oh, blood will out. It cannot be contained.” (“The Flood”, West-Running Brook (1928), CPPP, 233). Frost also involves the reader with and reminds the reader of the egalitarian constitution of any bodies faced with pain when he states the “Moral” in Steeple Bush: The Moral is, it hardly need be shown, All those who try to go it sole alone, Too proud to be beholden for relief, Are absolutely sure to come to grief. “Haec Fabula Docet”, Steeple Bush (1947), CPPP, 358.

Hélène Gaillard (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis), “Singing and Painting the Body: Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins”

7 Hélène Gaillard focused on Walt Whitman’s and Thomas Eakins’ common understanding of the body. The word is repeated more than a hundred times in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The final section of the collection, “Poem of the Body,” in which the poet makes an extensive enumeration of body parts and functions, was severely criticized by many of his contemporaries, who called it “reckless and indecent.” Whitman’s close friend, artist Thomas Eakins, painted bodies with a precision akin to the poet’s objective eye. His fascination for the body led him to paint medical surgeries and have the viewer look on the scene as would a doctor. While Eakins considered the body as “the most beautiful object in nature,” his preciseness in reproducing the human body led critics to denigrate his work. The Gross Clinic (1875), one of Eakins’ masterpieces, was regarded as “a degradation of art”. In both Eakins’ and Whitman’s cases, the impact of Victorian-age morality, where medical advancement did not fit the “American quintessential acceptance of nature and the body”, is evident. Their avant-garde passion for science led both artists to view the body scientifically, that is to say where all men are equal as ordinarily every human body is built the same way. Therefore, their view of the American body represented a political faux pas. Even though Whitman and Eakins were both ahead of their time, thus making them isolated from the rest of the world, eventually their art was recognized as the “expression of a true American spirit.”

Mathieu Guiglielmi (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis), “Beauty and the Beast: The Quest for the Perfect Body in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho”

8 In his paper, Mathieu Guiglielmi explored the various forms that the quest for the perfect body takes in Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). Patrick Bateman, the narrator, lives in 1980s Manhattan and is in constant search for perfection, to the extreme. Such obsession may be compared to that of an artist trying to “achieve his best piece of art, like carving a mask or even a building”. In this novel, the main American body progresses through three different stages. The first phase, which focuses on this tireless quest for perfection, can be titled the “Perfect Body”. The second phase is the “Body in Pain”, where the narrator surpasses himself. He behaves like a beast, in complete opposition to the gentleness he displays when taking care of his body—for instance when he applies facial lotions. Having entered a Social Darwinist crusade, “the

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survival of the most handsome,” Bateman starts killing people. Anyone that does not fit must disappear—those outcasts who do not “abide by the rules of this flawless ideal.” Finally, in the last phase, he goes through the “Abstraction of the Body”. The body that feels so much pain believes it needs such pain to be alive, yet a question remains: does being alive equal feeling good? Patrick Bateman is devoid of any human emotion; behaving as a zombie, he does not exist anymore as a character. In his “quest for flawlessness” he becomes “any-body”, representing a society that is slowly dying.

Claude Chastagner (Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier III), “Happy Bodies. Staging Happiness in Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy’”

9 Written, produced and performed by Pharrell Williams—artist, clothes designer, political and social activist—“Happy” became a worldwide phenomenon in 2014. Running for twenty-four hours, the video of the song is unusual and displays approximately four hundred dancers from all types of social and ethnic communities. This video has been viewed so far sixty-three million times, and the condensed version more than eight hundred and ten million times. Many cities have made tribute videos or even parodies. According to Claude Chastagner, about ninety-five percent of the dancers in the video communicate happiness through constant movement of their bodies. Claude Chastagner asserts that there are limited ways to communicate happiness while dancing, contending only seven expressions meant to communicate emotions are universal. Claude Chastagner wondered if there was an American way to display emotions. Furthermore, the effect of globalization is the focal point, as one essential question remains: should/must everybody be happy? The fact that this video was viewed all over the world is a reflection of the wide diversity which constitutes American society, because these dancing bodies were able to communicate happiness to an eclectic and international public.

Staging American Bodies and/in Drama – Chaired by Matthew Roudané (Georgia State University, Atlanta)

Sarah Dyne (Georgia State University), “‘It’s so queer – in the next room’: Docile / Deviant Bodies, Performativity, and Spatiality in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour”

10 Through this presentation, Sarah Dyne explored the different ways in which performed identity and “docile-turned-deviant” bodies act in the “heteronormative and heterotopic spaces of boarding schools,” drawing from the work of Michel Foucault and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. By focusing on Karen and Martha, the two main characters of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, Sarah Dyne exposes the lack of space in society for those American bodies that do not fit in the norms of the heteronormative institutions; in this play, society is staged through the all-girls boarding school whose headmistresses are Karen and Martha. Therefore, on this stage, public and private spheres meet and conflict. Martha terminates her life voluntarily when her mind and body are not “docile” anymore. One is led to question whether all American bodies are allowed to have a role in society, as Martha shoots herself offstage, “ultimately

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‘queering’ the space that once served to reinforce societal norms which she no longer embodies.”

Emeline Jouve (Université Champollion, Albi), “Hybrid Bodies on the Intermedial New York Scene”

11 In her paper, Emeline Jouve studied how bodies are represented in the New York drama scene referred to as the “New American Avant-Garde”. This New York drama movement is based on intermediality, more specifically the “superimposition of different artistic media”, which triggers diverse reactions from the public and leads to the creation of “hybrid bodies”. Emeline Jouve concentrated on three different theatre companies and how they perform and represent bodies. The first one was the Wooster Group, which could be characterized as the “uncanny” group, since characters are illusions; because of the use of technology, only the characters’ imagination lingers. Therefore, the split between the characters and technology creates a sense of dread, a sense of uneasiness. Emeline Jouve also analyzed The Big Art Group, which could be characterized as the “carnivalesque” group, as the negative space holds the dancers while the positive space is found on television. This group pushes the “frontier of avant-garde,” according to Emeline Jouve. Finally, Andrew Schneider may be said to produce the “reality defect.” This artist wishes to communicate the feeling of the “here and now” through his unusual use of technology and his original choice of staging the public space. Emeline Jouve’s presentation led to the understanding that direct human interaction is necessary in drama, and that technology does not equal loss of control but, on the contrary, it can be perceived as a plus, as human bodies still have power over technology.

Staging American Bodies: Politics, Memorialization, Representation – Chaired by Anne Stefani (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès)

Céline Geffroy (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis), “The Metamorphosis of the Qhalincha. Cross-Dressing and Inebriation in the Bolivian Andes”

12 In this presentation, Céline Geffroy described how Andean life has strict rules about community living. Examples include the fact that nothing may be done on one’s own, and that homosexuality is not tolerated. Identity metamorphosis is not uncommon, however, and it is found in many rituals. One rule must always be followed in order to assume another persona: to be drunk. During carnivals and celebrations related to death, men who cross-dress are allowed to be whoever they wish to be. The community allows inebriation and transgression of the rules, because everybody knows that it is temporary. These cross-dressers are called the qhalinchas. Qhalinchas take the identity (and gender) of persons who have passed on; thus they may dress—and act—as babies or métis, for example. The staging of these events can last for days, verging on the grotesque. A new gender through inebriation is completely allowed, and bisexuality is embraced, as alcohol can be labelled at the sole reason for these actions. Consequently,

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during a few days a year, homosexuals can be themselves. Despite many taboos, drunkenness brings all bodies together, no matter what sex, gender or sexual orientation. As the qhalinchas often experience loss of memory and can represent any body in the community—even animals—one is led to wonder if they could not be seen as “embodying humanity”.

Nathalie Massip (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis), “Staging Native American Bodies: Sports Mascots and Cultural Appropriation”

13 Playing Indian is a persistent tradition in American history and culture. The most famous example of appropriation of Indians is the Boston Tea Party, when some protesters dressed up as Mohawk Indians. In her paper, Nathalie Massip showed how cultural appropriation of Native American imagery has dominated American sports at the high school, college, and professional levels. In 2016, more than two thousand American sports teams use Indian names. For decades, Native Americans have denounced the use of these stereotypes, which they consider as a form of cultural colonization. They have organized different forms of protests, forcing high school and college teams to change their names and/or mascots, as is the case for the Stanford Cardinals, previously known as “The Indians”. However, the practice endures, especially at the professional level. The biggest controversy as of now is around the Washington, D.C., Redskins. Indeed, it seems that as long as the name and logo of a team remain economically profitable, team-owners will have no real incentive to consider a name-change.

14 Tiphaine Duriez (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis), “Bodies in Motion and Citizenship: The ‘Internally Displaced Person’ in Colombia, a Community of Exiles”

15 Through this presentation, Tiphaine Duriez offered a summary of the internal exiles of Colombia forced to flee because of the ongoing conflict in their country. The issue of refugees within the country arose in the fifties with the beginning of the internal armed conflicts. The government acknowledged the problem as late as 1997, and "formulated a political response to these migratory phenomena". A law was thus passed to help these refugees, calling these bodies “desplazados forzados por la violencia.” These refugees soon became “migrants of war,” since from the moment they were displaced, their displacement was repeated again and again. Thanks to this law, the government granted them public police, legal representation, services and so forth. Tiphaine Duriez questioned the stigma affecting these citizens, and how these bodies are “marked into the Colombian conflict war experience.”

16 Thibaud Danel (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis), “Bodies of War and Memory: Remembering the Korean War in the United States”

17 In this presentation, Thibaud Danel offered a large panel of art, social mobilizations, memorials, ceremonies and historical reconstructions that have played a key part in the memory of the Korean War. This war, which lasted three years, resulted in a death toll almost as high as that of the Vietnam War, yet the conflict is known as the “Forgotten War”, and human remains in Korea are still being recovered. As bodies are staged, they are also the reflection of history and, thus, of the war. This is perfectly expressed in Big Fish (2003), in which Asian twins share the same body, as a metaphoric image of the two Koreas that once were a single body. Furthermore, there was a binary

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unyielding vision of the war situation, exemplified for instance in Gran Torino (2005). Therefore, Thibaud Danel detailed how bodies, as they play a role in society, have at times impacted a collective representation of history. The staging of bodies has had an important role, even political at times, as in the case of propaganda images found on both sides of the ocean.

Conclusion

18 This conference showed how diverse the definition and use of American bodies can be, whether the bodies are real or imaginary. The transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary dimension of this conference was a reflection of the diversity of the American continent, and the diversity that constitutes the bodies of America. It also demonstrated how art and history are intricately linked.

19 Through art and the “staging of American bodies”, questions were raised. How can history be passed on so that the memories, linked to the bodies, can be preserved, while having new doors opened? Likewise, if portraits can communicate by the omission or the addition of layers of reality, can photography then take on a new dimension, such as a political one or a historical one? If drama can question the limits of the American body by involving technology as an ally, instead of a competitor, then new views for the future are allowed. If poetry and literature depict the American body by giving a voice to each bodily part, new scientific or existential questions may be resolved. If historical stereotypes can be used in staging American bodies, then which staging is necessary in order for the truth be in fact unveiled? Finally, one could ask if in fact some staging of American bodies have been used in order to conduct the decolonizing or the re-staging of a historical fact.

20 All communications of this conference have at different levels solicited the need to constantly question the context in which a staging of the American body has been produced, the events that have led to this staging, what place this staging holds among the many other ‘stagings’—past and present—of the American body, and finally, to what future staging it will lead. The presentations and the debates throughout these two days have shown how there are visible links as well as innumerable invisible links that constitute the chain of staged American bodies, and the step to unveiling more of these links is in the transdisciplinary inquiry of the staged American bodies.

INDEX

Subjects: Actualité de la recherche

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AUTHOR

YAËL POUFFARY Université Nice Sophia Antipolis

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Recensions

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Claude Le Fustec, Northrop Frye and American Fiction

Robert D. Denham

REFERENCES

Le Fustec, Claude, Northrop Frye and American Fiction, Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2015. 238 pages, 39,81 €, ISBN-10 : 1442647698

1 Most of the secondary literature about Northrop Frye belongs to one of two large categories, the theoretical or the practical. Claude Le Fustec’s Northrop Frye and American Fiction, the latest addition to the University of Toronto Press’s “Frye Series,” belongs to both. The primary theoretical issue has to do with the relationship between literature and religion, a relationship that has presented itself to the critical intelligence for a long time. In Plato’s Ion, for example, the poet is presented as an inspired rhapsodist through whom the gods speak. The poet is inspired by the gods, the rhapsodist is inspired by the poet, and so, to use Plato’s metaphor, a magnetic chain develops, linking all three. Although Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry is a defense based on moral grounds—the end of poetry is not just well-knowing but well-doing—there is a good measure of religious thought strung throughout the Apology : one of Sidney’s three kinds of poetry is poetry about God, and he says that the architectonike or final end of poetry “is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.” Another Renaissance critic, Henry Reynolds, little-known but much admired by Frye (he calls Reynolds “the greatest critic before Johnson”), believes that poets should become natural philosophers by cultivating the knowledge and love of God.

2 In the modern era there has been a resistance to this kind of talk, some of it having to do with the post-Nietzschean temper of the times and some of it with anxieties about the autonomy of criticism as a discipline, beholden to nothing outside of literature. The New Critics, who bowed to T.S. Eliot’s dictum that poetry was poetry and not another thing, wanted to keep criticism free from the ideologies of other areas of inquiry. Even

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the early Frye, the Frye of Anatomy of Criticism, who was clearly influenced by the New Critics, held that criticism needs to be independent from externally derived frameworks, what he calls “determinisms.” “Critical principles,” he wrote in Anatomy of Criticism (not The Anatomy of Criticism, as Le Fustec has it throughout), “cannot be taken over ready-made from theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any combination of these.”

3 But there are really two Fryes, the early centripetal Frye of the Anatomy : systematic, given to the taxonomy of literary conventions, an imitator of poetics in an Aristotelian sense, exuberantly learned, analytic, and highly schematic. Then there is the late centrifugal Frye of The Great Code, Words with Power, and The Double Vision. These books come from the last decade of his life, and his extensive notebooks from this period, of which Claude Le Fustec is one of the first to take advantage, are mostly devoted to religious rather than literary topics. In the late Frye the Bible becomes the central text in need of commentary, and Longinian ekstasis has replaced Aristotelian karthasis in the forefront of Frye’s thinking. The subtitle of each of the first two books from this late period is “The Bible and Literature.” A part of the academic interest in the Bible and literature is devoted precisely to literary approaches to the Bible, which is the first subject addressed in the essay on “Contemporary Methods in Biblical Study” in the New Revised Standard Version of The New Oxford Annotated Bible. When Frye began teaching his course in the Bible in the 1940s, his approach by way of myth and metaphor was, so far as I can determine, unique. The course was called Religious Knowledge, and in the recently published Northrop Frye’s Lectures : Student Notes from His Courses, 1947–1955 we have a fairly complete record of what Frye taught in the course. About a decade after Frye began teaching his Bible course, the University of Chicago established a graduate program in religion and art, art referring primarily to literary art. Critics such as Nathan A. Scott of Chicago argued forcefully that a dialogue between religion and literature was altogether justified.

4 While modern secularism has resulted in some resistance to religion in the academy, the study of religion and literature has from its beginnings in the 1950s now developed into a full-blown academic industry, with its various journals, monographs, conferences, Ph.D. programs, and the like. Le Fustec’s first chapter “Introduction : Re- enchantment, Postsecularity, and the Return of Transcendence in Western Culture” reviews some of the central themes that have emerged from the more recent incarnations of the study of religion and literature in a postsecular age, beginning with several accounts—including those by Charles Taylor, Peter Berger, and Mark Taylor— which challenge the notion that secularism has displaced transcendence. This introduction, along with the concluding chapter, is the theoretical part of Le Fustec’s book. She calls up a number of apologies for a literary criticism that do not exclude matters of religion, and she then turns to Frye’s work as an exemplary instance of the “quest for transcendence.” Le Fustec is a bit nervous about equating the religious imperative with the spiritual one, the latter for her sometimes meaning only esoterica, and I think her emphasis on transcendence causes her to sometimes shy away from the other half of the dialectic, immanence, which in a critic like Frye with his Blakean roots is always italicized. In one of his Late Notebooks he writes : “The two accounts of creation in the Bible provide us with a spectacular creation, featuring dividing and opposition, transcendental in reference, and an immanent one, featuring the permeation of life & moisture into death & dryness.” Like almost all oppositions in Frye, immanence, which

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is not exclusively human, and transcendence, which is not exclusively divine, interpenetrate.

5 Le Fustec is surely right in calling attention to the centrality of “kerygma” in Frye’s understanding of the power of literature. Frye has called himself a “terminological buccaneer,” and one of the terms he pirates from Bultmann is “kerygma.” In the Great Code kerygma is used more or less conventionally to mean proclamation, but eight years later in Words with Power the word takes on an astonishing array of meanings : prophetic utterance, the metaliterary perception that expands one’s vision, the Longinian ecstatic response provoked by any literary text that “revolutionizes our consciousness.” Le Fustec is one of the few to have realized that this last phrase captures what for Frye is the final cause of the spiritual quest. In his Late Notebooks, notebooks he wrote in preparation for writing Words with Power, he is forever talking about the power of literature to expand and intensify consciousness. In the “Tentative Conclusion” to the Anatomy Frye speaks of the “revolutionary act of consciousness” involved in the response to culture, and part of this revolution is in “spiritual productive power.” This claim, which Frye inserts almost as an aside, is an early intimation of what becomes an insistent theme in the late Frye.

6 Having surveyed the most recent understandings of the religion and literature dialogue and having called our attention to the various theoretical pronouncements about the transcendence–immanence opposition, Le Fustec sets off on her journey through the American literary tradition, armed with the concepts and language of Frye, who serves as her Virgil. What follows are six illuminating studies in practical criticism, studies of the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, and Toni Morrison. The common thread that runs throughout is how to account for the presence of transcendence while at the same time recognizing that the divine can also be immanent, as in the Incarnation. Le Fustec turns to several postmodern theologians, including Mark Taylor and his commentators, to solve the riddle of how transcendence and immanence can co-exist. And from these thinkers we get simply the juxtaposition of the two terms (“immanent transcendence”) or, in what is something of a tongue-twister, “immanentized transcendence.” A later variation is the “immanence of transcendence.”

7 Le Fustec is somewhat nervous about bringing deconstruction into the discussion, and, I think, with good reason. It is more illuminating to turn to Frye himself : a dialectic of opposites permeates practically everything he wrote. Here Bruno is a key figure. His ideas of polarity and the coincidentia oppositorum appear with some regularity in Frye’s writing. In fact, Brian Graham, even though he doesn’t take Bruno into account, has written an entire book on the issue : The Necessary Unity of Opposites : The Dialectical Thinking of Northrop Frye (University of Toronto Press, 2011). In this regard Frye’s notion of interpenetration and his use of the Hegelian principle of Aufhebung, the latter of which Le Fustec calls forth toward the end of her “theoretical” introduction (29), belong in any discussion of the dialectic of transcendence and immanence.

8 The chapters of practical criticism provide highly nuanced readings of The Scarlet Letter, The Europeans, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road, and Beloved. These readings appeal to features of Frye’s criticism that go far beyond the immanence– transcendence debate. Thus, to support her reading of James, Le Fustec turns to Frye’s theory of verbal modes ; of Hawthorne, his theory of symbols ; of Steinbeck, his notions of expanded consciousness and anagnorisis (recognition) ; of Kerouac, his ideas about

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esoteric spirituality ; and of Morrison, his speculations about creative and demonic ascents and metaphorical literalism. There are a number of other points of contact between Frye and the commentaries on the six novelists. Northrop Frye and American Fiction is the fifty-second book devoted in its entirety to Frye (there have been three more in the meantime). My guess is that studies like Le Fustec’s will continue to emerge as more and more readers take advantage, as she does, of the expanded Frye canon. The publication of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye was completed in 2012, and the thirty volumes in this edition almost doubled the amount of writing that Frye himself published. I think the future of Frye studies will continue to expand as the previously unpublished material, especially Frye’s notebooks, comes to be assimilated into the critical consciousness of the twentieth-first century. Several years back Terry Eagleton asked rhetorically, “Who now reads Frye ?” Northrop Frye and American Fiction is one answer. Surely someone will be interested in writing about Frye and American poetry, or perhaps North American poetry, so as to include the Canadians. The subjects of the chapters of that study might include Poe, Dickinson, Eliot, Stevens, Layton, Macpherson, Pratt, and Reaney. In any event, Le Fustec has shown us that Frye has not exited the critical scene.

INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

AUTHORS

ROBERT D. DENHAM Roanoke College

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Frédéric Dumas, Mark Twain : Tourisme et vanité

Stéphanie Carrez

RÉFÉRENCE

Dumas, Frédéric, Mark Twain : Tourisme et vanité, Grenoble : ELLUG, 2015, 348 pages, ISBN : 978-2-84310-301-8, € 25,00.

1 Samuel L. Clemens aimait à raconter que son pseudonyme, Mark Twain, faisait référence à une expression utilisée par les pilotes sur le Mississippi qui désignait la profondeur suffisante pour naviguer en toute sécurité. Il n'en reste pas moins que ce choix inscrit au cœur du nom de plume de l'écrivain une identité duelle, instable et problématique. Dans l'introduction de l'ouvrage intitulé Mark Twain. Tourisme et vanité, Frédéric Dumas rappelle ce « trouble identitaire savamment entretenu par Mark Twain » (15) et en analyse les implications dans un corpus de textes particuliers que sont les récits de voyage de Mark Twain. Il en déduit la nécessité pour étudier ces textes d'établir une distinction entre « l'auteur-personnage qui prétend avoir vécu et écrit ses propres aventures » et l'auteur implicite comme « construction mentale de l'auteur empirique par le lecteur », ce qui lui permet de délaisser l'aspect biographique « pour s'intéresser uniquement à la production textuelle » (16). Frédéric Dumas choisit de limiter son corpus à quatre récits de voyage, Le Voyage des Innocents (The Innocents Abroad, 1869), À la dure (Roughing It, 1872), Ascensions en télescope (A Tramp Abroad, 1880) et Le Tour du monde d'un humoriste (Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World, 1897). Il justifie ce choix en indiquant que les quatre textes ont en commun la mise en scène des « aventures divertissantes d'un voyageur ignorant » (13) et dessinent ainsi les contours d'une seule et même persona que Frédéric Dumas place au centre de son étude. Suivant le mouvement suggéré par le titre de son étude, il s'agit pour lui de replacer ces œuvres dans le contexte de l'avènement du tourisme de masse dans la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle mais également de démontrer que le récit souvent comique des voyages du narrateur-auteur constitue aussi une « création esthétique où

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affleurent çà et là des fragments de l'univers psychique de l'auteur en tant qu'artiste » qui laisse apparaître une « angoisse existentielle » renvoyant à la tradition des Vanités du XVIIe siècle (21).

2 La première partie de cet ouvrage s'attache à analyser les mutations de l'expérience du voyage ainsi que les transformations de la façon d'en rendre compte à travers l'écriture. Le premier chapitre explore la mise en scène dans les récits de Mark Twain de « la nouvelle donne touristique » (40), caractérisée par l'afflux de « touristes ignorants » qui « tendent naturellement à trouver (ce) qui leur ressemble » (42). Frédéric Dumas montre ensuite comment l'Amérique sert souvent de mesure au narrateur, dont le texte se présente comme un « palimpseste » où « les traces d'une Amérique sous-jacente guident la perspective » (47). Le discours du narrateur-auteur « relève à la fois d'un ethnocentrisme viscéral caractéristique de l'époque et d'une stratégie comique basée sur les travers d'une telle posture » (52), ce qui conduit Frédéric Dumas à envisager les récits de voyage de Mark Twain en tant qu'entreprise parodique, même si celle-ci laisse néanmoins « apparaître un univers poétique véritablement personnel, dans une loufoquerie marquée par la langue et la culture » (79).

3 Dans la deuxième partie, Frédéric Dumas s'intéresse à la manière dont le tourisme se présente sous la forme d'un spectacle qu'il compare à ceux du cirque Barnum, le narrateur-spectateur étant la victime consentante de « l'imposture qui sous-tend l'expérience touristique » (89). L'analogie qu'il repère entre les pratiques frauduleuses dont sont victimes les touristes et « leur traitement narratif » le conduit à explorer la façon dont « le texte attire l'attention sur son propre fonctionnement manipulateur » (105). Les textes de Mark Twain participent de cet « art du mensonge » (125) qu'est devenu le récit de voyage à l'ère des guides touristiques, alors que la perception du monde entier est désormais façonnée par les récits qui en sont faits et le rendent accessible au plus grand nombre. Ces textes contribuent à mettre en lumière et dénoncer cette imposture tout en suscitant une interrogation très moderne sur la « capacité très limitée des textes à rendre compte » de la réalité du monde extérieur (143).

4 Frédéric Dumas s'intéresse dans la troisième partie de son ouvrage à ce qu'il identifie chez la persona commune aux quatre récits de voyage comme « une préoccupation réelle pour l'appréciation artistique » (164). Il s'agit pour lui de montrer que la démarche du narrateur-auteur repose sur une forme d'esthétique « anti-intellectuelle » (166), guidée par le « principe mimétique » (174) et par « un sens aigu de l'harmonie, formaté par [la] culture anglo-européenne » (176). Il complète cette réflexion par une analyse des liens qui se tissent dans ces textes entre texte et image. Il met en regard les illustrations faites par Mark Twain et le discours critique que le narrateur a élaboré pour les accompagner, puis s'intéresse à des exemples de « vignettes textuelles » qui relèvent de la « description picturale » (227) pour conclure que, dans cette vision esthétique, « l'incapacité de la peinture à exprimer la beauté fondamentale de la nature ne laisse paradoxalement à l'artiste que les mots pour tenter d'exprimer l'ineffable » (233).

5 Cette remarque amène Frédéric Dumas au cœur de son propos, qui consiste à montrer dans la dernière partie de cette étude comment « l’œuvre reflète l'angoisse liée à la fugacité de l'existence et à l'inanité de toute production humaine » (238), dans un dixième chapitre intitulé « le texte-vanité ». Il y explore les nombreuses références à la

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mort qui jalonnent le parcours du narrateur-touriste au fil des quatre textes du corpus. Le dernier chapitre est enfin consacré à la question de la réception et à la place du lecteur implicite dans la construction artistique des récits de voyage. Les multiples facettes de la persona, « à la fois interprète, auteur, consommateur et critique », lui permettent de conclure que « ses points de vue contradictoires éclairent toutes les facettes du processus de la création et de la réception » (321).

6 Dans cette étude riche en analyses textuelles, Frédéric Dumas donne à son lecteur matière à penser la question particulièrement complexe chez Mark Twain du statut du discours et de la place de cette « instance auctoriale protéiforme » (293) si propre à cet auteur américain. L'intérêt de ce travail dépasse cependant le champ de la critique twainienne car l'analyse proposée au fil de cet ouvrage très documenté apporte également des éléments de réflexion fructueux sur les codes, les caractéristiques et les problématiques intrinsèques de l'écriture de voyage comme de l'écriture de soi, ainsi que sur les liens qui unissent texte et image.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEURS

STÉPHANIE CARREZ Université de Tours François Rabelais

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Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

Laure Gillot-Assayag

REFERENCES

Ngai, Mae M., Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press, 2004,377 pages, ISBN 0-691-07471-2, $ 23.95.

1 Impossible Subjects, Mae Ngai’s award-winning essay, explores the origins of new categories of non-citizens shaped by American law and society from 1924 to 1965. Positioned at the crossroads of immigration history, ethnic and law studies, Impossible Subjects can be understood as a test of the validity regarding the American claims, past or present, to be a nation of immigrants, a melting pot, a land of inclusion. It is not so much the history of immigration and the “poor huddled masses” passing through Ellis Island that interest Ngai but the much more subtle phenomenon of the construction of illegality by law – a history of exclusion that remains in many ways overshadowed by national American history. The author was a labor-union organizer before becoming Professor of history and Asian American Studies at Columbia University. Sequel of Strangers of the Land by John Higham, that ends precisely on the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, Ngai’s book is also a militant reply to Higham’s liberal tone, representative of the post- World War II narrative on immigration.

2 Impossible subjects fills a double historiographical gap: the choice to situate its study between the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 corresponds to a period somewhat neglected. Indeed, in the 2000s, historians mainly wrote on immigration before 1924, an era of open immigration from Europe and laissez-faire, or the period post-1965 when the national quota of origins was abolished and immigration from the Third World increased1.

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3 On the other hand, the focus on Asian immigration (Japanese, Chinese and Filipino) is a perspective often understudied, compared to the numerous works dealing with European immigration.

4 Impossible Subjects thus examines the transformation of an immigrant into an alien and how restrictive immigration laws produced new categories of racial difference. If illegality is a label that may change depending on the various laws on immigration, Ngai points out four categories systematically built to link race with illegality in the United States: the “illegal alien” and the “contract laborer”, which correspond to Mexicans crossing the border, the “alien citizen”, racialized as Asian and the “colonial subject”, corresponding to Filipino imported labor force. The novelty of Ngai’s book is to consider illegality not only as a breach of the positive law but also as a racial construction born of a perception in the eyes of a nation.

5 In an introductory note, Ngai specifies that the terms used are not employed in order to reproduce racial stereotypes but to trace the origins and the consequences of a constructed national imaginary. Indeed, the illegal alien becomes, by immigration laws, an "impossible subject", defined precisely by the illegality of their existence: their inclusion in the nation is a social reality but a legal impossibility—they are subjects without rights and excluded from citizenship. On the other hand, the reconciliation of two opposite words, “alien citizen” means that although Asians are literally citizens through naturalization or through birth, they are not considered as such in terms of belonging.

6 The first part deals with the quota system and the American deportation policy of the 1920s-1930s which led to the making and unmaking of illegal aliens. The essay first analyses the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. This time framework is questionable – it excludes the period of anti-Chinese restrictive immigration laws, such as the Exclusion Act of 1882, studied by Erika Lee in her book At America’s Gates2. Nevertheless, 1924 is a seminal date because it leads to the establishment of numerical limits and the institution of a global racial hierarchy that excludes certain categories (mainly Chinese, Japanese, South Indians). In turn, the 1924 Act solidifies the legal boundaries of the white race. The establishment of a border patrol as a law enforcement agency transforms unauthorized entry into a criminal act with a risk of deportation.

7 The process of racial exclusion carries on with the characterization of Filipinos as colonial subjects (ch. 3) in the 1920s-1930s and Mexican migrants as illegal aliens (ch. 4) in the 1940s. Labelled as undocumented workers and contract laborers, the Mexican and Filipino immigration helped to constitute the notion of whiteness3. Filipino migrant laborers worked mostly in the Pacific Northwest and California on summer contracts. However, Filipino immigration differed from other migration experiences, owing to the Philippines' status of US territory as a result of US victory in the 1898 Spanish American war. Filipinos were portrayed in the Treaty of Paris (1898) as incapable of self-rule and the 1901 insular cases gave legal grounds for the U.S. to create an unincorporated colony. After a period of benevolence from the American government to fill up the shortage in agriculture, they had to endure racial violence in the late 1920s because of racial stereotypes and for economic reasons, such as fear of losing jobs or anxieties of miscegenation. The 1929 depression exacerbated the conflicts surrounding jobs, there were attempts to repatriate Filipinos in mass. Indeed, the Welch Bill of 1935 subsidized passage back to the Philippines and thus conflated repatriation and deportation.

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8 Ngai then studies the bracero program, a state-sponsored contracted labor program that imported 4 million Mexican workers on temporary contracts from World War II to the early 1960s. Ngai notes that “The bracero program was supposed to be a solution to illegal immigration but in fact it generated more illegal immigration” (147). Indeed, the carrot and stick policy of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), an agency created in 1933, is analyzed through Operation Wetback, developed in 1954 by the U.S. Government and the Mexican Government to curb illegal flows through deportation of Mexicans. Nevertheless, the program only records short-term successes. As a consequence of this legislation, the term “wetback” became a derogatory term which racialized Mexicans, pictured as pathogen and dangerous elements.

9 Part three focuses on the shift of an immigration policy driven by politics of domestic racism to an immigration dictated by foreign policies matters. Ngai shows how international commitments and particularly the Second World War and the Cold War influenced American immigration laws and constructed a new category of citizens: the alien citizen, referring to the Japanese American (ch. 5), and the Chinese American (ch. 6).

10 The chapter on the mass incarceration of 120 000 Japanese is remarkable. It deals with the internment of Americans with Japanese origins in U.S. concentration camps from 1942 to 1945 on suspicion of intelligence with the enemy during World War II. The renunciation by 5500 Japanese of their American citizenship is a real crisis of citizenship and probably one of the darkest episodes in the history of civil rights in the United States since the Jim Crow laws. The switch from a positive image of the Japanese at the beginning of the century to the constitution of the Japanese enemy in the context of World War II is brilliantly analyzed. The reader learns that the internment was also intended for American Germans and Italians but the latter were released the following month by the FBI. The War Relocation Authority (WRA), the institutional actor of this forced internment, participated fully in the constitution of a racially based citizenship. Ngai shows how the institutions viewed Japanese Americans as racial children in need of democratic tutelage, in a way which is not dissimilar to claims about black Americans.

11 Loyalty conflicts regarding the Japanese were caused by question 28 of the 1943 Loyalty Questionnaire, requiring allegiance to the United States and the disallowance of their affective and political links to Japan. It culminated in the Denationalization act of July 1944 that authorized citizens to make a voluntary renunciation of citizenship. Wayne Collins, civil rights attorney, took their case and managed in a thirteen-year-old battle to restore the citizenship of 5000 Japanese Americans after the War, on the grounds that the Japanese reacted under condition of coercion – perhaps thereby renewing the stereotype of the Japanese weakness and pragmatism, even if this is not the subject of debate for Ngai. If a lot of Nissei (second-generation Japanese, born in America and with an American citizenship) renounced their American citizenship, nationalism within the Japanese population was overestimated according to Ngai – this renunciation is, according to her, an angry reaction against American politics rather than a desire for repatriation. The reader has also a glimpse of the culture in camps, particularly on Tule Lake, the segregated camp for Japanese disloyals. With a mixture of Japanese and American politics, culture camps celebrated both the anniversary of Lincoln and the Emperor, exemplifying the tension generated by patriotic ties both to the US and Japan.

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12 Even more forgotten by historical memory is the Chinese confession program, launched in 1956 by the INS. The program sought confessions of illegal entry from U.S. citizens of Chinese origin and offered, in theory, a legalization of status in exchange. As the only group to be excluded from immigration explicitly by their race, the Chinese indeed invented a system of illegal entry built upon a paper trail known as “paper sons”. 11 000 American Chinese confessed of having used false names to immigrate in the U.S. Nevertheless, the risk of deportation for the confessor and his family and the lack of benefits from confessing created fear in both the Chinese and white community. The Chinese American were thus victims of an anti-communism hysteria in the midst of Cold War politics where China was the number one enemy.

13 The last chapter retraces the emergence of pluralism as a narrative from its progressive origins in the 1920s to immigration reforms in 1965. Without doubt, it is the most militant part, and probably also the least analytical. The liberal pluralistic narrative was fueled by critics of nativism and new ideas of race and culture, such as Franz Boas’ works at the beginning of the century. Later on, this liberal thought was exemplified by John F. Kennedy’s book A Nation of Immigrants and embodied by Herbert Lehman, a prominent Democrat from New York participating in the immigration reforms of the 1950s. According to Ngai, the liberal discourse advocated an unfair notion of equality sweeping off economic or political differences between countries — even if the politics of asylum for Jewish refugees is not really investigated. Liberals also remained ambivalent about immigration from the Third World, as demonstrated by the 1952 McCarran Walter Act. This act imposed an immigration quota to the British colonies in the Caribbean in order to limit the immigration of Black people in the U.S. The ambivalence of this egalitarian liberal ideology against restrictive immigration is symbolized by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which repealed the system of national origins quotas but still retained the exclusionist character of the 1924 legislation with a new system of quotas, applied this time to all countries and evenly distributed (20 000 per country, 300 000 admissions per year).

14 The concluding remarks develop new patterns of immigration after 1965. Indeed, these years paved the way for an increased immigration from the Third World and continued American commitment to numerical restrictions by the imposition of quotas on Western hemisphere countries. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act passed by Congress, giving amnesty for 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, did not succeed in curbing illegal immigration. The stunning militarization of the U.S. – Mexico border since 1990 with the erection of fences and high-tech surveillance makes crossing the border more difficult for migrants in pursuit of work. The end of Asiatic exclusion led to the arrival of wealthy elites from Hong Kong repositioning American Asians as “model minorities”. Ngai vigorously opposes this stereotype as it elides the existence of large numbers of working-class immigrants and undocumented workers or refugees. She also notes that the growth in size of Asian and Latino makes the black-white prism of American society more complex. Eventually, globalization triggers a push-and-pull migration from developing countries to low-wage sectors in the United States, leading to new forms of illegal aliens.

15 In many ways, Impossible Subjects is ground-breaking and insightful to understand what it means to be American and how immigration restrictions remapped the nation by creating new categories of racial differences. The impressive compilation of institutional archives has to be noted, some of which previously unstudied, such as the

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U.S. border patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) archives. The crossing of periodical journals, of the AFL-CIO records and governmental serial publications allows Ngai, for example, to recount the strikes of Filipinos, who formed 80% of the asparagus farming workforce, in the Sacramento River, in favor of better working conditions in the 1930s and to show the lack of support from the white labor unions. Oral sources, if they are present in the list of archives, remain singularly absent in the narrative, which is dominated by the study of the changing design of the nation- state based on a stricter enforcement of national sovereignty. However, the presence of photographs, a sign of everyday history, foreshadows a stronger combination between a top-down legal history, and a social history from the bottom up.

16 As a result, the effects of immigration restrictive laws on lifestyles and family structures of the “impossible subjects” are not analyzed. In this sense, the essay would have also benefited from a reflection on gender. If the racialized sexual representations of Filipinos as feminized males are well studied, the way immigrant policies affected gender dynamics is largely underestimated. Chinese women, seen as presumptive prostitutes and Chinese males portrayed as sexually deviant since the 1880s, are not even mentioned.

17 In any case, the figure of the “impossible subject” does not cease to be ambivalent. The book was indeed published at the time of the immigration reform proposal by George Bush (2004). The reform, criticized as a new bracero program, thus emphasized the acute character of illegal immigration in the United States in its contemporary ramifications4. More recently, the very disputed Dream Act under Obama’s office or the spectrum of illegal Mexicans immigrants raised in the Trump campaign bring back the haunting of foreignness in the American nation. Undoubtedly, Ngai was right when she declared that the impossible subject is “a problem not to be solved” (18).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HIGHAM, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1988.

KENNEDY, John F., A Nation of Immigrants, New York, HarperCollins, 1964.

LEE, Erika, At America’s Gates, Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era 1882-1943, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

NOTES

1. One exception to this rule may be the book of DANIELS, Roger, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882, New York (NY), Hill and Wang, 2004. On nineteenth-century immigration, see for example KRAUT, Alan M., The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1921, Wheeling, Harlan Davidson, 2001 or VAN VUGT, William E., Britain to America: Mid-Nineteenth Century Immigrants to the United States, Urbana, University of

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Illinois Press, 1999. On the post-65 period, YANG, Philip Q., Post-1965 Immigration to the United States: Structural Determinants, Westport, Praeger, 1995. 2. Erika Lee’s essay is one of the first books devoted to the study of Chinese exclusion laws. 3. Indeed, contract labor was for a long time considered antithetical to the founding principles of American democracy. On the social construction of whiteness, see ROEDIGER, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), New York, Haymarket Series, 2007. 4. Cultural production is no exception to these questions. See for example the very recent film Soy Nero (2016) directed by Raffi Pits, which deals with the story of “Green card soldiers” Mexicans who were promised a green card after having served in the American army but were eventually deported.

INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

AUTHORS

LAURE GILLOT-ASSAYAG Center for North American studies (CENA) – EHESS

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Nathalie Dessens et Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, dirs, Interculturalité: la Louisiane au carrefour des cultures

Claire Parfait

RÉFÉRENCE

Dessens, Nathalie et Le Glaunec, Jean-Pierre, dirs, Interculturalité: la Louisiane au carrefour des cultures, Québec, Presses de l'Université Laval, Collection « Les voies du français », 2016, 370 pages, ISBN : 978-2-7637-9929-2, 36€.

1 Ce volume collectif, dirigé par Nathalie Dessens et Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, issu principalement de deux journées d’étude à Toulouse et La Nouvelle-Orléans en 2012, se propose de revisiter l’histoire de la Louisiane dans une perspective à la fois diachronique et interdisciplinaire. Les treize chapitres qui le composent examinent les circulations et les interactions entre les différentes communautés qui composent la Louisiane, de la période coloniale à aujourd’hui. L’ouvrage explore la créolisation, l'hybridation des cultures, telle qu'elle apparaît notamment au travers de discours, de commémorations, d’éléments de culture matérielle, de musique, ou de la langue elle- même, donc de marqueurs autres que les seuls marqueurs politiques et socio- économiques longtemps utilisés pour décrire les rapports entre Créoles et Américains.

2 Après une introduction qui rappelle les grands moments de l’historiographie louisianaise récente, une première série de 3 essais se penche sur la période coloniale. Les 5 essais suivants portent sur le xixe siècle. 3 chapitres explorent ensuite le français de Louisiane, avant un chapitre consacré à l’examen d’une forme musicale spécifique à la Louisiane, le zydeco. Le volume se clôt sur une analyse de la reconstruction d’un jardin à la Nouvelle-Orléans après le cyclone Katrina. L’ouvrage couvre par conséquent trois siècles d’histoire louisianaise, trouvant sa cohérence dans son objet, l'étude des circulations et des interactions entre les différentes communautés qui composent la Louisiane coloniale puis états-unienne, et sa méthodologie. Le « croisement des

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regards » (7) des spécialistes permet de proposer une vision renouvelée de l'histoire des communautés ethniques et raciales louisianaises, de ce « carrefour » des empires et des cultures, pour reprendre le titre du volume.

3 Dans le premier chapitre, après un bref rappel de l'intérêt récent pour une historiographie longtemps négligée, celle de la colonisation française en Amérique du Nord, Sylvia R. Frey retrace la trajectoire éclairante de plusieurs individus pendant la période coloniale. A travers l'exemple de Pradel, officier, commerçant et planteur français établi à la Nouvelle-Orléans, de La Nuit, un esclave qu’il affranchit, et le récit d'un procès d'esclaves accusés d'avoir voulu empoisonner leur maître, le chapitre démontre la nature de « mélangeur culturel » (33) de la Nouvelle-Orléans. Un second essai sur le xviiie siècle, signé de Sophie White, s’appuie sur des documents d’archives et des éléments de culture matérielle, notamment les vêtements, pour explorer la hiérarchie raciale établie par les Ursulines de la Nouvelle-Orléans pendant la première moitié du 18ème siècle. Cette hiérarchie place les Amérindiens au-dessous des Africains et explique pourquoi la fille d'un Français et d'une Amérindienne n'est acceptée que comme sœur converse et non choriste, donc à un rang inférieur, malgré son père français, son éducation et sa dot. Dans l’article suivant, Alexandre Dubé s’intéresse également à la culture matérielle et prend l’exemple du « limbourg », une étoffe destinée aux Amérindiens de Louisiane, pour revisiter la nature des liens entre Européens, Amérindiens, et Africains dans la Louisiane du xviiie siècle.

4 La seconde série d’essais commence par un article de Marieke Polfliet, qui, après un examen détaillé des différentes populations d'origine française en Louisiane au début du xixe siècle, explore les diverses manières dont ces groupes réagissent aux changements de souveraineté, de l'Espagne à la France, puis aux Etats-Unis. Polfliet explore ensuite les formes de socialisation spécifiques développées par les migrants français les plus récents en Louisiane, notamment l'éducation, la presse et les réseaux maçonniques. Elle termine par une analyse de la culture festive à caractère politique, qui permet la rencontre des deux cultures, française et américaine. Dans l’article suivant, Nathalie Dessens examine les interactions entre les différentes communautés ethniques, sous l’angle des fêtes et commémorations afin de mettre en lumière la créolisation, l'hybridation des cultures en présence, et de montrer comment dans les premières décennies du xixe siècle émerge une identité culturelle spécifique à la Nouvelle-Orléans. Ainsi, l'anniversaire de la bataille de la Nouvelle-Orléans (1815) dans laquelle ont combattu ensemble Blancs et Noirs, Américains, Créoles et réfugiés de St- Domingue, rassemble les divers groupes ethniques et raciaux, linguistiques et culturels. D’autres célébrations, à l'origine uniques à tel ou tel groupe ethnique, rassemblent progressivement l'ensemble de la population. C'est le cas du 4 juillet et du 14 juillet, ou encore de certaines fêtes catholiques. L’analyse du Carnaval met en relief l'hybridation de différentes traditions culturelles et linguistiques, prouvant que l'histoire particulière de la Louisiane en fait « un laboratoire exceptionnel pour l’étude des interactions culturelles » (160). Dans l’article suivant, Rien T. Ertel remet également en question la vision longtemps acceptée et quelque peu caricaturale de l’opposition entre Créoles et Américains, cette fois-ci par le biais d’une analyse des discours prononcés à la cathédrale St-Louis de la Nouvelle-Orléans par l'historien et homme politique Charles Gayarré (1830) et le prêtre et poète Adrien Rouquette (1846) lors de la commémoration de la victoire américaine à la bataille de la Nouvelle-Orléans en 1815. Chacun à sa manière, Gayarré et Rouquette tentent de réconcilier les multiples identités des Créoles, partagés entre Europe et Amérique. Cette tentative passe par la création d'une

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communauté imaginée, au sens où l'entend Benedict Anderson. Geneviève Piché explore ensuite les liens entre les esclaves et la religion catholique dans la période qui précède la guerre de Sécession, à partir des lettres et des rapports du clergé catholique de Louisiane, ainsi que des registres paroissiaux. L'auteur analyse les réactions des planteurs à l'évangélisation de leurs esclaves par le clergé catholique, indique la fréquence de sacrements comme le baptême pour les esclaves, même si la perception de ces sacrements par les esclaves demeure impossible à cerner. Le dernier essai sur le xixe est signé d’Olivier Cabanac, qui s'appuie sur l'analyse des manuscrits de la famille Grima de la Nouvelle-Orléans, en particulier sur un corpus d'environ 70 lettres écrites par Victor Grima à sa famille, entre 1856, date à laquelle il part à Paris pour faire ses études, et le début de la guerre de Sécession. Ces lettres sont révélatrices des liens qui continuent à unir la France et la Louisiane, par exemple les réseaux louisianais à Paris, mais elles mettent également en relief la prise graduelle de conscience par V. Grima d'une identité louisianaise et américaine, qui se dévoile dans la comparaison systématique entre la France et la Louisiane. Enfin, les lettres révèlent l'ignorance des Français par rapport à l'Amérique et leur vision « exotique » des Américains, mais également le regard très critique que porte le jeune Louisianais sur les Français.

5 Les trois articles qui suivent sont consacrés à la langue elle-même. Ainsi, Annette Boudreau examine les liens entre les pratiques linguistiques des francophones de Louisiane et de l'Acadie des Maritimes. Les deux communautés se rassemblent autour du personnage d'Evangeline célébré dans le poème de Longfellow. Les deux groupes partagent également les représentations négatives à l'égard de leur langue, et ont en commun « l'insécurité linguistique » dont souffrent les locuteurs de langues faiblement légitimées. Cependant, vers la fin du xxe siècle, ces langues dévalorisées deviennent l’une des manières de revendiquer une identité spécifique. Dans l’essai suivant, André Thibault s’appuie sur un recueil publié en 1994 de contes enregistrés dans le Sud de la Louisiane auprès de témoins, cadiens pour la plupart, pour examiner du point de vue lexical le français parlé en Louisiane. L'auteur relève les types lexicaux que l'on retrouve dans diverses variétés de français en Amérique du Nord et aux Antilles, et en trace la provenance. Il conclut que, contrairement à une vision traditionnelle, peut-être entretenue pour des raisons idéologiques, on ne peut pas voir dans le français de Louisiane le « strict héritier du français des déportés acadiens du xviiie siècle » (288). Enfin, Luc Baronian se penche sur les sources nord-américaines potentielles du français louisianais, à partir d’une enquête menée en 2003, pour conclure que le français louisianais semble être une branche indépendante de la famille des dialectes nord- américains de français. Partageant des traits avec l'acadien, le québécois et l'haïtien, le français louisianais est un « gumbo linguistique » (316).

6 Après un rappel de la différence entre Cadiens et Créoles, Claude Chastagner examine les origines et « les enjeux culturels et identitaires » (322) du zydeco, une forme musicale créée par les Créoles du sud-ouest de la Louisiane. Les autorités louisianaises utilisent le zydeco pour stimuler le tourisme et « inventer » une série de traditions, une forme de « marketing culturel » qui n’est pas exempte de stéréotypes.

7 Enfin, en manière de coda, Gilles-Antoine Langlois s'intéresse à la restauration du jardin Antoine dévasté par l'ouragan Katrina en 2005. L'auteur commence par dresser un historique de la nature et de la fonction des jardins dans la Nouvelle-Orléans coloniale, avant d'expliquer les origines du jardin Antoine, puis son évolution aux xixe et xxe siècles. La question de savoir quelle période de référence privilégier pour cette

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restauration met en lumière le passé multiculturel de la Nouvelle-Orléans et s'avère particulièrement complexe du fait des utilisations multiples du lieu. Parce que le jardin a eu des occupants très divers en raison de l'histoire particulière de la Louisiane, il représente « le lieu même de la transaction sinon de la transculture » (357).

8 Si l’on peut regretter l’absence d’index, il convient de souligner l’intérêt d’un ouvrage qui révèle toute la richesse du croisement des regards disciplinaires sur de multiples facettes d’un même objet. Le lecteur y trouvera par ailleurs d’utiles états des lieux historiographiques. Interculturalité: la Louisiane au carrefour des cultures intéressera notamment les spécialistes des Etats-Unis, de la Louisiane, de la période coloniale et des études postcoloniales.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEURS

CLAIRE PARFAIT Université Paris 13

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Nama, Adilifu. Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino

David Roche

REFERENCES

Nama, Adilifu. Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015. 169 pp. ISBN 978-0292768147 Hardcover $55.00, Paperback $25.95, Kindle $16.91

1 In Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino, the prolific Adilifu Nama, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, pursues his study of the interplay between identity politics (race, as well as gender and class) and genre in popular culture initiated in his previous books Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film and Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. The first full-length study devoted to this topic, Race on the QT is resolutely inscribed within critical and academic discussions on the politics of Tarantino’s films. Each chapter deals with two films that are examined in chronological order; equal attention is paid to Tarantino’s first seven films—from Reservoir Dogs (1992) to Django Unchained (2012)—as well as True Romance (1993), written by Tarantino but directed by Tony Scott. The book also includes an introduction, a conclusion, notes, a substantial bibliography and a useful index.

2 The introduction makes it immediately clear that Nama’s interest lies not in the director’s clumsy and sometimes embarassing statements, but in the films themselves (2-3). Analyzing the films’ representations of race should not be reduced to exploring their debt to the blaxploitation movies of the 1970s; rather, the “racial candor” the films exhibit pursues the legacy of New Hollywood filmmakers like Martin Scorsese (4). Nama provocatively contests the received idea that “Spike Lee is unquestionably American cinema’s most skilled (and accepted) racial provocateur for our present era”

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and goes so far as to contend that race is often just a gimmick in Lee’s films (7). Praising the work of white filmmakers like Tarantino, John Sayles and Norman Jewison, Nama considers that “in-group racial orientation does not necessarily provide a director with ability or insight when it comes to articulating racial politics in America” (8). In defending Tarantino as “a complex screenwriter and director who questions America’s traditional notions of race, ethnicity, and gender” (10), Nama sides with cultural critic Stanley Crouch against film critics like Armond White (9). Analyzing the “symbolic and cultural meaning” of the individual films through a cultural studies approach, Nama aims to “frame and then deconstruct Tarantino’s film work as a form of referential cultural production in dialogue with historical and concurrent racial anxieties in American society” (10).

3 Racial tensions, though covert, underlie the American filmmaker’s early work. In seeing the black detective Holdaway as “the ideological center of Reservoir Dogs’s racial politics” (17), Nama follows Paul Gormley’s demonstration that he acts as “the central causal agent of the film’s narrative” (19). Though relegated to the Commode Story flashback and optically marginalized in single shots, Holdaway is the one who, by training Mr. Orange for his undercover operation (17), undermines the white masculinity the thieves strive to uphold through racist, sexist and homophobic discourses. In this respect, Holdaway announces the racial avengers Django and Major Marquis Warren in The Hateful Eight (2015). Racial anxieties also permeate True Romance. Both the hero, Clarence, and the Sicilian mobsters who pursue him are driven by the fear of racial miscegenation, a fear enacted in Clarence’s confrontation with the white wanna-be-black pimp Drexl (26-30), and in the mobsters’ quest to avenge the allegations of racial impurity made by Clarence’s father Clifford. By empowering the female character, Clifford’s girlfriend Alabama, in the final act, True Romance shifts the focus from race to gender, before heading toward a politically disappointing Hollywood happy ending in which the two lovers “can fulfill traditional gender roles” (34).

4 Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown (1997), in Nama’s mind, “threw wide open the lid on America’s racism and black stereotypes and reached into the darkest corners” (37). Much attention has been paid to the apparently gratuitous use of the n-word, but little to the complexity of the films’ racial politics (40). Pulp Fiction goes against the grain of Hollywood films by positioning black characters (Jules the hitman and Marsellus Wallace the head gangster) as peers to their white counterparts; Jules in particular “is able to fulfill a role rarely ceded to a black character in mainstream Hollywood movies —a redeemed and empowered figure who lives to the end of the film” (52). For Nama, the use of racist language by the white characters (Lance the drug dealer, Jules’s friend Jimmie who happens to be married to a black woman) in the domestic sphere “signifies the run-of-the-mill, domesticated racism circulating in American society” (47), while getting rid of the evidence of a young black man’s (Marvin’s) death is “a brilliant metaphor for the disposability of young black men” in the contemporary U.S. (46). Though the rape of Marsellus initially “invites interpretation that his victimization is symptomatic of a racist film industry” punishing such a powerful black man, Nama believes that Butch’s change of heart doesn’t so much reinstate the position of the white hero as it “advocates racial reconciliation and mutual respect between blacks and whites,” along with the necessity to join forces against discrimination (51). Nama celebrates Jackie Brown for the way it “is most noticeably invested in the intersection of race and economics and frames much of its racial dynamics within the limitations of frustrated class aspirations” (64). Indeed, the movie pits Jackie, an ageing, working

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class black woman who acts as a drug mule, against Ordell Robbie, “the most outstanding and complex version of ominous black criminality to date” (57), a self- hating black man who values whiteness over blackness and uses his white girlfriend Melanie to “affirm and bolster his self-esteem” (60).

5 Nama qualifies the view that Tarantino’s next two films, Kill Bill (2003-2004) and Death Proof (2007), are “escapist fare that jettisoned the controversies of black racial representation” (65), but he does foreground the way the homage to exploitation cinema also leads to more contradictory politics. Kill Bill Vol.1, in particular, “perpetuates a trend whereby Asian characters are stereotyped and/or displaced by white characters” (70), yet on a metafictional level, it attacks, as its title indicates, the figure of the “yellow face” symbolized by David Carradine, who took Bruce Lee’s part in Kung-fu (ABC, 1972-1975) plays Bill (72), and in Vol.2, the whiteness embodied by the Bride who is humiliated by the ultimate figure of Orientalism, Master Pai Mei (80). Kill Bill does not fall into the trappings of the likes of The Last Samurai (Edward Zwick, 2003), not only because it is a fantasy, but because it rejects “romanticizing white characters as the honorable heirs to or noble practitioners of another ethnic/racial group’s culture,” but portrays them as “refreshingly corrupt” instead (82). Death Proof is effective as a critique of the white male gaze, but Nama regrets that the lack of development regarding Jungle Julia’s subversive potential as a black sex symbol in Austin, a predominantly white (and I would add Hispanic) Southern environment (87), and, worse, the “stock representation of black femininity as vulgarly hypersexual and, oddly enough, masculine” in the character of Kim (90).

6 “[R]ace once again takes center stage” in Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (92). Tarantino’s war movie can be seen as a satirical fantasy, similar in tone to Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) and M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1972) (94): “the film indulges in metaphoric rhetoric and imagery to examine some current ethical dilemma by means of social or political allegory” (95). For Nama, “the ‘hidden’ meaning of Inglourious Basterds suggests the pathology of German Nazism is the ideological cousin to American racism” (102). The analogy is constructed by the Nazi characters, notably by an SS officer who interprets King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) as an allegory of African American history (101). Nazism comes to represent the paradigm of institutionalized racism, overturned by a Jewish heroine, Shoshanna Dreyfuss, associated with various forms of otherness: a cousin of Debbie in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), Shoshanna flees the house from the Nazis, engages in an interacial relationship (with Marcel) and puts on make-up like Indian war paint (98). For Nama, Django Unchained is more of a Gothic romance than a Western (106-7), with Django as the spectre of retribution (108), Schultz as the fanciful aristocrat (107) and Calvin Candie as the epitome of the Gothic villain (109). In Nama’s reading, Django Unchained works “on a broader ideological scale” than 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013) (116) because its fantastical quality allows it to address racial issues in American history beyond the peculiar institution: Mandingo fighting can be seen as a metaphor of the white exploitation of black bodies not just under slavery, but also in contemporary team sports (116), and “when Stephen [the Uncle Tom character] and Django occupy the same cinematic frame, they symbolize, albeit reductively, an ongoing and strident ideological divide within black political discourse over whether accomodationism or militancy is the most effective approach toward gaining racial justice in America” (111). Even the film’s main flaw, its depiction of individual rather

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than collective revolt, can be read as political allegory, for Candie’s racist pseudoscientific discourse overlaps with Du Bois’ belief that exceptional African Americans, the best and brightest of the black race, will lead the masses of black folk out of social decay. In this sense, the extended pseudoscience that Calvin Candie drones on about at the dinner table and the triumphant heroism of Django work as metaphors for the real politics of racial uplift and social change that have their place in African American history. (119)

7 Nama concludes that much of the criticism leveled at Tarantino’s films is grounded in the ideology of “black respectability” with its “conservative overtones” that reduce the treatment of race to an opposition between positive and negative representations in the belief that the latter can “shap[e] the popular memory regarding race in America” (121-22). For Nama, these reactions can be seen as participating in “a broader and more troubling ideological impulse operating in American society today: a desire to deny or erase history” (124). This “revisionist impulse” can be observed in the post-racial colorblind worldview proposed in Hollywood films like The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011) and Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011) (126). For Nama, Tarantino’s “films are where the real poststructural action resides, because they do dialogue with real structures of racial marginalization and engage the ideological justifications used to legitimize these structures and the unequal relations they produce” (130).

8 Race on the QT is required reading for anyone working on Quentin Tarantino and, more generally, on representations of race in contemporary American cinema and culture. Scholars and students interested in studying representation would greatly benefit from following Nama’s methodology that endorses neither “black respectability,” nor the precept that one’s identity determines one’s legitimacy. Nama does a great job contextualizing Tarantino’s films, foregrounding his debt to New Hollywood filmmakers and showing how the films are not merely escapist exploitation but address contemporary concerns. Race on the QT is also exemplary as a work that combines a cultural studies approach with in-depth analyses of narrative, characterization and genre conventions; attention to the camerawork and editing would be required to go even further than Nama.

9 It is not often that you read a book on a topic or filmmaker you have studied intensively and find yourself agreeing with practically everything the author says. This was clearly my experience: I agree with at least 95% of Nama’s analyses and conclusions. I can only bicker on details here and there. Nama’s conclusions on True Romance and Kill Bill are probably not as clearly put forth as they are on the other films. I wonder, in particular, whether True Romance resolves the ambiguities raised by the character of Drexl, who is, after all, a white man (played by a British actor) appropriating black hypersexuality. I also think what Nama reads as ambiguities in the characterization of O-Ren in Kill Bill and Julia in Death Proof are coherent in light of the films’ assault on patriarchy: their appearances (O-Ren as a Geisha, Julia as a poster girl) confirm that, though powerful, they remain willfully subjected to patriarchy (Bill, the male gaze), in spite of the potential sisterhood between O-Ren and the Bride suggested through the common reference to Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973). Finally, I think that, in Inglourious Basterds, lurking under the reference to The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming et al., 1939) (99) is Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), so that Shoshanna’s revenge is also that of “the Jewish-German intellectual cinema of the 1920s” Goebbels loathed, as Lieutenant Archie Hicox explains in the film.

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10 In a way, my comments tie in with Nama’s conclusion on possible responses to the character of Stephen in Django Unchained. Nama explains that, for him “along with other African American friends and professional acquaintances [he] talked to about the film, the comedic import of Jackson’s performance and his strident interpretation of the character appear to be drawn from Malcolm X’s scathing critique of the house Negro” (132). Nama thus wonders: “what is it about Jackson’s quintessential portrayal of a house slave that makes white audiences erupt with laughter?” (132). Some white viewers may, indeed, be laughing for the wrong (i.e., racist) reasons, but some may also be laughing for the same reason as the African American viewers Nama mentions. Indeed, the limitation to Tarantino’s approach to filmmaking is that it is so steeped in intertexuality, cultural references and film genre conventions that it requires an informed viewer to decode it, which is exactly what Nama does in his book. In the case Nama mentions, African American viewers are, no doubt, more likely to analyze the character of Stephen in a similar manner, but other viewers (though maybe less) may equally do so, regardless of their race, ethnicity or nationality.

11 In any case, I want to thank Adilifu Nama for writing such an excellent book that is a worthy complement to Philippe Ortoli’s Le Musée imaginaire de Quentin Tarantino. And for leaving room for others to follow his lead.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gormley, Paul. The New-brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2005.

Nama, Adilifu. Black Space: Imagining Race in Science-fiction Film. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2008.

---. Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2011.

Ortoli, Philippe. Le Musée imaginaire de Quentin Tarantino. Paris: Cerf; Condé-sur-Noireau: Corlet, 2012.

INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

AUTHOR

DAVID ROCHE Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès

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Rebecca Walsh, The Geopoetics of Modernism

Beci Carver

REFERENCES

Rebecca Walsh, The Geopoetics of Modernism, University Press of Florida, 2015, 212 pages, 74,95 $, ISBN-10: 0813060516

1 Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities (1983) that “the ‘end of the era of nationalism’, so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (Anderson, 2006, 3). However, the modernist writers whom Walsh gathers together in her provocative book, The Geopoetics of Modernism, are at least interested in looking beyond nationalist accounts of the world(s) they describe. For Walsh, “geopoetics” suggests an interaction between poetic experiment and a vision of nature that either transcends or turns the tables on human influence. One of the core writers for this thesis, Gertrude Stein, aphorises in her prose poem, The Geographical History of America; or, The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936), that: “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is,” with the implication both that “space” is its own entity and that it has the capacity to diminish other entities: her word “anybody” blindly attributes non-somebodiness to whoever might darken an empty horizon (Stein, 1995, 45). Walsh draws on Stein and other geographically informed modernists to construct a portrait of modernism that pits what she terms “environmental determinism” against the increasingly hackneyed narratives of imperialism. As she puts it herself, panoptically, in her conclusion: “My study has traced […] the rise of environmental determinism in the early twentieth [century]” (Walsh, 2015, 147).

2 Anderson’s imprint may be traced throughout Walsh’s book, although she explicitly distances herself from the crowd of literary critics and historians who, as Anderson puts it in his preface to the second edition, “link the objects of [their particular] fields of enquiry to nationalism and nation” (xii). What Walsh takes from Anderson is a

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concept of “nationalist” geography as a discourse to be resisted on political grounds. Stein is summoned as an especially vocal and insightful example of an early twentieth- century writer who rejects the notion that places may be controlled by their inhabitants – even as phenomena of perception. Walsh cites her famous precept: “there is no there there” as a touchstone in her discussion of Stein’s representation of Oakland – her childhood home – in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937). Stein writes: “yes it might have been Thirteenth Avenue when I had been. Not of course the house, the house and the big garden and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge naturally were not any longer existing, what was the use” (Stein, 1993, 291). The opposite of a colonialist, Stein has no lasting purchase on the places she moves through; the most she can hope for is their independent continuity. As Walsh brings out, there is a felt mismatch between Oakland’s formative influence on Stein and the impregnability of the avenue to which she returns doubly, in memory and fact. Environmental determinism is a one-sided relationship.

3 Stein is untypical of Walsh’s haul of modernists in her failure to be linked concretely to a major geographer. Ellen Churchill Semple’s American History and its Geographic Condition (1933) may seem to play behind Stein’s similar-sounding title, while Semple’s influential pronouncement that: “Man is a product of the earth’s surface” is broadly reinforced by all Stein’s musings on geography (Semple 1911: 1), but “it remains unclear whether Stein was directly familiar with Semple’s work” (Walsh, 2015, 98). Walt Whitman, on the other hand, with whose proto-modernist “Passage to India” (1900) Walsh opens her discussion, is indebted to the nineteenth-century geographers Alexander von Humboldt and Mary Somerville in clearly demonstrable ways (Walsh writes of “Whitman’s relationship to Humboldt,” 57); and H. D.’s “lifelong companion and lover Bryher [Annie Ellerman]” owned Semple’s Mediterranean Region (1931) (125). The image Walsh presents of a geographically aware modernism may thus be mapped with relative confidence onto to the general rise of geographic awareness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The popularity of Semple’s books and her “singular success as one of the very first female professors at Clark University” is an example of this trend (32); Walsh writes of her “public visibility” after the publication of Influences of Geographic Environment (1911): a tract that wears its environmentally determinist colours on its sleeve (33).

4 Semple’s popularity is among the components of Walsh’s argument that gave me pause in working my way through her generally persuasive, rich, clever, and conceptually ambitious book. I was struck by what seemed to me the pseudo-mysticism and silliness of Semple’s claim that: “the earth has mothered [man], fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that strengthened his body and sharpened his wits, given him his problems of navigation and irrigation, and at the same time whispered hints for their solution. She has entered into his bone and tissue, his mind and soul” (Semple, 1911, 1). I wondered how Stein’s notoriously unsentimental candour (perhaps best exemplified by her announcement to Hemingway: “You’re all a lost generation” (Hemingway, 2000, 26)) squared with Walsh’s (admittedly tentative) hypothesis that she read and liked Semple, and how H. D.’s perennial melancholy squared with Semple’s jubilant conception of “man” as “the earth[’s]” umbilically unsevered child.

5 Reading Walsh’s interpretation of H. D.’s poem about Egyptian ruins and the bombing of London, “The Walls do not Fall” (1946), with this reservation in mind, I was conscious

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of quarrelling with Walsh’s gloss of the conflative phrase “here and there” or “here, there [H. D.’s italics]” as a rejection of the imperialistic logic that would normally give London primacy over Egypt; Walsh writes: “London has materially taken the place of Egypt in this equation, and it is found wanting” (142). In the eyes of environmental determinism, all space is equal, though distinct: hierarchically, there is nothing to distinguish “here” from “there.” However, if we read H. D.’s repeated phrase as a truncated echo of the saying “here, there, everywhere” or “here, there, and everywhere”, the case for Egypt and London’s equality is complicated by what may be understood as a thwarted last move in a tripartite act of generalisation. Walsh makes much of the slant rhyme between “here” and “there”, and the cohesive effect of its reverberation through other assonant words in the text (“square”, “hare”, “enter”, “endure”, “doors,” 139); but the introduction of “everywhere” or “and everywhere” would have consolidated this coherence by stabilising the rhyme sound (“here, there, everywhere”). By leaving “everywhere” out, H. D. both queries the generalising disposition that allows her to think between London and Egypt, and aurally hallucinates a scenario in which harmony cancels out difference and distance. There is an off-keyness, and a lack of reconciliation between the comparative ambition of the poem and the text itself, which Walsh’s theoretical framework fails to accommodate.

6 Walsh writes in the introduction to her book that, according to her reading: “Modernist poetry becomes a form of geography […] in which traditional geopolitical alignments are complicated and redrawn” (5). Poetry becomes geopoetics. In spite of my admiration for the originality and daringness of this proposition and for its Andersonian politics, I remain unconvinced that “poetics” are compatible with the forms of geographic discourse that Walsh imagines modernist writers lapping up. Geopoetics would perhaps be a more congenial project for a contemporary poet versed in Imagined Communities, itself a kind of prose poem.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANDERSON, Benedict, Imagined communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 2006 (1983).

HEMINGWAY, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises, New York, Vintage Classics, 2000.

STEIN, Gertrude, The Geographical History of America; or, The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995 (1936).

___, Everybody’s Autobiography, Cambridge, MA, Exact Change, 1993 (1937).

SEMPLE, Ellen Churchill, Influences of Geographic Environment, New York, Holt, 1911.

INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

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AUTHOR

BECI CARVER University of St Andrews

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Catherine COLLOMP, Résister au nazisme. Le Jewish Labor Committee, New York, 1934-1945

Annie Ousset-Krief

RÉFÉRENCE

Catherine COLLOMP, Résister au nazisme. Le Jewish Labor Committee, New York, 1934-1945, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2016, 312 pages, ISBN: 978-2-271-09002-7, 25 €

1 Le Jewish Labor Committee, organisation syndicale juive, fut fondé à New York en 1934. Son influence dans le mouvement ouvrier américain a été documentée, mais une part importante de son histoire était restée jusqu’alors méconnue : son rôle dans la lutte contre le nazisme. Catherine Collomp, professeur émérite à l’université Paris-Diderot, vient combler cette lacune avec son nouvel ouvrage intitulé Résister au nazisme. Le Jewish Labor Committee, New York, 1934-1945.

2 Alors que les syndicats américains restaient indifférents aux dangers qui se profilaient en Europe avec l’accession au pouvoir d’Hitler, le JLC fut l’une des premières organisations à prendre la mesure du cataclysme qui allait s’abattre sur l’Allemagne, la Pologne, la France et le reste de l’Europe. Fidèle à ses engagements de lutter contre l’antisémitisme et de protéger les Juifs, le JLC allait tout mettre en œuvre pour apporter aide et soutien à ceux qui tentaient de résister à la déferlante nazie. Malgré l’ampleur de la tâche, le JLC multiplia les actions au cours des « douze années de ténèbres » (233) qui virent l’anéantissement des communautés juives européennes.

3 L’ouvrage comprend six chapitres, avec une postface et un index des noms et organisations – élément utile pour appréhender la masse considérable d’informations. L’auteur a travaillé sur des archives jusqu’alors inconnues et présente une étude exhaustive et infiniment détaillée. Elle nous propose une analyse chronologique, qui couvre les origines du mouvement et sa fondation, la construction de liens avec les autres organisations internationales, sa participation au sauvetage des figures

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politiques et syndicales menacées par le régime nazi, la coopération avec la résistance en France et enfin l’action en Pologne. L’aridité du sujet est maîtrisée grâce à la clarté des analyses. L’ouvrage est illustré de photographies d’archives qui font revivre une époque proche et lointaine à la fois.

4 Le Jewish Labor Committee fut créé avec le but exprès de lutter contre l’antisémitisme et d’aider le mouvement ouvrier. Baruch Charney Vladeck, son fondateur, était un ancien militant du Bund, immigré aux États-Unis en 1908. Le Bund, Union générale des travailleurs juifs de Lituanie, Pologne et Russie, s’était organisé à Vilna, pour défendre le prolétariat juif de la Zone de résidence (région où étaient assignés les Juifs de l’empire russe). Le Bund était un parti ouvrier socialiste qui combinait idéologie marxiste et défense du peuple juif. Le JLC rassembla nombre de ses membres qui avaient fui les persécutions en Russie. Les statuts fondateurs du JLC annonçaient une orientation à la fois socialiste et juive : « Soutenir les organisations ouvrières juives, et non juives, outre-Atlantique ; aider le mouvement démocratique en Europe ; fournir soutien et secours aux victimes d’oppression et de persécution ; et combattre l’antisémitisme ainsi que l’intolérance raciale ou religieuse à l’étranger comme aux États-Unis » (23). Le JLC pouvait offrir une réponse militante au totalitarisme nazi qui menaçait les Juifs, mais également le mouvement ouvrier. C’est d’abord un rôle politique que devait jouer l’organisation, dans sa lutte contre le régime autoritaire.

5 Le déclencheur des actions du JLC fut l’anéantissement du mouvement ouvrier allemand, puis autrichien, en 1933 et 1934. Les dirigeants du JLC voulurent alerter l’ensemble du monde syndical qui restait muré dans un immobilisme coupable. L’articulation entre défense du monde juif et défense du monde ouvrier constitua dès le début de l’existence du JLC un enjeu singulier.

6 Les années qui précédèrent la guerre furent cruciales dans l’établissement de liens internationaux et dans l’émergence d’un espace américain de lutte contre le nazisme. Le JLC joua un rôle conséquent, en dépit des obstacles nombreux auxquels il se heurta : le Congrès américain maintenait une politique de neutralité et refusait d’assouplir les lois sur l’immigration. L’action du JLC se situait alors notamment sur le plan de l’opinion publique, en organisant des manifestations comme par exemple les contre- Olympiades de New York en août 1936, et en agissant en secret en coopération en secret avec les réseaux antinazis en Europe. L’une des priorités fut le sauvetage de leaders syndicaux et politiques. De juillet 1940 à fin 1941, le JLC réussit l’exploit de sauver plusieurs centaines de réfugiés politiques : visas d’urgence, financement des voyages, exfiltration, la tâche était colossale et se heurtait à l’inertie administrative américaine (un véritable « mur d’incompréhension », 223), toujours hostile à un engagement clair en faveur des réfugiés persécutés par le régime nazi. Alors que le JLC disposait d’informations précises grâce à son réseau en Pologne sur la situation catastrophique des Juifs dans les ghettos et sur la terreur nazie, ses dirigeants restaient « paralysés par l’immobilité de l’opinion et des pouvoirs publics », écrit l’auteur (209). En dépit d’un rapport remis au président Roosevelt en décembre 1942 qui faisait état du massacre de deux millions de Juifs en Pologne, le gouvernement américain se refusait à prendre des initiatives contre le régime nazi. Le JLC continua cependant son travail d’information et de mobilisation de l’ensemble des organisations syndicales.

7 Le sauvetage devint impossible après l’occupation du Sud de la France en novembre 1942. Le JLC passa à la deuxième phase de son action : le soutien à la résistance armée. Des collectes furent organisées afin de soutenir les mouvements clandestins en

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Pologne, par l’achat d’armes notamment. Le JLC apporta également son aide à la résistance armée en France, fidèle à son soutien des mouvements démocratiques. Les sommes collectées peuvent paraître modestes au regard des besoins gigantesques de la Résistance française, mais elles témoignaient d’une mobilisation sans relâche des communautés ouvrières qui adhéraient au JLC. Le réseau international fonctionna efficacement pendant la guerre, permettant la survie du mouvement ouvrier socialiste dans la clandestinité.

8 À la fin de la guerre, le JLC orienta ses actions vers une reconstruction du monde juif : il participa à l’émigration et réinsertion des Personnes déplacées en Palestine, en France et aux États-Unis. Il apporta également son soutien financier à l’OSE (Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants) pour la construction de maisons d’enfants en France. Il consacra environ un million de dollars à l’aide apportée aux survivants de la Shoah. Sa mission devint après 1945 une mission humanitaire.

9 Dans sa postface, Catherine Collomp souligne le silence qui entoure l’histoire du JLC pendant la guerre, silence en partie dû au caractère secret de ses opérations. Archives disponibles tardivement (1985), difficultés linguistiques d’exploitation des documents rédigés en yiddish, mais également historiographie du mouvement ouvrier américain qui a privilégié l’étude de l’AFL-CIO au détriment du JLC, tous ces facteurs ont fait qu’une page essentielle de l’histoire du JLC est restée dans l’ombre. L’auteur a réussi à débrouiller l’écheveau complexe de l’histoire syndicale américaine, en mettant en lumière le rôle important joué par le Jewish Labor Committee, cheville importante de la lutte contre le nazisme. Travail inédit et novateur, le livre de Catherine Collomp permet d’ouvrir une nouvelle page dans l’histoire des mouvements ouvriers américain et international, en multipliant les croisements entre différents domaines habituellement cloisonnés. Le Jewish Labor Committee a une place non négligeable dans le récit de la résistance au nazisme – ce que Catherine Collomp démontre avec brio.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEUR

ANNIE OUSSET-KRIEF Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

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Revue Imaginaires n°19 « Pop Culture ! Les Cultures populaires aujourd’hui. »

Nicolas Labarre

RÉFÉRENCE

Revue Imaginaires n°19 « Pop Culture ! Les Cultures populaires aujourd’hui. », Sous la direction de Sylvie Mikovski et Yann Philippe, Reims : ÉPURE (Editions des presses universitaires de Reims), 2015, 304 pages, 22€, ISBN : 978-2-37496-002-9.

1 Ce numéro de la revue Imaginaires, à la couverture des plus réussies, ambitionne d’« interroger à nouveau le concept de "culture populaire" » (10). Il propose pour ce faire une sélection raisonnée de travaux présentés dans le cadre du séminaire « Cultures populaires » du laboratoire interdisciplinaire CIRLEP de l’université de Reims, précédée d’une introduction générale co-signée par les deux animateurs du séminaire, Sylvie Mikovski, et Yann Philippe, spécialistes respectivement d’études irlandaises et de civilisation des États-Unis.

2 Les deux auteurs y font d’emblée le constat de la persistance des débats autour de la notion de culture populaire dans le champ universitaire, malgré l’imprécision d’une expression qui peut renvoyer, selon les cas, à des pratiques majoritaires, à des objets ayant donné lieu à une appropriation populaire ou encore aux produits des industries culturelles. Mikovski et Philippe avancent qu’il n’y a pas de contradiction entre la persistance de l’expression et sa polysémie, tout aussi prononcée en anglais, bien qu’inscrite dans un jeu d’oppositions légèrement différent, mais plutôt un lien causal. La plasticité et la fertilité de la notion de culture populaire expliquent son usage actuel, puisque l’expression encourage les auteurs à penser les interactions et les nuances entre ses différentes acceptions.

3 Dans la suite de cette introduction, les deux auteurs proposent un vaste parcours chronologique à l’appui de cette affirmation initiale, qui débute par les condamnations

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sans appel de F.R. Leavis ou de l’École de Francfort dans la première moitié du XXe siècle, et se poursuit en introduisant de façon synthétique les penseurs successifs des potentialités de la culture populaire dès lors qu’elle fait l’objet d’une appropriation par ses utilisateurs. Les thèses d’Antonio Gramsci, Michel De Certeau, Stuart Hall, John Fiske ou Todd Gitlin faisant toutes la part de ce potentiel de résistance sont ainsi évoquées successivement et mobilisées pour expliquer l’importance désormais accordée à ces formes culturelles, y compris dans le champ universitaire.

4 Le modèle d’une culture de masse monolithique imposée par les industries culturelles se heurte en effet à un constat d’inversion des flux (16) et de déplacement des frontières du légitime (18), à mesure que la culture populaire se dote de ses propres canons et de ses propres institutions de légitimation. Tout en faisant la part des voix discordantes, Mikowski et Philipe poussent ce raisonnement en se demandant si la dimension participative n’est pas constitutive de la culture populaire (22), celle-ci serait alors nécessairement liée à une forme d’« empowerment » de ceux qui ne se contentent plus de la consommer, mais la pratique activement (23). Les deux auteurs relèvent aussi la difficile position de l’universitaire dans ce paradigme, au sein duquel il ne dispose plus simplement du « monopole d’étude et de la distance interprétative » (10) qui fondent sa pratique. Sommé de clarifier sa position par rapport aux autres connaisseurs et interprètes de la culture populaire, l’universitaire peut alors embrasser la position d’amateur ou de fan, comme l’y invite par exemple Henry Jenkins, ou choisir de maintenir une distance plus importante vis-à-vis de son objet (23-24). Cette question à laquelle les deux auteurs n’offrent pas de réponse définitive n’est qu’un des exemples de cet état de tension qui caractérise la culture populaire et que met en exergue sans dogmatisme cette introduction. Les deux auteurs proposent d’ailleurs de résumer leur objet en le décrivant comme un moment d’équilibre, un « mouvement libératoire mais éphémère » présentant des paradoxes que l’ouvrage cherchera moins à résoudre qu’à expliquer (28).

5 Cette introduction pose donc en une trentaine de pages un cadre théorique ambitieux, qui englobe aussi la question de la consommation culturelle via Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Lahire ou Richard Peterson et parvient à identifier les potentialités de la culture populaire, sans tomber dans l’angélisme d’un John Fiske par exemple. Les treize textes qui suivent complètent par incrément le panorama, en évoquant notamment les théories de Linda Hutcheon sur la parodie et l’adaptation, celles de Dick Hebdige sur les sous-cultures ou encore les écrits fondateurs de Raymond Williams en matière de cultural studies. De ce fait, l’ouvrage offre à son lecteur un parcours complet et nuancé1 des principaux courants théoriques touchant à la culture populaire, à l’exception toutefois des voix les plus critiques, notamment celles qui ont pu s’exprimer durant les culture wars américaines autour de la question du canon. On peut aussi regretter quelques absences historiques, celle des théories spécifiquement nord-américaines de la culture de masse du milieu du XXe siècle par exemple (Clement Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, et al.), même si les contraintes de longueur suffisent à les expliquer.

6 À une exception près (Morgane Brucelle sur le web comme espace de cocréation), les textes rassemblés déploient leurs apports théoriques à l’intérieur d’études de cas, s’intéressant à l’adaptation (de la littérature au roman graphique ou aux séries télévisées), proposant des panoramas historiques de phénomènes culturels singuliers (le mouvement punk en Irlande du Nord, l’émission « A Prairie Home Companion », le baseball, Keith Haring) ou analysant les tensions et les dynamiques internes d’objets

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contemporains (Sex and the City et The Big Bang Theory, les fans de Terry Pratchett, le mouvement Adbusters ou encore Iron Man 3 et les films de super-héros contemporains).

7 La moitié de ces essais traite d’objets culturels nettement étatsuniens, et plusieurs autres se situent au croisement des aires britanniques et étatsuniennes ; ce fort tropisme anglo-saxon, que confirme l’appartenance de la plupart des auteurs à la communauté américaniste, rend l’ouvrage particulièrement utilisable dans le cadre des études américaines. Il tend en revanche à minimiser l’importance des circulations culturelles, qui apparaissent pourtant comme une composante majeure de la physionomie des cultures populaires à l’échelle mondiale.

8 Les deux responsables de l’anthologie suggèrent que le trait d’union de ces articles serait de traiter « de formes de cultures populaires susceptibles d’être associées à des formes de légitimation » (29), ce qui n’est pas faux, mais découle plus de la trajectoire générale de la culture populaire que des textes spécifiquement rassemblés. L’unité du volume est à chercher dans une vision partagée de la culture populaire, d’ailleurs exclusivement anglo-saxonne, comme un lieu certes dynamique et ambigu mais finalement pourvu d’indéniables possibilités progressistes ou libératrices. Cette lecture est réitérée de texte en texte et par-là démontrée de façon convaincante, mais elle ne présente qu’un trait d’union ténu entre la trajectoire de Keith Haring d’une part (Nadège Marsaleix), et le statut du baseball comme « ruine culturelle » (Peter Marquis, 140), d’autre part. Malgré cette convergence et les échos qui se manifestent de texte en texte dans les références à Michel De Certeau ou Henry Jenkins par exemple, le volume souffre d’une certaine dispersion, résultant de son ambition.

9 Les essais qui fonctionnent le mieux au sein de cette approche fragmentaire sont sans doute ceux qui ne se rattachent pas directement à un champ d’étude établi ou bien balisé. Ceux-là justifient l’existence d’un volume sur la « pop culture » au sens large. À l’inverse, certains articles sur des sujets travaillés en profondeur ailleurs et disposant par-là d’un corpus de référence, paraissent ici soustraits à leur nécessaire contexte. Pour ne prendre que cet exemple, l’essai consacré par Steen L. Chistiansen au jeu du corps dans Iron Man 3, entre représentation du trauma et libération ludique non- narrative, apporte une contribution à un long débat universitaire sur le rôle idéologique des super-héros, dont l’ouvrage de Dean Hassler-Forest, Capitalist Super Heroes (2012) serait le pivot le plus récent. Soustrait à ce dialogue, le texte semble proposer une focalisation exagérément étroite sur quelques scènes d’un unique film. La remarque inverse semble devoir s’appliquer au travail de Florence Bigo-Renault sur les adaptations d’œuvres littéraires patrimoniales en séries télévisées britannique. Le sujet renvoie directement aux études sur l’adaptation filmique, qui ont travaillé en profondeur ce sujet (voir notamment Leitch, 2007, Film Adaptation and Its Discontent et Elliott, 2003, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate). En passant sous silence ce dialogue existant, le texte produit un propos clair et accessible, mais privé des fondations solides de la connaissance cumulative. L’un et l’autre essais proposent une thèse convaincante et étayée, mais ils ne servent que marginalement le propos du recueil.

10 Plusieurs textes évitent cependant ce double écueil et proposent une histoire culturelle adossée à une approche théorique. Le travail de Timothy Heron sur les spécificités du mouvement punk en Irlande du Nord durant les Troubles, reposant sur des entretiens personnels et d’abondantes sources secondaires, est à ce titre éclairant. L’auteur y convoque en effet les lectures classiques du mouvement punk (sous-culture, importance du bricolage au sens de De Certeau, etc.) en montrant en quoi elles sont

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particulièrement opérantes dans le contexte des divisions nord-irlandaises de la fin des années 70.

11 Les hypothèses de Peter Marquis sur les rôles changeant du baseball aux États-Unis, reposant sur une vaste palette d’objets culturels et adossés à une grille analytique originale et limpide, remplit pleinement son rôle d’étude d’une culture populaire, dans toutes les acceptions du mot. Marquis parvient en effet à caractériser le rôle du baseball dans la première moitié du XXe siècle avant de s’intéresser aux différents rôles que peut encore remplir cette « ruine culturelle » désormais chargée de nostalgie, fonctionnant comme un mode de transmission familiale ou encore comme « une riposte à la dépossession contemporaine » (153-4).

12 L’importante dimension d’histoire culturelle et le très abondant appareil bibliographique utilisé par Xavier Giudicelli pour son étude des adaptations du Portrait de Dorian Gray en bande dessinée offrent de façon similaire un cadre convaincant à plusieurs micro-lectures et analyses de stratégies d’adaptation, qui permet de refaire le lien de l’objet singulier à un ensemble culturel plus vaste.

13 Ces textes et d’autres permettent à l’ouvrage d’atteindre un de ses objectifs affichés : « montrer par l’exemple qu’il est possible de parler et de bien parler des cultures populaires » (10). Il n’est cependant pas évident que cette démonstration soit nécessaire, au vu du nombre de travaux exemplaires produits en France et ailleurs sur des objets de culture populaires.

14 Ce numéro d’Imaginaires semble alors pouvoir remplir deux fonctions distinctes. Il peut jouer le rôle d’introduction appliquée aux différents courants théoriques sur la culture populaire, avec un appareil bibliographique et une introduction permettant tous deux d’explorer plus avant les mouvements rapidement présentés. Il propose ensuite, de façon plus classique, une collection de textes de qualité susceptibles d’être lus indépendamment à la faveur d’un intérêt pour tel ou tel type d’objet ou de phénomène culturel. Le numéro ne réussit en revanche pas réellement à offrir le panorama des « cultures populaires d’aujourd’hui » promis par son titre, mais sans doute aurait-il été irréaliste de tenir à ce programme cette publication collective relativement brève.

NOTES

1. On y évoque par exemple l’Adorno des années 30-40 mais aussi celui, moins connu, des années 60.

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INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEUR

NICOLAS LABARRE Université Bordeaux Montaigne

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Stefani, Anne, Unlikely Dissenters: White Southern Women in the Fight for Racial Justice, 1920-1970

David Diallo

RÉFÉRENCE

Stefani, Anne, Unlikely Dissenters: White Southern Women in the Fight for Racial Justice, 1920-1970, Gainesville, FL : University Press of Florida, 2015, 334 pages, US$ 74.95, 978-0-8130-6076-7.

1 Dans Unlikely Dissenters: White Southern Women in the Fight for Racial Justice, 1920-1970, Anne Stefani examine la participation d’un petit groupe de femmes blanches originaires du Sud au combat pour l’égalité raciale. À partir d’analyses d’articles, d’essais, de récits autobiographiques et de correspondances, mais également en s’appuyant sur des entretiens réalisés avec certaines de ces militantes, l’auteure met en lumière leur engagement protéiforme dont la portée, difficilement quantifiable mais bien plus que symbolique, n’avait jusque-là fait l’objet d’aucun ouvrage. L’idée principale du livre d’Anne Stefani est que cet engagement contre la ségrégation et en faveur d’une plus grande justice raciale, sur une période qui s’étend de 1920 à 1970, s’il ne s’articulait pas sur un rejet total des valeurs de la société sudiste, s’est néanmoins accompagné d’un processus d’émancipation complexe de ses normes patriarcales.

2 Stefani débute son étude par la présentation des deux générations de militantes qu’elle a choisi d’étudier (Chapter 1). Une première génération qui s’est mobilisée, dans un premier temps, à partir des années 1920 contre la pratique du lynchage, et qui, après l’arrêt Brown, s’est engagée activement en faveur de la déségrégation de la société sudiste. Puis une deuxième, qui a poursuivi et intensifié la lutte dans les années soixante, en privilégiant toutefois une approche plus directe et moins modérée. Alors que la première génération était issue de la bourgeoisie et des classes supérieures éduquées, mais relativement conservatrices, du Sud, la deuxième génération, composée

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de militantes nées dans les années trente et quarante, était nettement plus hétérogène avec des jeunes femmes d’origines sociales plus variées.

3 Malgré la diversité de leurs profils et les différentes formes d’activisme prônées pour réformer la société sudiste, toutes se sont investies dans la lutte pour une plus grande justice raciale et la fin de la ségrégation en raison d’un sentiment de culpabilité commun et étaient animées par un même militantisme religieux. Comme l’explique l’auteure, chacune d’entre elles a dû, après un moment clef, - une « épiphanie » (40)-, désapprendre les principes racistes inculqués par des proches et par l’Eglise et effectuer un travail de rééducation passant par l’écriture ou par le militantisme afin de dépasser le traumatisme causé par la remise en question, la répudiation parfois, de leur culture d’appartenance.

4 Anne Stefani se penche ensuite, dans un premier temps, sur l’activisme de ces « dames du Sud » (Southern Ladies) (57) et sur le rôle moteur joué par cette première génération (Chapter 2). Elle explique notamment comment, en se conformant à l’idéal de la Southern Lady, ces femmes parvinrent à promouvoir des idées progressistes dans leurs communautés. Grâce à un engagement important, elles parvinrent notamment à ouvrir quelques brèches dans le Sud ségrégué et à mettre en place une coopération multiraciale avec les femmes noires déjà investies dans la lutte. Leur place et leur statut d’influence dans la société sudiste mais également le fait qu’elles étaient souvent mariées à des personnes importantes, ce qui les mettaient à l’abri d’une réprobation ouverte de leurs positions réformatrices et de mesures de rétorsion, leur permirent de mener des actions visant à faire évoluer, graduellement, les mentalités sudistes vers une plus grande égalité raciale. Ce militantisme, comme le montre en détail Anne Stefani, s’appuyait à la fois sur la mobilisation massive de réseaux féminins particulièrement actifs et impliqués dans le milieu associatif et sur le terrain, loin des sphères politiques et des couloirs des assemblées, et sur un activisme de couloir – « behind the scenes » – (92), fondé sur des connections personnelles privilégiées avec des personnalités politiques et d’influence dans la communauté.

5 Anne Stefani détaille ensuite l’évolution des formes d’activisme privilégiées par cette première génération et sa posture stratégique de « respectabilité » (97) : une prise de risque calculée et un engagement dont la modération et la non-violence les mettaient à l’abri de la brutalité qui ciblait généralement les réformateurs conventionnels (Chapter 3). Par exemple en adoptant une rhétorique qui contournait le problème de la ségrégation en en faisant un problème social ou moral (et non racial), ces militantes et les groupes auxquels elles appartenaient parvinrent à rallier à leur cause de nombreuses femmes en ciblant stratégiquement des questions auxquelles ces dernières étaient particulièrement sensibles, comme l’éducation. Ainsi et malgré des motivations diverses, le mouvement « save our schools » pour le maintien d’un système scolaire ouvert à tous après l’arrêt Brown fut particulièrement efficace et une pierre importante à l’édifice de la lutte antiségrégationniste, notamment grâce à une mobilisation importante.

6 Anne Stefani détaille ensuite le passage d’un activisme modéré à un positionnement et à un engagement plus radicaux (Chapter 4). Elle montre notamment comment, après l’arrêt Brown, les femmes du Sud évoluèrent vers un plus grand radicalisme « moral » et procédèrent à des changements stratégiques et tactiques d’importance, en phase avec le durcissement plus large du mouvement pour les droits civiques. On retrouve alors, avec l’arrivée d’une nouvelle génération de militantes, le débat classique entre un

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militantisme modéré, favorable à une approche graduelle et les partisanes d’un changement radical.

7 Ces dernières, que Stefani qualifie d’« abolitionnistes modernes » (179) (chapter 5), prônaient une nouvelle forme d’activisme, plus orienté vers la confrontation directe que le lobbying modéré de leurs prédécesseurs. Particulièrement impliquées dans la direction opérationnelle du mouvement pour les droits civiques, ces militantes, mues par des idéaux religieux et d’aspiration existentialiste étaient investies à part entière dans la lutte. Leur engagement total et leur activisme révolutionnaire les isolaient souvent de leurs proches et les mettaient dans une situation de souffrance émotionnelle qui les distinguait clairement de l’activisme respectable, plus serein, de la première génération.

8 Anne Stefani conclut son étude en mettant en lumière combien le militantisme de ces femmes a contribué à leur développement personnel, voire leur libération, en tant que femme habitant le Sud, en liant le combat vers une plus grande égalité raciale à celui contre l’oppression sexuelle (Chapter 6).

9 Ce travail a indéniablement comme mérite de mettre en lumière un pan méconnu de l’histoire pour les droits civiques en examinant la contribution de femmes blanches du Sud des États-Unis. Ces dernières, particulièrement déterminées, se sont avérées être des alliées de poids dans la lutte pour la déségrégation, notamment grâce à leur capitaux social (réseau fort et efficacité dans l’organisation d’actions) et symbolique (riches et blanches). Parées de leur uniforme « chapeau à fleurs et gants blancs » et optant pour un langage euphémisé (elles utilisaient « social welfare, human relations » pour éviter de parler frontalement de « race relations » (102), les militantes de la première génération jouèrent incontestablement un rôle moteur qui soutint le combat plus large mené par les associations nationales, noires et blanches. La contribution de ces dernières apparait de manière plus visible que celle des « abolitionnistes modernes » (179) des années soixante, moins souvent individuelle (et souvent menée en couple), à quelques exceptions près, et minorée par leur appartenance à des organisations emblématiques comme SNCC, SSOC où elles occupaient des rôles de support ou de soutien certes importants, mais moins marquants symboliquement.

10 On pourra toutefois regretter qu’Anne Stefani n’ait pas effectué un plus grand travail de contextualisation sur l’activisme noir et blanc, féminin et masculin, antérieur ou simultané, dans le Nord et dans le Sud, qui aurait permis de mieux situer l’engagement, certes particulier, de ces femmes dans un ensemble et une dynamique plus vaste. Par exemple, lorsqu’elle mentionne que les YWCA (Young Women Christian Association) décidèrent en 1946 de mettre fin à la ségrégation dans leurs rangs - donnant ainsi l’impression que ses dirigeantes étaient ainsi des précurseurs -, l’auteure omet de souligner que cette décision s’appliquait également aux YMCA (Young Men Christian Association) dans tout le pays et que cette démarche progressiste, transversale, n’avait rien de singulier.

11 Enfin, plusieurs travaux en théorie de l’action collective proposent des instruments d’analyse pertinents pour plusieurs positions et phénomènes identifiés par Stefani, qu’il s’agisse de la reconsidération de bases morales et de la promotion d’une alternative (Merton, 1949), d’un engagement intentionnel suite à un choix rationnel (Olson, 1971), ou encore des tensions inhérentes à l’engagement de militants issus d’un groupe dominant en faveur des minorités (Marx & Useem, 1971). Ces outils, grandement pertinents même si datés, offrent un réel apport analytique dans le cadre

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de l’étude des phénomènes collectifs comme celui étudié par Anne Stefani et auraient pu venir apporter une caution théorique à son argumentation.

12 Ces remarques ne remettent toutefois en question l’intérêt de l’ouvrage, qui vient remédier à la faible visibilité du combat de ces femmes du Sud dans l’historiographie de la lutte pour les droits civiques.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Marx, Gary T. and Michael Useem, « Majority Involvement in Minority Movements: Civil Rights, Abolition, Untouchability », Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 27, No. 1, 1971, 81-104.

Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure, New York, The Free Press, 1968.

Mancur, Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1971.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEUR

DAVID DIALLO Université de Bordeaux

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Anca Cristofovici & Barbara Montefalcone: Hands-on / Hands-0ff

Susan Barbour

REFERENCES

Hands-on / Hands-0ff , The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books, Eds. Anca Cristofovici & Barbara Montefalcone, Cuneiform Press, 2015, 205 pages, ISBN 978-0-9860040-5-6, $40

1 In 1994 the book artist and theorist Johanna Drucker published the groundbreaking study A Century of Artist Books, in which she describes the important tradition of books that sit at the intersection of text and artwork. Unlike the livre d’artiste, or illustrated book, the artist book blurs the binary of text and image. It calls attention to the book’s material aspects as well as its various stages of production. It also interrogates the concept of “bookness,” reflexively commenting upon the structure and meaning of its form. Makers of artist books often come from backgrounds in the visual arts (such as Marcel Duchamp and his Green Box, for example) or poetry (such as the works of William Hogarth and the Kelmscott Press).

2 Now, some twenty-two years later and in spite or because of the prevalence of the digital book, the genre continues to captivate us. Artist books challenge established binaries across the disciplines of art and literature. In so doing, they trouble our practiced modes of interpreting texts and drawings, a difference that exists largely because of the dematerializing tendency of the mechanical reproduction of texts. Indeed, it is only since the Gutenberg Press that writing has been construed as a discrete series of words, an immaterial phenomenon capable of taking on many different material forms. To an ancient Greek, who had but one word (graphesis) for “drawing” and “writing,” the text/image binary of our current day would have been beyond understanding. Artist books rematerialize language and force us to look at text as image, an activity that reveals additional layers of meaning that exist beyond a simple glossing of diction and syntax. In some instances where the artist book has been

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crafted by multiple individuals these books also trouble assumptions about authorship and intentionality.

3 The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books is a compendium of fifteen papers from a symposium in Caen in 2011 that were devoted to such collaborative artist books. This event drew together poets, artists, scholars, independent publishers, and museum curators from France and the United States in effort to get a transatlantic perspective on the form. Barbara Montefalcone, one of the book’s two editors and the symposium organizer, is the author of a book on Robert Creeley’s collaborations. The talks here accordingly focus mostly on poets affiliated with the American avant-garde (Black Mountain College, The New York School, and LANGUAGE poetry) and their collaborations with visual artists. There is, however, a talk on the Bauhaus, and the second half of the book covers the all-important but often underappreciated perspective of publishers, curators, and librarians.

4 Conceptually, the book does readers a favor by drawing together a disparate array of perspectives not usually permitted in the same volume. As a result, however, there is a great range in the scope and style of the papers. Some talks read like off-hand notes to a slideshow while others are eloquently penned essays. So, while it is interesting to see these different perspectives juxtaposed here, the range feels uneven. The papers are also quite brief, about seven pages of text each, so one can’t help but feel that the most fascinating discussions at the symposium happened between the papers—in the conversations that arose during coffee breaks, lunches, and Q&A sessions—where the experts from different fields were allowed to interact.

5 As the Introduction makes clear, this book admirably wants to address the hybrid nature of the artist book and disrupt ideological assumptions about how books mean. But, because its focus is on collaborations between poets and artists, there is a sense in which it takes it as a forgone conclusion that writers write and artists make pictures. Meanwhile, it seems to me that the most provocative examples of artist books have been from individuals who themselves instantiate a blurring of boundaries: from Hogarth to Duchamp to (to take a more recent example) the works of Jen Bervin. Still, while artist book collaborations may be a small sub-genre, readers will find significant examples discussed in this book’s pages, often by notable experts. In “Why Frank O’Hara is not a painter,” for example, poetry scholar Olivier Brossard observes how the disagreements and difficulties of O’Hara’s collaborations dramatized the “radical otherness of writing to painting” (47). Collaborative works also prompt interesting questions about the social aspect of creation. Poet Bill Berkson writes beautifully about the two strategies of teamwork available to poets and artists in his essay “Hands On / Hands Off,” a must-read for anyone interested in the process of collaborative authorship. Works of collaboration can arise from painstaking face-à-face dialogues; they may also be created asynchronously and over great distances. It is perhaps this latter type of artist book that leaves readers most baffled, wondering how to interpret works that seem haphazardly composed. But, as Berkson argues, such “parallel creations” represent “a period of style” (87). Poet and art-critic Raphael Rubenstein echoes this notion and hints at a fascinating kind of telepathy in the collaborative process when he writes of an artist finding his collaborator’s writing to be “more predictive than descriptive” (108).

6 With the exception of these glimmering insights one craves greater depth of reflection on what these collaborative artist books accomplish formally or how such works

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change the way we read. Honing our awareness of what we do with books, the different cognitive modes we bring to them, ultimately informs us about the limitations and potentialities of how we have historically recorded and transmitted human knowledge. This seems to me the real reward of interacting with an artist book, a theme that one wished were more palpable here. An exception is Antoine Cazé’s excellent essay “Charles Bernstein De/Signs, or Severe Typo’s Ambiguity,” which addresses the way Bernstein collaborates with his typewriter and illustrator Susan Bee to undermine transparency in language—a reading he acknowledges is largely indebted to Craig Dworkin’s landmark work Reading the Illegible (1998). Also valuable in this regard are the papers by publishers and curators, such as Cuneiform Press’s Kyle Schlesinger’s, which serve as important reminders that all books are collaborations in that they involve the hands of editors, typesetters, and bookbinders.

7 But if there are shortcomings here it is the fault of the conference paper genre and not the editors or presenters themselves. There can be no doubt that this volume brings together an important set of perspectives on a timely topic. Readers who are interested in Black Mountain poets and artists, the Bauhaus, the New York School, LANGUAGE poets, and the San Francisco Bay Area poets will surely find rich anecdotes relevant to their research here. And anyone interested in the twentieth and twenty-first century artist book as a collaborative project will do well to read this book cover to cover. It is, finally, a beautiful assembly of artist book images that will be a pleasing addition to the collection of any bibliophile.

INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

AUTHOR

SUSAN BARBOUR The Bogliasco Foundation

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Reconnaissances

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An Interview with Rick Bass

Claire Cazajous-Augé

Claire Cazajous-Augé: I would like to begin this interview with a question about taxonomy. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael classifies the different species of whales that exist. As a former scientist, how do you feel about such classifications? Rick Bass: Just fine. They, the classifications, fit the voice of Ishmael—they establish the voice of Ishmael—and represent his world view, and the necessary logic of the story, which is the pursuit of whales, through the perception, the lens, of the chasers —the pursuers. It’s important to remember also the context of the day. Melville’s ordering and classification provides a good template for the reader to understand the mysteries and bounty of the vast sea below, and conveys simultaneously the hunter’s fierce desire—obsession and attention. This is good work, when writing can pull double duty.

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CCA: I would like to talk about anthropomorphism and its duality. Indeed, anthropomorphism highlights the similarities between men and animals while reasserting their differences. Consequently, there has always been a certain defiance toward this trope. In his article about the metaphor that Thoreau used to refer to animals, “Brute Neighbors,” Thomas Pughe writes that anthropomorphism is “a potentially subversive trope,” carrying “a symbolic burden.” How do you use anthropomorphism in your writing? RB: I think the goal of any art is to establish a connection with reader/audience/ recipient. Specificity can be the sharpest, keenest, most immediate way to do this; but as an increasingly large percentage of the world becomes ever more estranged and disassociated from the natural world, I feel sometimes that some remedial work is required, some basic reminders that the world is still—in a healthy, functioning ecosystem, at least—connected. That—shocker!—living beings are sentient. Anthropomorphism can be redefined, under such value and need. In some ways it is like poetry—if it’s done poorly, it’s awful, worse than awful. But to not leave room for a subtle gesture or observation that points out shared (or dissimilar) characteristics— to willfully overlook that—strikes me as sterile, even artificial. It’s a question of degree. Nothing can ruin an essay more quickly than lax or easy anthropomorphism. It’s like rosemary: a tiny bit goes a long way and on some dishes it’s not appropriate. It’s a question of scale. The best is when you don’t even know it’s there, and are instead aware of metaphor and desire—the fuel for all great stories. I’m certainly not arguing for anthropomorphism, and try to avoid it myself, unless—as in The Ninemile Wolves—it is simply unavoidable, and is part of the story—or part of our part of the story, anyway.

CCA: In Walden, Thoreau tries to reproduce and interpret animals’ sounds. He thus finds resonances between the night birds’ songs and his personal questioning. However, in your stories, nature, along with your characters, is often silent. In order to describe the sounds of nature, you often resort to verbs and onomatopoeias: “coyotes yapping,” “owls howling”. Is it because human language will inevitably fail in representing and translating these sounds? RB: I’m not sure I would agree that we will always fail at interpreting sound—more so maybe that they are but one of the five, or if you will six, senses of inhabiting the woods. The sixth being an integration of the other five, keenly felt. Scent, touch, taste, sound, and certainly sight—the verbs of sound are just one more thing to notice in the woods. I think further that in nature, many of my characters are searchers— which is to say, protagonists in a story. All stories are built of desire—someone wants something. It is not always the dominant desire in a story, but when many of my characters go into the woods they are seeking to place themselves more firmly in a tilting world. Again, they use the five senses. I don’t think it’s so much that nature tends toward silence in their world as they are just as keenly, or even more keenly, aware of the other four senses, mixing in; and as a writer, I try to feather those in without being overbearing. And here your observation about the dangers of anthropomorphizing in literature rings true; for a bird to spend a sentence “calling,” for instance, all but shouts, “Listen! Listen up! Here comes metaphor”—a heavy- handed gesture, if not done carefully—or, far worse, “Listen! Here comes symbol!” One wants the reader to inhabit a dream—not a dream of literature or style, but simply a dream.

CCA: In The Book of Yaak, you compare art to two animals: wolves and grizzlies. Wolves because of their predatory behavior—“traveling great distances around the edges of [their] wide territory, and chasing and hunting down objects of [their] desire” (BY, 39)1—and grizzlies because of their link with a world that is unattainable to humans and dates back to

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the beginning of the world: “mining the underground soil, the emotions of magic—the unseen, the unnamable” (BY, 39). Would you say that one approach is predominant in your fiction? RB: No—I think both aspects—the vertical and the horizontal—are necessary for satisfying structure, architecture, in a story. In a story like “Fires,” the tension and conflict—unacknowledged attraction/desire—is kept just beneath the surface, almost at the level of shallow grass roots, while the story proceeds above the surface— likewise in “Swans” there is a linear, chronologic, horizontal story of senescence, disintegration, reduction and diminishment through time—while a story like “The History of Rodney,” with its extreme emphasis on time and history, plumbs deeper.

CCA: It seems that in your stories, you keep some things secret, holding back rather than exposing. You wrote in The Book of Yaak that “there are some things in the world that, if touched and measured, disappear” (BY, 58). I would like to know how you work with this dilemma as a creative force in your fiction and your nonfiction. I am thinking of the short story “Two Deer.” The title is misleading, because there are not just two deer but four. The first two are numbered (“The first deer” / “the second deer”) whereas the second two are just named. In The Book of Yaak, one of the chapters is entitled “Four Coyotes” but you never speak of the fourth animal: “I will not speak the name of this mountain anymore, nor will I tell you about the fourth coyote in the story” (BY, 29). Is it a way to protect the nonhuman world and keep some natural and narrative spaces free? RB: Yes—precisely. The word “space” is very important, a huge concept in my fiction and nonfiction. I like to think of space more than structure. Do the spaces and movements within determine the structure, or vice versa? I think slightly the former: as a river’s energy and content and nature carve the structure, the course, of its passage and riverbanks, rather than so much the other way around. The fire within the story determines the structure. The artist can presuppose a desired architecture or story but it is or should be heavily influenced by the content—and, yes, the spaces between scenes, characters, objects, events, words, sounds, rhythms.

CCA: Michel Collot wrote that the presence of otherness gives depth to the world. It helps us to have a new perspective on the world. Do you think that animals, like your dog Colter who had the power to “transcribe a new landscape,” can help someone to renew his or her perception of the nonhuman world? In other words, when you go hunting with your dog, do you see nature differently? Do animals act like translators of sorts? RB: Without question! A hunter learns quickly to watch the dog’s movements, and in so doing to be more keenly attuned to the wind direction that brings the dog scent, to the escape lanes for birds that might flush—the terrain between hunter and dog, number of steps required to close that distance, should a bird be found, contours— moisture patterns, where birds might be in the heat of the day—overheard hawks circling, which might help pin the bird—and so on, and so forth. All crashing into the brainpan at the speed of life.

CCA: In The Black Rhinos of Namibia and in In my Home There Is No More Sorrow, you express your fascination for the way rhinos and mountain gorillas fit in a landscape and belong to it. Would you say that their “creative adaptation” gave you a model to adapt to the Yaak valley when you first settled there? RB: Yes and no. I wasn’t aware of such individual attempts at fittedness at the time— did not compare my own efforts, which were conscious, to those of evolution, which are not conscious—a species strives “merely” to survive, prosper, procreate, I think, not to fit a niche. But in retrospect, I recognized the similarities between my social

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and individual attempts to fit a place, learn a place, prosper in a place, and those of species that have likewise become—over generations—fitted to their own landscapes.

CCA: In The Black Rhinos of Namibia, you evoke a form of disorientation, often trying to draw parallels between Namibia and Montana. I wonder if this experience changed the way you write about the Yaak valley, and if so, how. RB: I don’t think it changed how I write about the Yaak—the Yaak is the Yaak—but it was wonderful to see the obverse landscape, the flip side of lush and wet, and yet how life strives here also, just as hard, to endure and succeed, and with as much “creativity.” The fire-for-life in a green wet rainforest is no different from the same yearning in a red desert. I knew that intellectually, but it was good to see it in tangible, physical manifestation. And as in the Yaak, the keystone species, umbrella species, beneath which almost all others operate, were dramatic—just much more visible in the desert, like a veil lifted.

CCA: Do you consider animals differently when you write fiction and nonfiction? Do you consider that there is a difference in their representation? RB: Yes and no. I don’t consciously assign “parts” or goals for animals in either my fiction or nonfiction—they are not symbol or metaphor as instead simply present, according to truth (artistic or journalistic)—so the answer is yes and no, and maybe more no. I try not to think of them any differently than I do people as characters in fiction or nonfiction—which is to say, observe them closely, represent them so that they are interesting, and a vital part of the story or essay. At some deeper level there probably are differences (fiction/nonfiction)—but not at any conscious level for me.

CCA: I would like to ask you how you consider the interplay between science and poetry in your work. Indeed, if science is a first step toward the understanding of the mysteries of the natural world, it often shows its limits. RB: I would agree about science showing its limits but would rather argue that it is in the arts and storytelling, and in metaphor, that we learn first and ultimately perhaps more in understanding the natural world.

CCA: In “Two Deer,” the autopsies Martha performs on dead deer to understand the reason of their deaths leave many unanswered questions: “It was as if there were something out there that could not be measured: a thing they needed but had run out of” (HS, 176). Hypotheses and imagination are then used to fill in the gaps. Do science and poetry complement each other? Can poetry fill in the gaps left by science? RB: I think the other way around—science can sometimes help fill gaps left in poetry, rather than the other way around. Science is bounded—either by the confines of the laboratory, or, if in the field, by the protocol of the experiment—time of year, temperature, etc.—a finite set of conditions. Life is not that way. Storytelling can cross these arbitrary and somewhat mechanical lines in its reckless pursuit of larger and more hidden truths.

CCA: In Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, Carlo Ginzburg shows the similarities between hunting and writing. The hunter and the writer both have to pay attention to signs, decipher them and eventually reconstruct a narrative. I wonder if you agree with this analogy and how being a hunter has an influence on the structure of your stories. RB: Absolutely. A writer searches for hidden things, things at depth—like a geologist. The line that propels a hunter is desire, as with a writer. In a story, a main character wants something, and goes after it. What else is this but the story of the hunt? I’ve

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written about this extensively in my book, Brown Dog of the Yaak, and elsewhere, including an essay, “Landscape and Imagination.”

CCA: When you go into the woods to observe or hunt animals, do you adopt a single vision, that of a hunter, that of a scientist, or is it a combination of both? RB: It is usually one or the other. In hunting season, it is certainly as a hunter!

CCA: It seems to me that your writing has changed a lot since your first collection, The Watch. Indeed, the relationships between the characters and the nonhuman world show more violence and domination. I would like to focus on two similar scenes that occur in “Mississippi” (W) and in “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness” (SSW). In the first story, two young men catch a turtle, play with it and insult it. In the second story, Ann and her brother also catch turtles and armadillos but they use a phosphorescent paint to write their names on their shells before observing them walking away in the dark. How do you explain this different approach? Does it have to do with a change of scenery? Is it mainly a chronological evolution? RB: It’s not an evolution, tempting as that may be to extrapolate between two points. In many of my stories the animal-human relationship is defined by violence, as bespeaks I think the historical and current condition. Certainly there are scenes and stories of caretaking—the sick and overworked mule in “Wild Horses,” for instance, or the fawn in the Thanksgiving entry in Winter; but in general we as a species have proven we can be as cruel to species other than ourselves as we can be to each other. My exploration of these themes—our species’ competing treatments of animals, and any other disadvantaged being—the twin elements of the human condition, gentleness versus disregard or outright cruelty—the human condition in flux— culminates, I think, in “Fish Story.” I am reminded of the Pattiann Rogers poem, “Animals and People.” Our relationship with animals—indeed, with all of the natural world—seems to still be very much a work in progress.

CCA: I would like to focus on two particular birds. The dead egret in “Pagans” and the dead eagle in “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness” almost appear as martyrs. They have been wounded by humans and are almost crucified. While you seem to play with a Christian imagery, there is nevertheless an almost pagan dimension to their sacrifices. Indeed, their blood directly nourishes the earth. Would it be right to say that they are a metonymy for the suffering natural world? RB: Yes!

CCA: Just like the elk in “The Distance,” many animals appear to be intermediaries, or emissaries between the human and the nonhuman worlds. Significantly enough, they often appear to men at dusk, and at the edges of the woods. Does this liminal position make them privileged creatures with our world and a world that remains unknown to us? RB: There is that poetic aspect, but it comes first and foremost from the fact that most animals, particularly mammals, are most active in crepuscular hours.

CCA: Do you think that an encounter with an animal can give us access to the mysteries of the nonhuman world? RB: I do believe this, in a way that we think of in contemporary thought as mystical— which I use to mean simply that which we do not yet understand fully. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have had animals, rare animals, present themselves to me when I have been thinking about them. It transcends coincidence.

CCA: It appears that there is a difference in the way you describe living or dead animals. As living animals are often elusive, they are represented by fragments whereas dead animals

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allow a more detailed description, and the eye of the observer can almost dissect their bodies. Does it mean that living animals are always beyond human understanding? RB: No, again I think that is simply verisimilitude. It’s easier to observe details up close and stationary—though as I think you are intimating, the observations will differ not only from proximity and motion but in other ways, less measurable—the ineffable quality of animus.

CCA: Indeed, some of the comparisons or images that are used in your short stories can be quite puzzling. In spite of a strong reverence toward the natural world, some images compare animals to trivial objects (a pig the size of a Volkswagen in “The History of Rodney”, a turtle like an operating car wash in “Mississippi”). Could you explain why you sometimes resort to almost incongruous images? RB: The artist’s/writer’s primary responsibility is not to be precious or predictable or to advocate but to reach and move readers. A big pig resembles the shape of a Volkswagen beetle. Good metaphors often surprise. To compare one animal to another can sometimes weaken both, can muddy the waters.

CCA: It seems to me that in your short stories, the nonhuman world is not a mere background to human stories, it directly influences the lives of the characters and your writing (in terms of structure, rhythm, plot, etc.). Do you think that the interconnectedness of animals with their environment is a source of inspiration in your creative process? RB: Yes, but it’s not limited to that. I am inspired by all processes—hydrology, geology, evolution, cellular biology—I love the cause-and-effect of functioning systems—natural systems, that is, which seem to me to be infinitely more sophisticated, complicated, and interesting than even the most complex systems devised by humans. The organic and the living is the realm of metaphor, which is the realm of good story.

CCA: In many of your short stories, almost extra-ordinary events happen. Many of these elements highlight the mysteries of the natural world: in “The History of Rodney,” a river disappears; in “The Hermit’s Story,” Ann and Gray Owl fall under a frozen lake where they discover a subterranean world, etc. These elements have been said to belong to “magical realism.” Do you agree with this term or would you use another word? Is it sacred? Is it magic? RB: I would not use the term magical realism. I’m not sure what term I’d use. The events in my stories may not be probable but they are always possible.

CCA: Animals seem to carry a mythical dimension and your stories suggest that they are deeply linked with the origins of the world. In “Swamp Boy,” buffaloes are said to have participated in the creation of the city of Houston and in “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness,” birds announce the narrator’s birth. Could we go as far as to say that animals participate in the elaboration of some myths of creation of America? RB: Certainly; the creation story of the earth as Turtle Island is one of the most beautiful there is. Likewise the story of bears descending into the underworld in winter and re-emerging in spring—everywhere one looks in nature, these powerful, beautiful stories have existed long before we began making up our own.

CCA: It seems to me that the numerous scenes in which characters tell other characters stories with animals help create a bond between individuals living in isolated valleys. Would

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you agree that the narratives that emerge from the encounters between humans and animals have the power to reunite men?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

RB: Absolutely. We—humankind—are so young in the world, so lost, so new to the party. The older ways, we long for that security and fit and connection. Almost every other species has been here longer than we have; at a mere 180,000 years of age, we are so very new to the party—a bold and curious experiment, far out on the branch, way out away from the main trunk of the tree of life. In this regard we sense intuitively if not explicitly that almost all other life, all other animals, are our elders, more deeply experienced, and it is therefore right and primal to tell stories of and about them. They connect us with greater attachment to a writhing, spinning world. Their survival is proof that life can succeed.

BASS, Rick, Winter, Notes from Montana, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

---, The Ninemile Wolves, New York, Ballantine Books, 1992.

---, The Watch, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

---, In the Loyal Mountains, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

---, The Book of Yaak, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

---, Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism, Minneapolis, Perseus Books Group, 1999.

---, The Hermit’s Story, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

---, Colter: the True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

---, The Lives of Rocks, New York, Mariner Books, 2007.

---, - The Black Rhinos of Namibia: Searching for Survivors in the African Desert, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2012.

---, In My Home There Is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda, San Francisco, McSweeney’s Publishing, 2012.

COLLOT, Michel, La Poésie moderne et la structure d’horizon, Paris, PUF, 1989.

GINZBURG, Carlo, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

MELVILLE, Herman, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds., New York, Penguin, 1992.

PUGHE, Thomas, “Brute Neighbors, the Modernity of a Metaphor”, in Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon, Specq, François, Laura Dassow Walls, and Michel Granger, eds., Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2013, 249-263.

THOREAU, Henry David, Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings, New York, Norton, 2008.

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NOTES

1. Abbreviations: BY: The Book of Yaak; HS: The Hermit’s Story; SSW: The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness; W: The Watch.

ABSTRACTS

This interview was conducted by email from October 9th to October 11 th 2015. The interview focuses on the role and the representation of animals in Bass’s work.

INDEX

Subjects: Reconnaissances

AUTHOR

CLAIRE CAZAJOUS-AUGÉ Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès

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An Interview with Hollis Seamon Bordeaux, April 2016

Pascale Antolin

Pascale Antolin: Who are you Hollis Seamon? Hollis Seamon: Oh, my—that’s a big question. Let’s go with the basics: I’m a woman of a certain age, a mother, a sister, a baker, a gardener, a reader, and a writer. I’m also a professor who teaches writing and literature. I’m on the edge of retirement from fulltime teaching, though, and looking forward to more time for reading, writing, gardening, and good food.

PA: Have you written other books—novels or short stories—than Somebody Up There Hates You? HS: I’ve published four books, total, and many short stories. My first book was a collection of short stories called Body Work (Spring Harbor Press, 2000) and the second was a mystery novel, Flesh (Avocet Press, 2005). Most recently, I published another collection of short stories, Corporeality (Able Muse Press, 2013), which won the IPPY Award gold medal for short stories—that’s the Independent Publishers award, given annually here in the United States. Corporeality contains the original short story, “SUTHY1 Syndrome,” which grew into my novel, Somebody Up There Hates You (Algonquin Young Readers, 2013). That novel is now out in Canadian, Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese editions.

PA: How did you happen to write a book like Somebody Up There Hates You, i.e. about adolescents at death’s door? HS: That’s a long story—I suppose it’s really the story of my life, in many ways. Here’s the short version: my son Tobias, now a writer himself, who has published a number of books (www.tobiasseamon.com), spent many years in and out of hospitals, most often in what was then called Babies Hospital of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. I stayed with him during those long periods in the hospital and we met so many kids there—children with every imaginable kind of illness and wound. The kids who made the biggest impression on me were the teenagers. No matter how ill they were—and most were terribly, terribly ill—they remained stubbornly and bravely teenagers: rebellious, funny, foul-mouthed, angry, and full of life, for whatever time they had. A few years ago, I realized that their voices, faces,

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and names have never left me, even all of these years later. I dream about them, I hear them whispering in my ear. Most people don’t want to even acknowledge that kids are dying, every day—but as Richie says in Somebody Up There Hates You, “But we are, so I say, deal with it.” This book is my attempt to deal with it and to honor the memories of those heartbreaking, hilarious teenagers that I once knew.

PA: Many Americans when they have been confronted with illness—their own or relatives’— write memoirs. Why did you choose fiction instead? HS: That’s simple: I’m a fiction writer. I make stuff up. It’s the only genre I can write and the only one I want to write. I’m a natural-born liar and not much interested in memoir, either as a writer or a reader, I have to admit. I prefer imagination to “truth” and always have. Here’s a perhaps-true fact: I used to make up stories to put into my diary when I was a kid. I couldn’t even tell the truth there. Another sort-of-true fact: when I was very little, I used to tack the phrase “she said” onto the ends of things I had just said. As in, “Please pass the salt, she said.” Clearly, I thought I was a character in a story. Luckily my older sisters made so much fun of me for saying this that I learned not to. But I still sometimes think it.

PA: Considering the age of your main protagonist/narrator, did you mean your book—or do you consider it—to be “young adult literature”? HS: This is an interesting and complicated question. My original “SUTHY Syndrome” story, which Richie narrates, was first published in Bellevue Literary Review (www.blreview.org), a literary magazine published by NYU Medical College and aimed at an adult audience. As I expanded that story into a novel, I never once gave a thought as to whether it was for young adult or adult readers. My wonderful agent, Gail Hochman, suggested that it might be young adult and when it was accepted for publication by Algonquin Young Readers, that seemed to have settled the question. I very much loved the wisdom and care that Algonquin Young Readers put into marketing the book for young adults. But, the novel has been published in France as Dieu me déteste by the La Belle Colère imprint of Anne Carrière and this imprint focuses on books for adult readers, books with young adult protagonists. See? It gets complicated. And where does all of that leave us? In the end, I think it doesn’t really matter what we call it. All I wanted to do was write a good novel, period.

PA: Why did you choose a first person narrator—and above all a 17-year old boy narrator— when you are a woman writer? HS: And not only a woman but a much, much older-than-seventeen woman! (I’m exactly 50 years older than Richie, if anyone’s counting.) And, yet, this choice of a far- different age/gender narrator never felt a bit strange to me. One day, I just heard this boy talking to me, telling me, in his own voice, that he had an illness called SUTHY syndrome, was stuck in hospice, and what he did about it. While writing the story and then the novel, I never lost the sound of his voice. It felt perfectly natural and still does. One might explain this by the fact that I raised two sons or that I have taught classrooms full of 17 and 18-year-olds for many years. Or, one might just hope that writers’ imaginations are much, much bigger than our sexes or our ages or our life circumstances. That’s what I choose to believe. But, of course, that over-simplifies the mysterious and complex relationship that exists between any writer and a first-person narrator in a piece of fiction. Writing from the mental, spiritual and bodily perspective of a character often feels like an act

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of radical empathy, like actually inhabiting the being of another person. (Or, perhaps, more like being inhabited by another being?). And, for me, in dealing with such difficult and emotionally-fraught topics as illness and death of young people, having Richie voice the story may have been a protective device, a mask or disguise, if you will, that made it possible for me to write this story. Richie’s voice—young, rough, ironic and full of humor—tells the story in a way that, I hope, allows it to be entertaining and energetic, rather than devolving into pathos. Through Richie is the only way I could ever imagine telling this particular tale. One other thing: hearing the audio version of the novel, as read by a young actor named Noah Galvin, was revelatory for me. Hearing an actual male, adolescent voice spinning the story out into the air was amazing and humbling. Now, when I read sections aloud, I can hear Noah’s voice, somehow superimposed or joined with Richie’s, and I find myself using his intonations.

PA: Isn’t it unexpected, if not bold, to associate “kids” with death, in a hospice? HS: I don’t think it’s bold at all—it’s simple reality. Kids get sick. Kids die: in hospitals and at home, kids die. The use of a hospice unit in a hospital came from experiences I had been having just before I wrote the “SUTHY Syndrome” story: two close family members (both of them adults) had been in hospice. One died there; the other died at home. In one of those hospices, there was a harpist, sitting in the little lobby by the elevator, playing music. That freaked me out and when something does that to me, I start imagining a story about it. So, it was that harpist who started SUTHY story going in my head—and it’s the harpist who appears on the first page of the novel. She became a much more important character in the novel than I ever expected: it turns out that she has personal reasons of her own for hanging around that particular hospice; she takes Richie outside at the crucial moment; she teaches him, in a good growing-up kind of way, that there are many things that he doesn’t know. She goes from being someone Richie makes fun of, calling her a “harpy,” to someone he respects. That’s a major part of Richie’s coming-of-age, I think—learning to really see and hear other people and realizing that everyone suffers, not just him. Sadly, some critics and readers now talk about a whole all-too-common sub-genre of “kids-with-cancer” books. After the huge popularity of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, it’s hard to avoid that kind of categorization and I’ve come up against it with Somebody Up There Hates You. Some readers (mostly teens) have called my novel an “imitation” or “rip-off” of Green’s, even though the books are not at all similar. And, I always feel compelled to point out that my “SUTHY Syndrome” story was published in 2009, years before The Fault in Our Stars came out. Enough said?

PA: Why did you choose this epigraph “Wait for death with a cheerful mind”? HS: Really, I just love epigraphs. I like the reliance on another text, set right there at the beginning of one of my own, to put whatever I’ve written into a larger context and to connect to earlier and/or favorite writers. As a lifelong reader and student of literature, I naturally look to other writers for my inspiration and sense of connection. For my story collection, Corporeality, I searched far and wide until I remembered one of my favorite lines from Margaret Atwood’s essay, “Alien Territory,” in her wholly wonderful book, Good Bones and Simple Murders, and used it as an epigraph for the book: “Having a body is not altogether serious.” That line has

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just the right bit of flippancy that I wanted for my corporeal stories, tales that focus on both the pleasures and pains of living our lives in the flesh. And, although you wouldn’t think of Atwood and Aurelius as in any way similar, the epigraph I chose from him has, I think, just a touch of that same tone, that interesting mix of the serious and the sardonic. When I was writing Somebody Up There Hates You, I kept searching for an epigraph that truly captured the tone of the book and when I stumbled upon that Marcus Aurelius quote, I was delighted. I remember sitting on my couch at home, reading that meditation and that line, and saying to myself, “Here it is. This is perfect. Richie would love this.” I still feel that way.

PA: Why did you choose such a closely-knit structure for your novel—three parts covering a very short timespan? Is it a reference to Aristotle’s rule of the three unities? HS: Ah, wouldn’t it be grand to say that, yes, yes indeed, I had Aristotle in mind the whole time?! But… no. I do love structure and I do love subtitles and sections and I always try to have solid scaffolding on which to construct a novel (or even a short story) but I don’t remember thinking of Aristotle’s unities in particular. But, you know, now that you bring it up….. I have taught his theory of the unities of time, place and action to students who are reading/writing plays, so it may have been lurking, somewhere in the back of my mind, all the time. That’s one of the many mysteries of writing, right? We honestly don’t know where some of this stuff comes from. I will say that I was always aware of the benefits of having such a short time span, for a couple of reasons. I wanted Richie’s coming-of-age to have to happen very quickly, under the most extreme conditions; I wanted the drama of that kind of time pressure. I also was worried about tiring or boring readers, if the story went on too long. It’s really claustrophobic in that hospice and I knew that readers, along with Richie, would be clawing at the walls to get out. (That’s also why it was so important to allow Richie those moments of escape—his trip into the city on Halloween; the times he actually gets to go outside, even for a few minutes). And, I have always loved Aristotle’s ideas about reversal and moments of recognition in drama. I find those concepts hugely helpful to fiction writers. In Somebody Up There Hates You, as in any other story with tragedy bred in its bones, the moments of recognition come too late to change the outcome. (Like poor Oedipus, suddenly getting it: Jocasta is his mother as well as his wife; that guy he killed on the bridge is his father. Whoa! That kind of moment.) When Richie recognizes that having sex with Sylvie has harmed her, for example, he feels a terrible moment of recognition and believes that he deserves the beating he receives. And it might be a tiny bit significant that Richie experiences a level of physical blindness by the end, an echo of all of his emotional blind spots throughout the story. Still, I hate to over-emphasize any possible allusive or symbolic meanings in this novel. First and foremost, it was my intent to have everything that happens to Richie and Sylvie and all of the characters be plausible, natural, and believable. If the events and structure also reveal some sort of deeper meaning, that’s for readers to decide— or not. I’m not quite ready to issue as stern a warning as Mark Twain did in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that “persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished” but I’m in his camp. And, it just now occurs to me, that this might be one

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difference between adult and teen readers: the teens, I think, are reading it as a kind of tragi-comic love story; the adults may see more. Well, that was a long answer, wasn’t it? You clearly struck a nerve with that question.

PA: This structure is highly dramatic, the anticlimactic third part being notably shorter than the other two. Why did you choose this strategy? HS: The third section moves more quickly because, basically, Richie’s time is running out and I wanted the structure/pace to match that sense of having very little time left. And, I hope that the third part isn’t really anticlimactic. I guess it depends on what readers think are the real issues of the book: is it whether Richie and Sylvie have sex? Fall in love? Because, yes, those things happen earlier in the book. Or is the key issue whether or not Richie, in some way or another, actually manages to grow up? Or become something of a hero, just a little bit of the princely figure he dreams of being? Or is able to do something for his mother, something that might in some tiny way, help her after he’s gone? I wanted all of that for Richie—the love, the sex, the growing up, the gift to his mother, and the heroic act of sacrificing something that’s truly important to him, for Sylvie. All of that. The last section of the book is where many of those things are accomplished. And even if his sacrifice of the days he has won in the poker game is part of Richie’s delusional state at that point, he believes that’s what he’s doing and that’s what counts, right? He is giving the most precious thing he has—time, a little more time—to the girl he loves.

PA: Why did you set your novel in the fall? Is it a symbolic allusion to the end of life? Or rather due to Halloween? HS: Oh, it’s all about Halloween. Sure, fall is the most evocative season of the year for me. But Halloween is truly the point, in the novel. It is, at least here in the northeastern part of the United States, the closest we come to celebrating the things we fear: monsters, ghosts, skeletons. It’s the night when we thumb our noses at death. It’s the one holiday that gives us costumes and masks and the freedom to knock on strangers’ doors and demand sweets. I love Halloween. And I grew up in the suburbs of northern New Jersey, one of hordes of baby boomer kids, all of us freed to go out and wreak havoc on our neighbors on October 30, Cabbage Night, also called Mischief Night and Devil’s Night. I share Richie’s wonder, even now, that our parents allowed—even encouraged—such madness. My sons, when they were kids, always went crazy on Halloween, too, planning their costumes months in advance. The werewolf costume that Richie remembers in such loving detail is based on one that my younger son Jacob wore when he was about eight. I still have the wolf mask and I hang it on my front porch every Halloween. It totally scares my cats. My son Tobias’s most recent book, The Fair Grounds (P. S. Publishing, UK, 2013), also takes place in and around Halloween, with most of the action occurring in a fantastic cemetery/fair ground combo. No coincidence, I’m sure, that he and I are fascinated with this particular holiday. The boys grew up and I still live in Kinderhook, NY, a village that claims that it inspired, in part, Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. We are steeped, around here, in Halloween lore and legends. It’s in our blood. And what better time to have a sick kid break out of the hospital to have a wild night on the town? It’s the only day of the year when Richie could appear on the streets in public, in his current state, and not look like a total freak. It’s the only night where he

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can blend in with a crowd, not stand out as “the sick kid.” On this one night, he can ride a wheelchair, don a crown and cape and mask and hardly be noticed. It’s a raucous, out-of-control night, perfect for behaving badly. For Richie, Halloween is the only possible night when he can be free.

PA: No matter how weakened he may be, Richard never wants to tell others nor does he complain, yet he describes his impressions in funny or not so funny images such as being “hollowed out. Like a cantaloupe or something”? Why did you choose this metaphoric approach, when some critics like Susan Sontag and specialists in disability studies argue against the use of metaphors to refer to illness? HS: I’m not a specialist in disability studies, obviously. I’m a fiction writer; ergo, I deal in metaphor. And I would contend that all descriptive imagery is metaphoric, anyway. Descriptions of illnesses are no different. When we say that someone has a “stabbing” pain, a “burning” ache or a “rosy” red rash, what else are those but metaphors? How else can anyone ever convey, in words, purely physical sensations? Even when we ask patients to assign a number for the depth of their pain—1-10—isn’t that a kind of metaphor, giving a symbolic numerical value to an otherwise indescribable sensation? In your introduction to the journal Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 2015/2 (No 43), you quote that powerful line from Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” So all writers trying to convey the sensations of illness and pain are in for a challenge. I just can’t figure out any other way to write/talk about illness, other than through metaphor. And I hope that metaphors like the hollowed-out cantaloupe give readers a way to understand/feel Richie’s experiences. And Richie doesn’t want to even name his disease, as if to name it would give it a power and dignity he refuses to acknowledge. Never in the whole book does he name what he has. So he has to find other ways to talk about it—and one of those ways is the ironic name “SUTHY Syndrome,” a kind of metaphor in itself.

PA: At one point, Richard’s uncle says, “I am entertained by the whole human comedy.” Is it also your case? Is it the reason why you used laughter and irony to deal with illness and death? HS: It’s true that I often am entertained by the ironies of human life, even the painful ones. But it’s Richie who tells this story, in his own voice, and I am nowhere near as brave as he is. I could never whistle in the dark with his kind of insouciance, that’s for sure. I am more fearful and more worried, all the time. In fact, I write from my fears, hoping to imagine them so vividly that they no longer have the power to terrify. But I also come from a family where dark humor prevails; we see ourselves as a tough, no-nonsense lot, people who handle pain with sarcasm and hard laughter. And, in the hospitals where I spent so much of my life, I would say that laughter occurred more often than weeping. Dark laughter, to be sure, but still… Sometimes, of course, it’s hard to distinguish laughter from tears, anyway. As Richie says toward the end of the novel, “I hope I’m not crying. I mean, I don’t feel like I am, but maybe I can’t even tell anymore. Maybe I’m always crying.”

PA: You insist on smells a lot—whatever happens a smell is mentioned, can you explain that? HS: Ah, that’s an interesting insight, something I never really noticed. But, yes, I do believe that smell is perhaps our most powerful and evocative sense. We all know the experience of suddenly being cast into the past, transported into a different place

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and time, when we encounter a certain scent. I remember once following an older woman through a grocery store because she smelled of Youth Dew by Estee Lauder— the perfume my mother had once worn. My mother had recently died and I could hardly bear to let that scent escape—as if it brought her back to me, for just a moment. I’m sure I acted like a crazy person, stalking that woman as she bought her fruit and milk and bread. I managed—but only barely—not to follow her out to her car. I stayed in the store, my own shopping forgotten, crying like the orphan I was. A fully grown, middle-aged orphan whose grief had been re-ignited by Youth Dew. I find that when I’m teaching writing, I often have to remind students that their characters have bodies, that they aren’t all mind. Young writers often use what we call “talking heads” dialogue, for example, just line after line of back-and-forth repartee, with no sensory imagery to make the scene visual and vivid for the reader. It’s as if their characters are nothing but disembodied voices. I often give them writing prompts that ask them to describe what their scenes’ settings smell like and to make sure that their characters are aware of and touched by certain scents. I don’t want them to forget about this most basic human sense. And Richie, of course, as the book goes on, is losing his other senses. By the final scenes he has lost the hearing in one ear and has a constant humming roar in the other. His eyesight is greatly diminished, filled with hallucinatory colors and movements. Pain and weakness have dulled his sense of touch—and he eats almost nothing, so taste has gone, too. The last sense available for him, really, is smell and so it comes to the forefront of his perceptions.

PA: Your novel immediately suggested to me the carnivalesque, as it was defined by Bakhtin, all the more as it is scattered with episodes suggesting carnival chaos and breaks of conventional social rules. Take “cabbage night” for instance. You write: “Grandma says her folks figured, what the hey, better the kids get this shit out of their systems once a year than dribble out bits of badness every other day on the calendar.” Is it the reason why you chose that particular approach? HS: I love your ideas about the carnivalesque aspects of the novel; you’ve given me some wonderful new insights into the book. My approach, I’ll admit, in writing the novel, was more instinctive than intellectual—I just somehow felt that what Richie would crave, at this stage of his life, would be exactly that kind of rule-breaking chaos. It may be what most teenagers crave, after all, on some level, right? And Richie has missed out on experiencing it. He’s been subjected to the routines and inflexibility of living in and out of hospitals since he was eleven years old; he is furious, in many ways, about the loss of freedom he’s experienced. And here at the eleventh hour, he is set free from parental supervision and he is determined to make the most of every second. And, yes, as I said earlier, Cabbage Night and Halloween are the closest we come to carnivalesque occasions here in the northeastern part of the United States. (We are not, alas, New Orleans and do not have Mardi Gras revelry in our streets.) So, for Richie, the fates kind of align: it’s coming up on his 18th birthday; it’s the season of Halloween; and, for once, his mother is not standing guard over him—and, in all sorts of ways, he makes chaos happen. His adventures in Hudson on Halloween night with his rule-smashing Uncle Phil send him into a carnival atmosphere where almost anything goes. On Cabbage Night, the prank he pulls with Sylvie is steeped in carnival themes, too. They paint death masks onto their faces, at the same time defying and

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flaunting their terminal diagnoses. They showcase the fears of the hospice visitors— and their own fears—with a kind of manic intensity. They bring the elements of death and damnation, things often spoken only in whispers, into the open, blasting “death metal” music, wearing Black Sabbath tee-shirts, and—in Sylvie’s case—lighting little token hell-fires. In that moment, I believe that these kids are insisting that everyone around them acknowledge the presence of Death, with a capital D. For me, another important aspect of carnival is masking, the use of disguise. People are set free from societal norms, in part, because they are anonymous and/or representing something other than their day-to-day selves. When Richie dons a cheesy paper crown, for example, and turns his blanket into a cape, he becomes something other than a sick kid, he becomes a kind of super-hero. When Sylvie dresses in her school uniform, she is defying her illness, too, by assuming the garb of her once-healthy self. When Kelly is dressed as Marie-Antoinette, she says she “could be much braver, more, uh, bold as Marie than as me.” So much of the book, really, is about the power of this kind of defiant use of disguise. And, as a writer, I believe that I donned a kind of disguise, when I wrote in Richie’s voice, so different from my own. This freed me to write about this whole topic of sick and dying kids without crippling self-consciousness. My own mask was the character of Richie. In this guise, I could, like Kelly-Marie, be much braver and more bold.

PA: Your narrative is full of animal imagery—which is also typical of the carnivalesque—why did you use it? What effect did you mean to create? HS: Well, here’s something else I didn’t notice, myself. It’s interesting because I have been accused of having way too many dogs in Corporeality. But I’m not sure there is all that much animal imagery in Somebody Up There Hates You—is there? Most of the creatures that enter the story seem to be of the mythical sort: werewolf and dragon. Are there other animals in the book?

PA: Why did you choose to portray such “tough” women in your novel—from the young Sylvie, to Richard’s mother and grandmother, to the nurses? HS: It’s certainly true that the women in the book are tough. Partly by nature as well as by nurture (or lack of it). Richie’s grandmother is described as “a tough Jersey girl,” for example, pregnant at the age of sixteen. (Note: By the way, that’s the rough- and-tumble state of New Jersey where I grew up. I, however, was not a tough Jersey girl, in any way. I was shy, skinny, bookish, and pretty much terrified of the truly tough Jersey girls I knew. And there were a lot of them: teased-hair, heavy-smoking, black-mascara, smack-you-as-soon-as-look-at-you girls. Secretly, I admired them very much, from afar.) But, mostly, the women in the book have been put into incredibly tough situations and I think that they have grown strong, in part, because of what life has brought to them. Think of Richie’s mother: an unmarried teenage mother who has never revealed who Richie’s father is, who has worked multiple jobs to support herself and her son, who has been by his side for years and years of terrible illness, and who, now, faces the death of that son. She has had to be tough. Although I fear that once Richie is gone and she no longer can take care of him, she is going to fall apart, badly. And, partly, with both Richie’s grandmother and mother, toughness is a matter of class. These women have always been poor, always had to work hard. It is very, very difficult in this country for working class women to hold jobs—usually low-paying,

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low-status, incredibly hard jobs—while also raising children. We have no decent system for childcare; we have a healthcare system that makes it almost impossible for anyone who isn’t rich to maintain decent health insurance; we do almost nothing to help a working woman balance caring for a sick child with her need to be on the job. Simply from who they are and how they have been forced to survive, these women have grown tough outer skins. Inside, they are much softer, kinder, and much more afraid. But they will not show the inside self. The nurses—yes, they are tough, too. But they are also full of compassion. Who could work as a nurse in a hospice without that kind of balance? Their compassion comes out, at times, as weakness or lack of professionalism, as when Jeannette allows Richie and Uncle Phil to walk out of the hospital. At their most human and vulnerable, confronting the imminent deaths of these young patients, the nurses’ humanity sometimes overcomes their professional training and discipline. And for that, I came to love them. And, Sylvie. Ah, as Richie says, that girl is fierce. When faced with “flight or fight” reactions, there is simply no flight in her. She is all fight. And when dealing with her own terrible illness, she chooses not to believe her diagnosis; she is completely defiant. She can be mean; she is certainly impetuous and bossy, sometimes cruel. She has, after all, dragon blood running in her veins.

PA: By contrast, all your male characters seem weaker, if not imbalanced—from Richard himself, the gay nurse Edward, Phil (Richard’s uncle) to Sylvie’s father. What message are you trying to convey? HS: I disagree that the male characters are weaker. I think Richie is incredibly strong. By the end of the book, he has achieved a kind of triumphant manhood, under the most difficult of conditions. He’s not, obviously, physically strong but he is amazingly resilient. I also see no weakness in Edward. He is a wonderful, caring nurse—who, like the female nurses, occasionally lets his heart override his head, in regard to the young lovers. But, for me, that is a kind of strength, not weakness. Sylvie’s father certainly becomes unbalanced, more and more so, as the novel progresses. I think that this is because he has assumed the traditional, successful patriarchal male role, as society defines it: he is a high-earning lawyer; he is used to taking care of his family; he is used to being the boss. When confronted with utter loss of control over his daughter’s life and death, he tips over into a kind of madness. He behaves very badly and he does some despicable things. But I believe that, as Jeannette says when Richie calls him a demon, “No. That man’s in hell, is all. He’s not in charge of the place, he’s just been thrown in there.” And Richie, toward the end of the novel, comes to understand Sylvie’s father, perhaps better than anyone else. He thinks, “I could love him, too. I mean think about it. Isn’t that how a father should be? I mean, what wouldn’t you do, if Sylvie was your child?” I hope that readers, without excusing any of the awful things he does, see Sylvie’s father’s torment and understand, at least a little, why he acts as he does. Phil? Well, sure, Phil isn’t exactly a solid citizen, is he? But Phil is there. He isn’t avoiding the pain of seeing Richie so ill; he hasn’t skipped out. He’s fighting as hard as he can, in his own way, to give Richie some kind of life in the time left to him. He’s also an artist, perceptive and talented; as Richie notices, “…once he goes into artist mode, Phil’s a different guy.”

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Two other male characters are minor, but do I admire them: the old guys in Room 304. World War II vets. Old soldiers. They seem strong to me, even here in their last days. So, are all of the men in the book flawed? Sure. So are all of the women. I mean, really, who isn’t?

PA: Your characters play cards recurrently throughout the novel, particularly at the end. Why? What do these card games mean? HS: Games of chance, for me, echo the whole randomness of who happens to become ill and who dies young. I don’t believe this is some kind of divine curse or divine will; it’s simply the luck of the draw. Sure, there’s skill involved, in life as in poker, but you’ve still got to work with the hand you’re dealt, right? In the original “SUTHY Syndrome” story, I ended with the poker game simply because I saw, in my head, the main characters of the story gathered around a bedside table, gambling for that most precious of stakes, days of life. Once I launched into the novel version, I knew that if the book was going to end with a card game, there should be earlier card games as well. I’ve been influenced, in creating this kind of parallel or echo-effect scene structure, by writer Charles Baxter’s terrific essay called “Rhyming Action,” in his book Burning Down the House. So I was aware of trying to create the kind of fictional “rhyme” that Baxter describes in having a couple of card games. The earlier game of gin, which Sylvie’s father gloatingly wins, kind of foreshadows the final game. And, on the most basic level, I’ve seen lots of people playing cards in hospital rooms, passing the time and injecting a bit of play into the hospital routine. These days, people probably just play solitaire on their phones rather than gathering around tables in waiting rooms and at bedsides. That seems sadder to me—even lonelier.

PA: Why this recurrent image of the dragon, associated with Sylvie’s father? Is there any symbolic meaning? HS: Dragons! There are two wonderful archetypal dragons that I have always loved: the sly, philosophical dragon in John Gardner’s novel Grendel and, of course, Tolkien’s gold-encrusted Smaug. For Richie’s visions of Sylvie’s father as a dragon, I wanted that imagery to be associated with Richie’s dream of becoming a fairy tale prince, that heroic guy who rescues the fair maiden from her imprisoning tower by defeating the dragon that guards her. Richie knows, on one level, how silly this fantasy is but in another way, he wants to believe it. Just as he knows that his story about the “science geeks” coming up with a cure for his illness is a fantasy but also almost believes it. He tells this story to Kelly-Marie and to his mother. And, perhaps, to himself, both as a kind of fairy tale and a desperate hope. When Richie goes to Sylvie’s room, where she lies in bed unmoving and unconscious, he sees her as a fairy tale princess under a spell and wishes, with all of his heart, that he could wake her with a kiss. But he’s also honest enough—with himself and with the reader—to report the real outcome of his kiss: “It would be nice to say that she opened her eyes and said, ‘Hey, Rich-man.’ That my princely kiss brought her back to life. But I’m not going to start lying, not now. She didn’t move and she didn’t speak. That’s the truth.” It’s important, somehow, that Richie carries this basic contradiction with him, all of the time, that he clings to fantasies that he really doesn’t even believe in. But they

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comfort him, nevertheless. He can mock and honor these things, simultaneously. This seems true to human nature: don’t we often choose to believe—and to disbelieve— both at the same time? That’s part of why, I think, we are so drawn to fairy tales, always and forever. The story itself, the telling of it, the recurring characters and motifs, those are our slim comforts. They are not real but, still, they strike us as somehow true. Truer than true. So, yes, here there be dragons. All I have to do, right this minute, is glance behind the screen of my laptop and I’ll see a picture I’ve kept propped up on my various writing desks for many, many years—forty, at least. It’s a copy of a pen-and-ink drawing by Lois Allen. It shows a little girl serving a cup of tea to a large, dark, spiky, sweet-faced dragon. I don’t know why, exactly, that picture is so important to me. But it is. And I’ve just recalled that Gardner’s Grendel also has a character who is a harpist—the enigmatic storyteller in Beowulf’s court called The Shaper. Curiouser and curiouser, the connections that these questions reveal……

PA: Your narrator “speaks” to his readers and the novel suggests some kind of tall tale, why did you choose this approach? HS: Again, because this is just the way I first heard the story, in that opening boast, “I shit you not.” Whenever somebody says that, stand back, because some kind of bullshit, inevitably, is on its way. When I heard Richie’s voice proclaiming himself to be “The Incredible Dying Boy,” I understood the tone this book would take. And the tall tale is another way of telling the truth, isn’t it, but telling it, as Emily Dickinson says, “slant”? Exaggeration, boasting and hyperbole allow us to touch on difficult matters in an over-the-top way that entertains rather than depresses. Most of Richie’s voice depends on this whole element of ironic braggadocio that, I think, is also quite natural for an adolescent boy. A tall tale element that I didn’t include here is any kind of supernatural or superhuman occurrence. No deus ex machina will appear at the last moment to snatch Richie from the arms of death. What’s “tall” about this tale is mostly Richie’s habit of hyperbole about the things he considers fun and boastworthy, like his sexual adventures. What Richie plays down, of course, are his pain, growing weakness, and fear. He prefers to shape his tale around the extraordinary rather than the mundane.

PA: What role do Phil’s drawings play in the novel? Why did you introduce them? Do they represent some kind of metafictional discourse? HS: First, I’d recommend that anyone who’s interested take a look at the Planeta website, where, for the Spanish-language edition of the book, someone has taken the time to create Phil’s drawings with wonderful care and precision: http://planetadelibrosmexico.com/tag/alguien-alla-arriba-te-odia/. And then I’d say that, yes, there’s a touch of metafiction here, as the drawings provide a slightly skewed commentary on the story. And there is more than a touch of intertextuality: visual blending with verbal. But mostly, I just wanted to give Uncle Phil a talent of his own, something that might help to offset some of his more black- sheepish characteristics. It’s important to Richie that someone in his family actually see the hospice and recognize its realities and oddities. He needs someone to understand the world he’s living in. His mother can’t even admit to herself that Richie is in hospice; she pretends that it’s just another hospitalization for him. But

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Richie desperately wants someone to “deal with it,” as he is trying to do. And Uncle Phil does exactly that; he deals, through his drawings. They prove that Phil has been paying attention to everything Richie shows him and that he recognizes the humanity that lies inside and behind even the most diminished patients. It’s also important, I think, that Richie can’t see all of the details of that Phil puts into the drawings. So he is surprised when some of these little things are revealed to him. It’s another example of things he didn’t know, something else he has to learn. The drawings also represent a gift for his mother. When, finally, Richie runs out of words and his voice goes silent, there will still be these drawings, something she can hold in her hands.

PA: Are you preparing another book? What is it about? Yes, always. But this next novel is just barely begun, so I can’t give you any details. What I can tell you is that this one moves to the opposite end of the age spectrum from Somebody Up There Hates You. The main character is coming to the end of a long career as a professor in a college that is falling apart, an institution descending into the all-too-common pit of greed-driven corporatization and chaos. The story will be, essentially, an academic comedy, but one, I hope with real heart. And a whole lot of carnival. Working title, at the moment, is The Short Timer.

ABSTRACTS

Hollis Seamon was invited to Bordeaux Montaigne University in April 2016 to give a lecture entitled “Mask, Cape and Crown: Disguise and Dis-ease in Somebody Up There Hates You” (2013), her latest novel. A remarkable success on both sides of the Atlantic, this novel associates illness with youth and laughter.

INDEX

Subjects: Reconnaissances

AUTHOR

PASCALE ANTOLIN Université Bordeaux Montaigne

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Trans'Arts

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À rebours : Retour sur l’exposition de la collection de photographies de Sam Wagstaff au Getty Center à Los Angeles (15 mars - 31 juillet 2016) The Thrill of the Chase: The Wagstaff Collection of Photographs

Isabella Seniuta

1 Jusqu’au 31 juillet 2016, le Getty Center consacre une rétrospective au photographe Robert Mapplethorpe et propose un regard nouveau sur son mécène, le collectionneur américain Sam Wagstaff.

2 Né dans un milieu aristocratique new-yorkais, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. (1921-1987) incarne la figure même du dandy moderne. Avec son faux air de Gary Cooper, un peu hippie, son charisme ne laisse personne indifférent. Après s’être engagé dans la Marine pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, il étudie à Yale puis intègre une agence publicitaire à New York. Débordant de mépris pour le milieu de la publicité, il quitte son travail et reprend des études d’histoire de l’art à l’Institute of Fine Arts de New York. Dans les années 1960, il côtoie des artistes conceptuels et devient conservateur au Wadsworth Atheneum, dans le Connecticut, puis au Detroit Institute of the Arts, dans le Michigan, dans les départements d’art contemporain. En 1972, alors âgé de 51 ans, il rencontre le jeune Mapplethorpe, qui en a 26, avec lequel il établit une relation aux facettes multiples : amant, commanditaire, ami et conseiller. Aux côtés de ce dernier, il découvre la photographie et la communauté homosexuelle sadomasochiste new- yorkaise. Il s’initie à l’histoire du médium dans le New York des années 1970 au rythme des drogues et des événements à la Factory d’Andy Warhol. Héritier de plusieurs millions de dollars à la mort de sa mère en 1973, il débute une des premières grandes collections mondiales de photographies vernaculaires et de photographies historiques. Il fréquente les librairies, les marchés aux puces et les ventes aux enchères de Londres, New York et Paris. Accompagné de Robert Mapplethorpe, il fait l’acquisition d’albums de Julia Margaret Cameron (image 1) et de tirages de Nadar (image 2)1. Témoin de son engagement, Mapplethorpe est la clé de l’entreprise photographique de Wagstaff.

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Ensemble, ils ont établi les dynamiques du marché de la photographie encore naissant, dans une perspective transatlantique. La collection de Wagstaff révèle une cartographie des réseaux qui se sont mis en place entre la France, l’Angleterre et les États-Unis autour d’une même idée de la photographie en tant qu’œuvre d’art. Les archives personnelles de Sam Wagstaff indiquent qu’il forme sa collection auprès des marchands français : André Jammes, Gérard Lévy et les Texbraun et lors des ventes aux enchères à Londres organisées par Sotheby’s. De 1973 jusqu’à 1984, Wagstaff joue un rôle central dans la construction de la valeur des images. Il rassemble près de 25 000 objets, surtout des photographies en noir et blanc, qu’il entrepose dans son loft monumental à Manhattan. Mais ce n’est pas seulement l’exhaustivité qui fait l’exception de cette collection. La rare qualité esthétique des choix opérés fait de Wagstaff un pionnier dans l’histoire de la photographie.

Image 1

Julia Margaret Cameron, Mrs. Herbert Duckworth, 1867, 34 x 24.9 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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Image 2

Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon), Gustave Doré, vers 1856-1858, 23.5 × 18.7 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

3 Intitulée « The Thrill of the Chase », l’exposition montée par Paul Martineau dévoile une centaine d’images. Elle laisse entrevoir deux lignes constantes d’interrogations : pourquoi s’intéresser à la figure du collectionneur-mécène ? Et quel est son rôle dans l’écriture de l’histoire de l’art ? Si de nombreux musées présentent des collections privées de photographies depuis plusieurs décennies2, aucune exposition n’est venue souligner distinctement le rôle du collectionneur dans la construction d’un savoir en photographie. Située en fin de parcours de la rétrospective sur Robert Mapplethorpe, il peut paraître étonnant à première vue de voir la collection de photographies de Wagstaff présentée aux côtés des œuvres de Mapplethorpe. Mais l’enjeu principal du commissaire est précisément de rendre compte de la place du collectionneur dans la carrière du photographe. En offrant un dialogue entre l’artiste et son mécène, « The Thrill of the Chase » atteste donc d’un changement de paradigme.

4 Lors du parcours des deux salles, le visiteur se trouve face à des tirages anciens d’une qualité remarquable, souvent des grands formats, qui le confrontent à une histoire de la photographie recoupant celle plus personnelle du collectionneur (image 3). Parce qu'il s'intéresse aux procédés techniques du médium et à la beauté ineffable sous toutes ses formes, Wagstaff ne s'enferme pas dans les limites d'une position esthétique étroite. La collection atteste d’une histoire alternative de la photographie puisqu’elle a été établie en partie à contre-courant des institutions. De son vivant, Sam Wagstaff manifeste peu d’intérêt pour les photographes contemporains exposés dans les musées tels que Garry Winogrand ou Lee Friedlander soutenus par John Szarkowski au MoMA. « Il était à la recherche d’autre chose. » affirme Weston Naef, ancien directeur du département de photographies du Getty3. Si les cartels livrent peu d’informations sur la vie du collectionneur, cette exposition est inédite car elle donne un aperçu du fonds photographique du Getty formé en grande partie avec la collection de Wagstaff3. Présentée sous l’angle de l’histoire du goût, la collection offre une lecture personnelle

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du médium, c’est-à-dire une vision de la photographie centrée sur la lumière, les sensations et les formes. Le propos ici n’est pas chronologique. À l’exception d’une vitrine avec des images en petit format et des daguerréotypes, toutes les photographies sont présentées côte à côte et forment une frise composée de quelques photographies en couleur, des tirages anciens en noir et blanc et des snapshots. L’accrochage prend le parti d’un rapprochement entre une photographie du Président Lincoln pendant la guerre de Sécession (image 4), les daguerréotypes d’anonymes (image 5), une image de William Klein pour Vogue et « les chefs d’œuvres de l’histoire de la photographie » à travers Edward Steichen ou Gustave Le Gray (image 6). Par ailleurs, les images rassemblées au Getty Center font une large part à la photographie française et anglaise avec par exemple une photographie de l’Abbaye de Glastonbury par Roger Fenton (image 7) ou un paysage de la ville de Lyon inondée par Louis-Antoine Froissart (image 8).

Image 3

Auteur anonyme, Tente du Barnum & Bailey Circus à Paris, vers 1901-1902, 22.2 × 58.1 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Image 4

Alexander Gardner, Président Lincoln, 1862, 21.9 x 19.7 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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Image 5

Auteur anonyme, Portrait d’une jeune fille assise, Daguerréotype, 6.5 × 5.2 cm, , J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Image 6

Gustave Le Gray, Hêtre. Fontainebleau, Vers 1855-1857, 31.9 x 41.3 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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Image 7

Roger Fenton, Abbaye de Glastonbury, 1858, 35.4 x 42.7 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Image 8

Louis-Antoine Froissart, Inondations de Lyon (1856) : vue du quai Saint-Antoine, du quai des Célestins et du quai Tilsitt, 27 x 36.1 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

5 « The Thrill of the Chase » fournit un ensemble certes représentatif mais incomplet de l’architecture de la collection. L’exposition divulgue en arrière-plan un goût avéré pour les images sombres comme dans Lupus Vulgaris d’Oscar G. Mason (image 9). Ici, aucune description, seul le visuel compte. Cette photographie montre le portrait sinistre d’un homme atteint de lésions tuberculeuses. La prise de vue en contre-plongée laisse deviner un visage d’une grande beauté. L’homme détourne le regard de l'objectif et semble effrayé par sa propre maladie. Mort et démence se discernent dans les objets collectés et c’est sans doute ce qui fait la particularité de cette collection. Les images rassemblées révèlent une iconographie de la souffrance ; c’est une culture de la douleur qui se dessine en filigrane. La collection de Wagstaff dévoile à demi-mot son monde intérieur. C’est par là que le collectionneur devient finalement son propre sujet. À regret, le commissaire de l’exposition occulte une partie de l’engagement photographique de Wagstaff. Dimension méconnue dans la vie du collectionneur : Sam Wagstaff a aussi été photographe. Ses archives conservées en dehors du musée, au

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Getty Research Institute, révèlent des centaines de clichés de qualité. Or, Paul Martineau ne propose pas de lecture croisée des photographies de Wagstaff et de Mapplethorpe, ce qui dessert le propos de l’exposition. Seul le catalogue—écrit par Paul Martineau, Weston Naef et Eugenia Parry—mentionne et analyse les essais photographiques de Wagstaff. L’historienne américaine EP témoigne dans son texte que les photographies assemblées par Wagstaff sont le reflet de tous les sentiments qu’il a pu ressentir de son vivant4. Ainsi, jusqu’à la fin de sa vie, Wagstaff a tenté de réunir la photographie sous toutes ses formes pour créer son propre musée d’images. Impossible utopie ? Oui. Mais qu’importe puisqu’au fond c’est l’histoire des émotions qui fascine Sam Wagstaff.

Image 9

Oscar G. Mason, Lupus Vulgaris, 1900, 22.9 cm x 17.8 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

NOTES

1. Je renvoie à la biographie de Wagstaff par Philip Gefter : Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe - A Biography, Liveright, 2014 et à la biographie de Mapplethorpe par Patricia Morrisroe, A Biography, Random House, New York, 1995. 2. Citons par exemple : Une Passion Française, Collection de photographies de Roger Therond à la Maison Européenne de la photographie à Paris en 2000 et The Waking dream : photography’s first century : selections from the Gilman Paper Company collection au Metropolitan Museum of Art à New York en 1993. 3. Entretien du 14 mars 2016 avec Weston Naef, directeur du département de photographies au Getty Center de 1984 à 2008.

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3. En 1984, le Getty Center crée un département de photographie en faisant l’acquisition de onze collections privées. La collection de Sam Wagstaff achetée pour environ cinq millions de dollars est de loin la plus importante en nombre. 4. « He would build a collection of photographs, not only to retell photography’s history. The images would reflect everything he’d ever felt. They would become his autobiography. » The Thrill of the Chase, the Wagstaff Collection of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Paul Martineau, with an essay by Eugenia Parry and an introduction by Weston Naef, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2016, 37.

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

AUTEUR

ISABELLA SENIUTA Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne- ED 441

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Francesca Woodman, « On Being an Angel » Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, du 11 mai au 31 juillet 2016 (commissaire Anna Tellgren)

Juliette Melia

1 Il est quasiment impossible, face aux autoportraits de Francesca Woodman, de se défaire de la conscience de sa mort prématurée à l’âge de vingt-deux ans, d’autant plus qu’il s’agit d’un suicide, car un grand nombre de ses photographies ont pour sujet la présence fantomatique d’un corps qui semble disparaître. Bien qu’elle n’ait couvert qu’une dizaine d’années, sa période de création est extrêmement prolifique, avec la production de milliers d’images photographiques, parfois accompagnées de notes manuscrites qui peuvent leur servir de titre, ainsi que de quelques séquences filmées. Le titre choisi pour l’exposition, On Being an Angel (« Devenir un ange », pour reprendre la traduction de la commissaire de cette exposition1), contribue à cette impression d'irréversible, « devenir un ange » pouvant être l’euphémisme du « saut de l’ange » qu’est la mort.

2 Cependant, la question du suicide ne doit pas faire perdre de vue le caractère vivant de son travail, qui peut s’interpréter comme une façon de représenter mais surtout de vaincre la mort par l’énergie créatrice. La vaincre, car elle survit grâce à l’œuvre qui demeure alors que l’artiste n’est plus. La représenter, parce que la majorité de ses images évoque, sous diverses formes, sa propre disparition, réelle ou rêvée. L’usage du nu exprime en soi la mortalité, qui « remet volontairement le corps à sa place réelle, au sein d’un monde qui le déborde de toutes parts et où il ne nous appartient pas de durer éternellement », comme le rappelle Paul Ardenne2. D’autres effets esthétiques, tels que flou ou décadrage, traduisent un effacement progressif ou partiel du corps.

3 Si le choix de l’autoportrait peut apparaître a priori comme une manifestation de narcissisme, Woodman le présente comme un impératif pratique : « ainsi je suis toujours à portée de main »3. Sous couvert de simple commodité, le choix de l’autoportrait pose toutefois la question de son engagement. À la fois libres de tout cahier des charges féministe et des clichés sur le féminin imposés par la société

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patriarcale, les autoportraits de Woodman interrogent la représentation du corps de la femme par elle-même et créent les conditions propices à la maîtrise de son image.

La mort en représentation

4 La photographie qui accueille le visiteur dans la première salle d’exposition est, logiquement, celui qui est considéré comme le premier autoportrait, à l’âge de treize ans (« Self-portrait at thirteen, Antella, Italie, 1972 » [1])4. Cette image est construite autour de deux axes opposés : le visage est détourné de l’objectif alors que le fil relié au déclencheur est dirigé vers celui-ci. Elle semble constituer une matrice de l’œuvre, portant prophétiquement en elle trois caractéristiques majeures : l'interaction du montrer et du cacher (le visage derrière le rideau mystérieux des cheveux), de l’animé et de l’inanimé (la grâce de la main mise en valeur par le tomber lourd des étoffes), de flou et de net (ici dû à la faible profondeur de champ, le flou sera ensuite produit par des temps de pose longs, suggérant peu à peu la disparition du corps).

5 En 1975, Francesca Woodman intègre la Rhode Island School of Design, où elle obtient une bourse d’étude qui lui permet de passer une année à Rome. C’est là qu’elle réalise sa première exposition personnelle, à la librairie-galerie Maldoror, en 1978. La série qui donne son nom à l’exposition, c’est-à-dire les quatre images intitulées On Being an Angel, a été réalisée dans le contexte de ses études de photographie. Selon Rosalind Krauss, le choix de ce titre est probablement celui d’un travail proposé par les enseignants de la RISD, autour du sujet suivant : « ‘Is it possible to photograph something that doesn’t exist ?’ »,5 une façon de mettre à l’épreuve la nécessaire référentialité de la photographie.6 Woodman détourne cette notion de référentialité par la mise en scène de la figure imaginaire de l’ange.

6 Au sein de cette exposition, d’autres images métaphoriques de l’ange semblent former une séquence narrative. D’une part, dans « On Being an Angel, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 »[2], Woodman se représente le corps renversé, la pointe d’un parapluie qui, même si l’objet est à l’arrière-plan, est dirigée vers son cœur et comme sur le point de le transpercer. De son visage n’apparaît que la bouche ouverte dans un cri de peur ou de surprise, le reste du corps est hors-cadre, comme s’il avait déjà disparu. Dans « From a series on Angels, Rome, Italie, 1977 » [3], elle donne à voir sa vision de la vie après la mort : elle se tient debout, vêtue d’un jupon blanc, tandis qu'un voile blanc suspendu au-dessus d’elle forme une présence fantomatique qui suggère par métonymie l’aile d’un ange. Enfin, dans « From Angel series, Rome Italie, 1977 » [4], la photographie d’un saut la fige dans les airs, libérée de la gravité terrestre.

7 La métaphore de l’ange est filée tout au long de l’exposition. Dans la deuxième salle, un autoportrait intitulé « Angels, Italie, 1977-1978 » [5] fait le lien entre les deux parties de la série On Being an Angel. Dans une mise en scène de cauchemar, elle y adopte la même pose torturée, le corps renversé en arrière, comme foudroyé par une mort subite, tandis que les giclures dégoulinantes de peinture sombre sur le mur évoquent le sang qui pourrait jaillir de la blessure au cœur infligée par la pointe du parapluie utilisée comme une arme blanche, créant un sentiment d’horreur empruntant au registre du gothique, un genre où le corps de la femme est souvent victimisé. Sans aucune indication qu’elle pensait déjà à son suicide, la représentation de la mort, voire de sa propre mort, est omniprésente, sous la forme de mises en scènes à l’onirisme macabre mais aussi de disparitions liées au flou ou au décadrage.

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8 Les trois photographies de la série Swan Song, reproduites en très grand format (« Untitled (from Swan Song series), Providence, Rhode Island, 1978 »), déclinent également le motif de l’ange. Le titre de la série à lui seul évoque évidemment l'œuvre ultime d’un artiste. Pourtant, la mort étant survenue en 1981, cette série n’est pas à proprement parler son chant du cygne. L’œuvre entière de Woodman serait-elle donc à considérer comme telle ? La présence, à côté du corps de Woodman, d’une estampe d’ailes déployées [6] d’un volatile apparemment imaginaire, puis d’une enveloppe translucide [7] contenant quelques plumes à l’aspect très fragile, évoquent la légèreté de l’âme humaine libérée de son corps. Le point de vue en plongée, pareil à celui de l’oiseau en vol (ou de l’ange) parachève cet effet, surplombant un corps nu, comme inanimé et mettant en scène sa disparition par le décadrage – le corps est partiellement sorti du cadre, dans deux des trois images présentées – et le décor, une surface blanche qui, trop étroite pour être un lit, ressemble plutôt à une table de morgue.

9 Préférer traduire « On Being an Angel » par « Devenir un ange », par opposition à « Être un ange », transpose les stéréotypes féminins de douceur et de gentillesse à l’universel de la condition mortelle. Il n’en reste pas moins qu’à travers leur représentation de la mort, les autoportraits de Woodman interrogent singulièrement le vécu féminin.

Maïeutique7 de l’autoportrait

10 Francesca Woodman est une artiste qui « n’a pas pris le temps de vieillir »8. Pourtant, l’exposition montre une démarche étonnamment mature, évitant tout narcissisme (qui se manifesterait par exemple par des redites dans les autoportraits) en menant une démarche créative de représentation expérimentale qui repousse les limites de ce qui était alors habituel de représenter en photographie. C’est ce que montre Anca Cristofovici, pour qui la force du travail de Woodman est de créer un corpus inédit d’images de son propre corps dans les mutations qu’il subit entre l’enfance et l’âge adulte : « Woodman does not show adolescence from a narcissistic perspective […], but as a way of addressing its problems creatively. The stakes of her performing a wide range of corporeal realities in front of a camera are related to the transformations of the physical and psychic body and also to the possibilities of the camera to capture them »9. Le travail de Woodman se caractérise donc par cette conjugaison de l’utilisation de son propre corps avec les expérimentations techniques mises en œuvre pour le représenter, par exemple quand elle utilise le flou pour représenter sa corporéité tout en la dissolvant, ce qui met en image le caractère transitoire de la condition humaine. Le sociologue de l’art Daniel Vander Gucht salue, chez les artistes engagés au sein desquels il convient de ranger Woodman pour le traitement qu’elle fait de thèmes tels que le corps, la vie et la mort, la sexualité, « leur détermination à questionner les évidences, à explorer les possibles, à expérimenter ». Et il ajoute que « ce travail obstiné d’éveil des consciences, d’entretien du doute, d’accueil de l’altérité correspond assez exactement à ce qu’on peut entendre par un travail pédagogique, qui ne doit pas être entendu ici au sens de la didactique qui soumet le monde à la question mais plutôt de la maïeutique qui questionne le monde »10.

11 À plusieurs titres, les autoportraits de Woodman se placent sous le signe d’un tel questionnement. Sans le moindre dogmatisme, ils témoignent d'une pratique expérimentale visant à une certaine reprise de contrôle de son propre corps, dans un contexte social parfois oppressant, comme si elle tentait de dépasser sa propre

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vulnérabilité par la mise en scène de celle-ci. Anna-Karin Palm rappelle à quel point la représentation du corps varie selon le genre de l’artiste : La situation devient délicate si le corps est un corps de femme, parce que notre culture aggrave, accentue chez elle cette césure entre corps et âme. Le corporel masculin est normé, propre et comme objectif, sans complications. Le sujet masculin est censé pouvoir s’approprier sans grande difficulté, appréhender même son propre corps. On associe davantage la féminité à la matérialité du corps et au sexe ; la femme qui cherche son âme et revendique son droit à une subjectivité singulière devra livrer combat avec son corps. Pour son corps. Pour le droit d’être à la fois moi, et mon corps. D’être celle qui raconte.11

12 Bien des autoportraits présentés témoignent de la conscience que Woodman avait de ces questions. Une remise en question de l’association de la femme et de la domesticité, par exemple, est récurrente : dans des intérieurs décrépits, Woodman se représente nue ou vêtue de robes dont les motifs rappellent les aspérités des murs, se (con)fondant ainsi dans le décor. « House #4, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 » [8], peut figurer l’aliénation de la femme au foyer, avec la cheminée béante du salon se transformant en mâchoire prête à ingérer son corps. Cet effet est accentué par la pause longue, créant autour du corps de Woodman un effet de flou qui évoque la disparition/digestion de ce corps.

13 Woodman tourne également en dérision la fascination, souvent masculine, pour les seins de la femme. Plusieurs photographies empruntent au genre du blason sur un mode satirique, à l'instar de « From the three kinds of melon in four kinds of light series, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 » [9]. L’usage du vocable « melon », qui désigne péjorativement en anglais le sein de la femme, la dissimulation du sein par l’image dessinée du melon visant à troubler l’appréciation voyeuriste de l’image symétrique des seins de la femme, ainsi que l’aspect un peu trivial du melon sur le point de répandre sa semence de pépins sur la table, au premier plan de l’image, subvertissent par l’humour les représentations classiques du buste féminin.

14 D'autres images de buste, regroupées sur le même pan de mur, se jouent des codes de la bienséance en empruntant au mode de la performance artistique. Le corps de la femme est réifié par des pinces à linge qui suggèrent une souffrance masochiste, mais aussi une forme de victoire sur cette souffrance (« Untitled, Boulder, Colorado, 1976 » [10]). Dans une thématique inverse, le buste devient un visage dont les seins sont des yeux et la peau du ventre est pincée pour former un sourire (« Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 »). Enfin, sur la poitrine peut s’écrire le jeu du cercle et du trait : un sein est naturellement rond, mais l’autre est écrasé par une vitre imprimant dans la chair un angle droit (« Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 »).

15 La performance est également au cœur des quelques vidéos présentées dans l’exposition, qui prolongent les métamorphoses du corps en représentation. Une scène la montre se recouvrant le corps de peinture blanche, comme pour en faire une page vierge prête à être nouvellement exploitée. Le thème de la page blanche reparaît dans une autre vidéo, où elle inscrit son nom sur une grande feuille suspendue devant son corps. Elle déchire ensuite minutieusement le papier pour en surgir, comme une métaphore de sa propre (re)naissance.

16 Enfin, un autoportrait, « Untitled, New York, 1979-1980 » [11], mis en valeur par son accrochage dans le vestibule de la deuxième salle, montre avec quelle subtilité les autoportraits de Woodman questionnent le monde. Le visage posé sur les mains et les yeux clos, Woodman mime le sommeil. Sous son visage, dans une vitrine, sont disposés

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un oursin et une mâchoire d’animal, dont le caractère agressif et piquant ne semble pourtant pas troubler son repos, et formant un ensemble quasi surréaliste. Près de son visage est posé un gros coquillage blanc qui rappelle l’organe sexuel féminin, tandis que ses cheveux sont rassemblés en une volute qui en évoque la forme, associant métaphoriquement l’intellect (la tête) et l’érotisme (le sexe) de la femme, que l’usage tend à dissocier. Un deuxième coquillage flotte au-dessus de sa tête, comme si la sexualité féminine peuplait également ses rêves. Sans avoir besoin de recourir au nu, la reprise du contrôle de soi est ici portée à son point d'accomplissement, jusqu’à l’enjeu crucial de la représentation de ses propres pulsions désirantes.

17 Cette exposition permet ainsi de découvrir une œuvre intime et ambitieuse, déclinant en toute liberté Eros et Thanatos, avec la ferveur d’un corps engagé.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Sources primaires :

CHANDÈS, Hervé, SOLLERS, Philippe, JANUS, Élisabeth (et al.), Francesca Woodman, Paris, Actes Sud, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 1998.

PEDICINI, Isabella, Francesca Woodman : gli anni romani tra pelle e pellicola, Rome, Contrasto, 2012.

SCHOR, Gabriele, BRONFEN, Elisabeth (dir), BERNE, Betsy, BINOTTO, Johannes (et al.), Francesca Woodman, Works from the Sammlung Verbund, Cologne, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, 2014.

TELLGREN, Anna (dir.), Francesca Woodman, Devenir un ange, Stockholm, Éditions Xavier Barral, 2016.

TOWNSEND, Chris, Francesca Woodman, Paris, Phaïdon, 2006.

Sources secondaires :

ARDENNE, Paul, L’Image corps, Figures de l’humain dans l’art du XXème siècle, Paris, Éditions du Regard, 2001.

BARTHES, Roland, La Chambre claire, Note sur la photographie, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma, Gallimard Seuil, Le Seuil, 1980.

CRISTOFOVICI, Anca, Touching Surfaces, Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging, Amsterdam, New York, Rodopi, « Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 19 », 2008.

KRAUSS, Rosalind, Bachelors, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, The MIT Press, « October Books », 2000.

VANDER GUCHT, Daniel, L’expérience politique de l’art, Retour sur la définition de l’art engagé, Bruxelles, Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2014.

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NOTES

1. Anna Tellgren, Francesca Woodman, Devenir un ange, traduction du suédois et de l’anglais Marie- Hélène Archambeaud, Stockholm, Éditions Xavier Barral, 2016. 2. Paul Ardenne, L’image Corps, Figures de l’humain dans l’art du XX° siècle, Paris, Éditions du Regard, 2001, p. 77. 3. Cité par Agnès Sire in « Préface », Anna Tellgren, Francesca Woodman, Devenir un ange, op. cit., p. 7. 4. Il s’agit des références du catalogue de l’exposition, Anna Tellgren, Francesca Woodman, Devenir un ange, op. cit. Le même autoportrait, dans la monographie de Francesca Woodman publiée par Actes Sud et la Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain en 1998, est intitulé « Self-portrait at thirteen, Boulder, Colorado, 1972-1975 ». 5. Rosalind Krauss, « Francesca Woodman : Problem Sets » in Bachelors, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England, The MIT Press, « October Books », 2000, p. 162. 6. Ce qui ne sera théorisé que quelques années plus tard par Roland Barthes dans La Chambre claire, qui définit la photographie par le désormais fameux « ça-a-été », ce besoin d’une « chose nécessairement réelle qui a été placée devant l’objectif, faute de quoi il n’y aurait pas de photographie », p. 120. 7. Daniel Vander Gucht, L’expérience photographique de l’art, Retour sur la définition de l’art engagé, Bruxelles, Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2014, p. 19. 8. « […] a young photographer, one who did not take the time to age. » Anca Cristofovici, Touching Surfaces, Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging, Amsterdam, New York, Rodopi, 2008, p. 141. 9. Idem, p. 144. 10. DanielVander Gucht, L’expérience politique de l’art, Retour sur la définition de l’art engagé, op. cit., p. 19. 11. Anna-Karin Palm, « Le corps et ses histoires, quelques réflexions autour des photographies de Francesca Woodman », in Francesca Woodman, Devenir un ange, op. cit., p. 20, c'est moi qui souligne.

RÉSUMÉS

Photography, self-portrait, death, nude, body, politics, feminism

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts Mots-clés : Photographie, autoportrait, mort, nu, corps, politique, féminisme

AUTEUR

JULIETTE MELIA Université Paris-Diderot

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« As good as real » A propos de deux photographies de dioramas présentées dans l’exposition Le grand orchestre des animaux (Fondation Cartier, Paris, Juillet 2016-Janvier 2017)

Camille Joseph

1 L’exposition Le grand orchestre des animaux qui s’est tenue à la Fondation Cartier de juillet 2016 à janvier 2017, était consacrée à l’œuvre bio-acoustique de l’américain Bernie Krause. Tandis que les salles du sous-sol invitaient à une plongée dans les sons enregistrés par Krause, qui fait œuvre de « sauvetage » sonore pour alerter sur l’impact du changement climatique sur la biodiversité, la partie haute de l’exposition livrait un versant visuel de l’ « orchestre » en proposant notamment deux photographies de Hiroshi Sugimoto. « California Condor » (1994) et « Alaskan Wolves » (1994) sont deux grands tirages en noir et blanc (respectivement 120x185cm et 120x210cm) appartenant à la série Dioramas que l’artiste entama dans les années 1970 alors qu’il venait d’arriver à New York.

2 Le diorama, terme inventé par Daguerre en 1822, désigne ici une reconstruction en trois dimensions d’une scène où des animaux, le plus souvent empaillés, sont replacés dans leur milieu naturel. Vitrée, la scène peut faire appel à des éléments de nature réels ou reconstitués (rochers, plantes) et se déroule devant un paysage peint en trompe-l’œil pour donner l’illusion d’une perspective. On attribue la paternité de ces installations au sculpteur et taxidermiste Carl Akeley, que la célébrité conduisit à travailler au début du XXe siècle pour le Musée d’histoire naturelle de New York ou encore le Field Museum de Chicago1. Un autre grand nom des dioramas du musée de New York est Frank Chapman, conservateur et responsable des collections ornithologiques. Ces installations, destinées à provoquer chez le visiteur le sentiment exaltant né de l’expérience d’une nature sauvage et intacte, étaient intimement liées à des objectifs de conservation. Ainsi, le diorama de l’île aux pélicans, créé en 1902, joua un rôle important dans la création de la première réserve fédérale d’oiseaux un an plus tard. Il n’est alors peut-être pas surprenant de retrouver les condors et les loups américains dans l’exposition d’une œuvre dont l’un des ressorts, et pas des moindres, est là encore la préservation de la nature.

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3 Au musée de New York, le développement de dioramas à partir de la fin du XIXe siècle s’accompagne d’une vaste politique d’exploration et d’expansion des collections du musée. Les individus chargés de construire les dioramas étaient envoyés sur le terrain pour collecter les spécimens et peindre les paysages. Empiétant pour ainsi dire sur le territoire des explorateurs et des scientifiques, ces taxidermistes, sculpteurs et préparateurs provoquèrent une crise dans la hiérarchie sociale du musée. En effet, le fantastique succès populaire que rencontrèrent les dioramas à partir des années 1900 assura à ces « petites mains » une reconnaissance nouvelle, au détriment des représentants plus traditionnels – et plus « savants » - de l’institution, les conservateurs. C’est à cette époque en effet que les salaires des préparateurs et des taxidermistes en charge des dioramas augmentèrent de façon remarquable, à la faveur d’un engouement des administrateurs de musée pour ces nouvelles formes « éducatives » de représentation du savoir2. Dans les années 1920, le fossé se creusa à un tel point que les conservateurs et les chercheurs se plaignirent ouvertement de ces inégalités de traitement et critiquèrent au passage les dioramas comme des formes dépassées relevant de modèles dix-neuvièmistes d’une science de la nature désuète fondée sur l’anatomie comparée, et non de la biologie moderne, expérimentale, qu’ils prétendaient incarner3. L’entre-deux-guerres fut ainsi un moment charnière dans l’évolution des fonctions du musée d’histoire naturelle, qui vit l’échelle des valeurs se renverser, les fonctions de vulgarisation prenant le pas sur les objectifs scientifiques. L’éducation populaire se mesurait désormais en termes de statistiques de fréquentation, la priorité étant donnée à des expositions de plus en plus spectaculaires qui pouvaient assurer de généreuses donations de la part des philanthropes de l’institution.

4 Les sciences naturelles n’étaient pas les seules traversées par le débat entre la mission de vulgarisation du musée, dont la dimension économique était loin d’être négligeable, et les objectifs scientifiques. L’anthropologue Franz Boas, qui fut assistant du conservateur des collections d’ethnologie de 1896 à 1905 au Musée d’histoire naturelle de New York, avait lui aussi observé dans son département la même transformation des priorités, qui se traduisait notamment par la réduction des espaces dévolus à la recherche4. Les options d’exposition retenues pour les collections d’ethnologie visaient avant tout, selon Boas, à impressionner le visiteur, qui était sans cesse distrait, incapable d’arrêter le regard et de se concentrer sur un seul objet. Pour l’anthropologue, la mission pédagogique du musée ne pouvait être compatible avec une logique sensationnaliste, dont relevaient en partie les dioramas.

5 Ces tableaux naturalistes, qui utilisaient des mannequins grandeur nature pour représenter un groupe tribal figé dans une activité quelconque, étaient apparus pour la première fois aux États-Unis lors de l’exposition universelle de Chicago en 1893. Boas lui-même avait été chargé par le musée de New York de se rendre sur la côte Nord- Ouest pour y collecter des objets permettant de réaliser, à son retour, un diorama représentant l’initiation du Hamat’sa, l’esprit cannibal de ceux qu’on appelait alors les Kwakiutl. Le format du diorama appliqué aux peuples dits primitifs connut, tout comme les reproductions d’habitats naturels, un succès extraordinaire dans les musées américains, qui n’hésitèrent pas à investir de grandes sommes pour avoir chacun leurs « scènes ». A la Smithsonian, William Holmes, enthousiasmé par les dioramas de Akeley au Field Museum, pensait que les « habitats » humains devaient eux aussi « raconter une histoire, et ce immédiatement, et de la façon la plus séduisante qui soit. »5 Boas lui-

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même n’était pas contre l’idée de pouvoir « transporter » le visiteur dans le village, dans la maison, ou, pour reprendre un terme essentiel dans son appréhension des phénomènes ethnologiques, dans l’environnement des tribus exposées6. Mais l’anthropologue devait admettre que c’était là un vœu pieux, puisque tout – les vitrines, les murs, les escaliers… – rappelait au visiteur qu’il n’était précisément pas en train d’observer un vrai village. L’écart entre le réalisme visé par le diorama et le contexte du musée créait une perturbation trop grande pour que l’effet recherché se produise réellement. Dès lors, Boas préconisait d’abandonner toute tentative de rendre les mannequins réalistes – car ils ne ressembleraient jamais à de vrais hommes, quel que soit le talent du préparateur. Plutôt que de chercher à imiter la nature, le musée devait se ranger du côté des arts plastiques et assumer pleinement sa position. Ainsi, par exemple, la couleur de la peau ne devait être qu’ « approximative » et il était préférable, à la place de vrais cheveux, de les peindre ou d’utiliser des perruques artificielles7.

6 Dans un article de 1907, publié dans la revue Science deux ans après son départ du musée de New York, Boas reprenait le débat là où il l’avait laissé et revenait sur la mission d’instruction d’un grand musée de sciences naturelles. Désormais titulaire de la chaire d’anthropologie à l’université de Columbia, il ne semblait pouvoir se résoudre à abandonner la réflexion sur le rôle éducatif du musée et la place des objets dans le développement de l’anthropologie. Dans un paragraphe, il évoquait précisément le diorama animalier en mettant en garde contre le ravissement pour la pure technique, au détriment de la transmission de la connaissance et du savoir. Prenant l’exemple d’un diorama mettant en scène des mouettes volant au-dessus des vagues, il avertissait que les visiteurs risquaient de s’interroger davantage sur la manière dont étaient suspendus les oiseaux que sur les oiseaux eux-mêmes, sur lesquels ils n’auraient rien appris ou rien retenu une fois sortis du musée. Fascinés par la « ressemblance artificielle » de ces animaux et émerveillés par l’habileté technique des préparateurs du diorama, ils seraient comme les courtisans de l’empereur de Chine du conte d’Andersen, qui préféraient l’automate du rossignol au vrai oiseau8.

7 Si les années 1920 et 1930 représentèrent l’âge d’or du diorama, le développement des magazines en couleur, de la télévision et du film après la guerre eut pour effet de reléguer ces images à une muséographie désuète. Devenus eux-mêmes objets d’exposition, les dioramas du musée de New York sont aujourd’hui des icônes de l’institution. Mais les deux photographies de Sugimoto présentées à Paris reviennent aux origines de la création de ces paysages et interrogent la validité du procédé. Sugimoto explique ainsi que « les animaux empaillés placés devant l’arrière-plan peint ont l’air profondément faux ; mais si on les regarde rapidement avec un œil fermé, (…) ils ont tout à coup l’air très vrai. J’avais trouvé là une manière de regarder le monde comme le fait l’appareil photographique. Quand bien même le sujet serait faux, une fois photographié, c’est comme s’il était vrai. »9 C’est donc parce que ces images « ratées » ont échoué à lui donner le frisson d’une rencontre authentique avec la nature sauvage que Sugimoto a l’idée d’utiliser la photographie pour redonner vie à ces scènes, en raison du pouvoir de représentation réaliste immanquablement associé au médium photographique. Il utilise pour ce faire une chambre et un temps de pose très long, ainsi qu’un cadrage serré éliminant toute trace du contexte muséal. Jouant avec la dimension « fixiste » de l’image photographique, il active ainsi l’illusion que devaient à l’origine produire les dioramas. Sur son site, le musée de New York vante le talent des artistes ayant élaboré ces scènes et explique qu’il participe du réalisme troublant des

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photographies de Sugimoto10. Par un effet de réappropriation, le musée met ainsi en avant la connaissance fine et précise, tant de l’anatomie que du comportement des animaux, des préparateurs, qui permet aux photographies de Sugimoto de renouer avec l’impératif de réalisme d’origine.

8 Tandis que les vitrines créent une distance infranchissable avec la « nature » exposée et, comme la mouette de Boas, ne renvoient finalement qu’à la pure technique, les photographies de Sugimoto provoquent un retour sur le moment de création de ces dioramas et questionnent la rationalité des images « scientifiques ». Le cartel accompagnant les deux œuvres précise que Sugimoto avait été « fasciné par le trouble visuel provoqué par ces reproductions idéalisées des conditions de la vie sauvage », suggérant par là que les scènes recréés sont imprégnées de nos projections sur la vie animale. Ainsi, dans « Alaskan wolves », la meute de loups a le regard tourné vers des élans que l’on devine peu à peu se détachant au loin sur le paysage enneigé peint en trompe-l’œil à l’arrière-plan. Parce que ces loups sont fixés et immortalisés, pour ainsi dire, dans une attitude choisie parmi bien d’autres possibles, on pourrait presque parler ici d’une « naturalisation » de l’instinct de prédation de ces bêtes que le spectateur doit avoir l’illusion d’observer depuis un point de vue privilégié – et sécurisé. Quant aux condors de Californie – qui frôlèrent l’extinction complète à la fin des années 1980 –, ils surplombent un paysage de montagnes et de canyons qui relève de toute une tradition visuelle de l’Ouest américain. Les dioramas s’inscrivent par ailleurs dans une histoire de la photographie naturaliste, à laquelle ils empruntent leur mise en scène : l’animal est montré dans son environnement « naturel » sans aucune intrusion d’éléments humains. Mais la représentation en trois dimensions veut aller plus loin que la photographie puisque même l’humain – en la personne du photographe – y est absent. Cela parachève en quelque sorte le mythe d’une image naturaliste telle qu’il se dessine depuis l’invention de l’affût à la fin du XIXe siècle. Révolutionnant les techniques d’observation, celui-ci a rendu le photographe invisible et donné naissance à un type de photographie entièrement nouveau où l’animal est enfin saisi dans des conditions « absolument naturelles »11.

9 Les photographies de Sugimoto questionnent la dimension profondément artificielle des images produites par et pour les sciences naturelles : « En prenant ces photographies, j’ai été saisi par l’envie de représenter l’histoire naturelle comme une image trompeuse offrant une illusion de réalité.12 » Ses photographies interrogent en effet les rapports de la science avec sa propre représentation, les images qu’elle utilise pour véhiculer le savoir et enfin la mission du musée scientifique13. Ce questionnement n’est pas nouveau puisque, dès le début du siècle, il a existé un débat sur l’articulation entre réalisme et scientificité sur fond de bouleversement des fonctions du musée public aux États-Unis. Les deux photographies de Sugimoto renvoient ainsi à toute une histoire de la muséographie et des liens entre recherche et vulgarisation au sein du musée d’histoire naturelle, qui est aussi celle d’une crise sociologique qui voit les conservateurs et les représentants traditionnels de la science américaine perdre leur prestige et, dès lors, recentrer leur activité au sein des universités où ils s’attacheront désormais à redéfinir les contours épistémologiques des sciences de la nature, leurs pratiques ainsi que leur rapport aux images.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948 - ), Alaskan Wolves, 1994

Lors de l’exposition Le grand orchestre des animaux (Fondation Cartier, Paris, Juillet 2016-Janvier 2017), photographie de l’auteur.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948 - ), California Condor, 1994

Lors de l’exposition Le grand orchestre des animaux (Fondation Cartier, Paris, Juillet 2016-Janvier 2017), photographie de l’auteur.

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NOTES

1. Sur l’histoire des dioramas animaliers aux États-Unis, voir Karen Rader et Victoria Cain, Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014. 2. Victoria Cain, « The art of authority: Exhibit, exhibit-makers, and the contest for scientific status in the American Museum of Natural History, 1920-1940 », Science in Context 24(2), 2011, p. 215-238, ici p. 216. 3. Idem. 4. Sur le rapport de Boas au musée de New York et les raisons de son départ, voir Isabelle Kalinowski, « Franz Boas, le Musée d’Histoire Naturelle de New York et la galerie de Dresde », Revue germanique internationale 21, 2015, p. 113-132. 5. W. Holmes, cité par Marianne Kinkel, Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman, University of Illinois Press, 2011, p. 23-34. 6. « L’objectif avoué d’un grand groupe est de transporter le visiteur dans des environnements étrangers. Il doit voir tout le village et la façon dont les gens vivent. » (Lettre de Franz Boas à Frederic Ward Putnam, 7 novembre 1896, cité par Ira Jacknis, « Franz Boas and Exhibits. On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology », in George W. Stocking (éd.), Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p. 75-111, ici p. 101). 7. I. Jacknis, « Franz Boas and Exhibits », art. cit., p. 102. 8. Franz Boas, « Some Principles of Museum Administration », Science 25, 1907, p. 921-933, ici p. 923. 9. http://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/diorama.html, consulté le 12 décembre 2016. 10. http://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/news-posts/hiroshi-sugimoto-four-decades-of- photographing-dioramas/, consulté le 12 décembre 2016. 11. Frank Chapman, cité par Matthew Brower, Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. 129. Il est intéressant de noter que Frank Chapman, l’un des premiers à avoir développer le diorama au musée de New York (au sein du Whitney Hall of Birds, notamment), fut aussi celui qui proposa le premier une réflexion approfondie sur l’usage de l’affût dans son ouvrage de 1900, Birds Studies with a Camera. 12. Cartel de l’exposition. 13. D’autres commentateurs ont vu dans les photographies de Sugimoto une interrogation plus générale sur les rapports entre art et science, image et texte. Voir par exemple Rachael Z. DeLue, « Art and Science in America », American Art 23(2), 2009, p. 2-9.

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

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AUTEUR

CAMILLE JOSEPH Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis

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Western stories Arles 2016-2017, Les Rencontres de la photographie

Chiara Salari

1 Dans le cadre des Rencontres d’Arles 2016, « Western stories » met l’accent sur la notion d’histoires, pour considérer non seulement la photographie mais aussi les expositions photographiques comme actes fictionnels et espaces imaginaires. Tandis que « Western Camarguais » se présente comme l’épopée de l’appropriation par le cinéma d’une mythologie collective, « Western Colors » offre le récit photographique individuel de Bernard Plossu dans l’Ouest Américain.

2 Les deux expositions montrent respectivement un « raconteur d’histoires » (le photographe en tant qu’explorateur interrogeant tout à la fois l’histoire et le médium à travers la création d’une cosmologie individuelle) et une « rencontre avec l’autre photographie » (avec des images archivées en tant que documents historiques ici « réactivées » pour se prêter au contexte de l’exposition).1

3 « Western stories » reflète ainsi la tendance des Rencontres à l’exploration de l’expansion du médium photographique : de la photographie en tant qu’objet artistique à sa fonction illustrative ou promotionnelle, de la photographie au cinéma, du réel à l’imaginaire et vice-versa.

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Vue de l’exposition “Western Camarguais” aux Rencontres d’Arles 2016 Droits réservés

Vue de l’exposition “Western Camarguais” aux Rencontres d’Arles 2016 Droits réservés

Western Camarguais

4 L’exposition, coproduite avec le Musée de la Camargue et dont les commissaires sont Estelle Rouquette et Sam Stourdzé, est présentée à l'Eglise dominicaine des Frères- Prêcheurs et montre des photographies et des cartes postales, mais aussi des affiches, des objets et des extraits de films. « Les images sont leurs mots »2 : leur changement de

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nature est mis en évidence lorsqu’elles sont utilisées pour retracer l’histoire singulière qui fait du delta du Rhône le décor de nombreux films d’aventure réalisés au cours du XXème siècle.

5 A partir des films des années 1910, où la Camargue joue un rôle de substitut de l’Ouest américain, en passant par les adaptations d’œuvres littéraires d’inspiration régionale des années 1920-1930, où elle est montrée pour elle-même, jusqu’à des productions comme Crin-Blanc ou D’où viens-tu Johnny ? des années 1950-1960, le delta est considéré comme un sanctuaire de traditions provençales et de pratiques ancestrales comme le culte du taureau, et célébré en tant que symbole du triomphe d’une nature vierge.

6 Le XIXème siècle est pour la région une véritable révolution : l’industrialisation de l’agriculture, l’endiguement des terres contre les inondations, l’arrivée de populations étrangères bouleversent les pratiques et le paysage. Ces changements sont dénoncés par les défenseurs d’une Camargue érigée en rempart contre le progrès qu’ils rejettent : des auteurs comme Frederick Mistral, Jean Aicard et plus tard Folco de Baroncelli célèbrent les singularités du territoire.3

7 C’est dans le cadre d’une véritable défense régionale de la Provence-Camargue (qui terminera dans la participation au projet de réserve ou parc naturel régional) et d’un intérêt pour les langues et les cultures provençales que Baroncelli s’installe en 1899 à Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, pour se consacrer à l’élevage des taureaux et des chevaux. Son engagement dans la promotion des usages équestres locaux et sa fascination pour l’Ouest Américain le conduiront à Paris, en 1905, pour assister à une représentation du "Wild West Show" de Buffalo Bill.4

8 Ayant à l’origine l’ambition de proposer l’intégration de gardians camarguais dans ce show (qui accueillait des pratiques équestres de cultures différentes), Baroncelli s’inspire finalement des leurs pratiques, et invite le réalisateur Jean Durand et Joë Hamman (qui travaillait dans l’équipe de Buffalo Bill) à tourner en Camargue une série de films d’aventure. Le village des Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, les gardians et le bétail de la manade Baroncelli participent à de nombreux tournages jusqu’à la guerre en 1914.

9 C’est dans le contexte d’une production qui préparait le terrain à la constitution du western en tant que genre dans les années 1920 que les pionniers du cinéma français ont joué un rôle, sans que l’on puisse affirmer qu’ils aient véritablement « inventé » le genre. Dans les films tournés entre 1909 et 1914, qui représentent la partie la plus intéressante de l’exposition, la Camargue remplace l’Ouest Américain pour ses éléments environnementaux qui donnent à l’écran l’impression d’un univers sauvage et de « frontière » propre du western.

10 La Camargue offre ainsi ses paysages sans fin et son ciel immense, cadre propice aux scénarios, à des films comme Un drame au far West (1909), La prairie en feu (1911), ou à la série Scènes de la vie de l’Ouest américain, où elle joue les rôles de composition, incarnant tour à tour le Nebraska, l’Arizona, ou la réserve indienne de Sioux Falls.5

11 Si l’esprit était régionaliste, l’enjeu de cette entreprise semble être de prouver que la France avait aussi son « Far West », qu’on devrait plutôt dire « Far South » : « La Camargue voit ainsi consacrée son « invention », par Folco de Baroncelli, en tant qu’espace « vierge », nature à l’état natif, conservatoire des us et coutumes remontant à la nuit des temps, y compris par la restauration de la pureté de la race de ses taureaux et de ses chevaux »6.

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12 Comme le Far West, la Camargue en tant que terre sauvage est donc une invention culturelle, et le cinéma a pris une part décisive dans sa popularisation.

Vue de l’exposition “Western Camarguais” aux Rencontres d’Arles 2016 Droits réservés

Western Colors

13 Quand Bernard Plossu arrive au Nouveau-Mexique au milieu des années 1960, il retrouve les paysages qui avaient marqué son imaginaire lorsqu’il était enfant et qu’il allait au cinéma le dimanche après-midi, à Paris, voir les westerns de Peckinpah ou Aldrich.

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Vue de l’exposition “Western Stories” aux Rencontres d’Arles 2016 Droits réservés

Vue de l’exposition “Western Stories” aux Rencontres d’Arles 2016 Droits réservés

14 L’exposition, en salle Henri Comte, présente des tirages Fresson (un procédé au carbone qui dérive des premières recherches en chimie photographique) d’une sélection de photographies prises lors des voyages en voiture ou des randonnées qu'il effectue jusqu'en 1985 (date de son retour en France) dans le Nevada, le Nouveau-Mexique, l'Arizona, l'Utah, la Californie.

15 Il faut s'approcher des tirages : on est alors tout de suite saisi par le rendu des matières la texture du papier, où se donne presque à voir « l’épaisseur du temps ». L’aspect

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onirique des images épouse l’imagerie mythique de l’Ouest pour montrer une Amérique déglinguée, balayée par la poussière et le vent : motels et rodéos, déserts et églises isolées, routes et véhicules, câbles téléphoniques et pancartes politiques.

16 La première série montre simplement la route, comme pour souligner l’attrait photographique de la vie nomade pour des générations de photographes américains et européens. Considéré autrefois le « plus américain » des français par le photographe américain Lewis Baltz, Plossu n’a d’ailleurs « jamais abandonné l’Europe ni la tradition photographique française, il a, plutôt, ajouté un monde au monde qui lui appartenait de naissance »7.

17 Plossu dit ainsi, à propos de ces photos, qu’il y retrouve les couleurs de Breughel, et que la focale utilisée (l’objectif 50mm) est la plus proche de la vision de Corot, capable d’exprimer des émotions directes en accord avec son état d’âme. Si cette focale, qui n’entraîne pas la déformation du grand-angle ni l’écrasement des perspectives du téléobjectif peut donc être considérée comme l’extension naturelle de son œil, son appareil Nikkormat est l’extension naturelle de sa main : « Je m'en fous de la profondeur de champ, j'aime que ça aille vite. Je vois les photos avant de les faire »8.

18 Son petit appareil de tradition européenne lui permet de se passer de l’étape de la prévisualisation propre aux appareils grand format de tradition américaine, et pour lui permettre ainsi de gagner en mobilité. A la tradition des paysages sublimes et des larges images, Plossu préfère des rencontres avec la réalité immédiate qui lui permettent d’être en même temps observateur et protagoniste (comme l’était Robert Frank). Il développe ainsi une pratique intuitive et spontanée, qui cherche l’émotion plutôt que l’essence des lieux et des situations, et qu’il articule autour de sensations et d’impressions, ce qui donne une forte qualité autobiographique à ses images.

19 Ses photos du Nouveau Mexique ne sont pas un reportage en tant que tel, mais plutôt un ensemble de photographies du pays qu’il habite et dont il est habité. Il construit ainsi ses photographies à partir des impressions données par sa propre culture, mais aussi à partir d’images produites par d’autres. La réalité se fait alors en quelque sorte un palimpseste d’images (de photographes tels que Strand, Weston, Adams, Caponigro, Giplin, Cartier-Bresson, Frank, Friedlander, O’Keeffe) qui créent une géographie photographique précise à partir de la qualité photogénique des lieux et des signes iconiques, en particulier au Nouveau Mexique, qui se distingue par son abondance de signes culturels.

20 Pour ne pas se limiter à faire écho aux œuvres de ses grands prédécesseurs, le défi consiste alors pour Plossu à s’approprier la réalité et construire sa propre vision à partir de cette unique relation entre lieux imaginaires et géographiques, là où s’efface la qualité poétique et onirique des noms si chère à Proust9.

21 L’évocation du simple nom d’une ville ne suffit plus à imaginer toutes sortes de paysages enchanteurs : en s’éloignant de l’imaginaire cinématographique de l’Ouest tel que représenté dans les westerns de son enfance, pour gagner une progressive familiarité avec les paysages réels du Nouveau Mexique, Plossu se retrouve à la fois séparé de ses origines et confronté à sa culture.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

AA.VV., Bernard Plossu’s New Mexico, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2006

Plossu, Bernard, Western Colors, éditions Textuel, Paris, 2016

Plossu, Bernard, et Saporta, Marc, Go West, Chêne, Paris, 1976

Rouquette, Estelle, et Stourdzé, Sam, Western Camarguais, Actes Sud, Arles, 2016

NOTES

1. https://www.rencontres-arles.com/CS.aspx? VP3=CMS3&VF=ARLAR1_460_VForm&FRM=Frame:ARLAR1_463 2. Stourdzé, Sam, https://www.rencontres-arles.com/C.aspx? VP3=CMS3&VF=ARLAR1_460_VForm&FRM=Frame:ARLAR1_463. 3. Marchis-Mouren, Laure – Roquette, Estelle, Wild South Camargue dans Western Camarguais, Actes Sud, Arles, 2016, p. 16. 4. William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) évoque ses aventures de jeunesse en tant que « Pony express rider », scout de l’armée et chasseur de bisons dans une représentation spectaculaire et héroïque de la conquête et du « drame de la civilisation ». Ce « traveling show, » qui de 1883 à 1913 transporta la vision romantique de l’Ouest Américain en Amérique et en Europe, était connu en France depuis l’exposition universelle de Paris en 1889, et servira d’inspiration à plusieurs scènes de western. 5. Bernard Bastide, Coeur Weestern: Joë Hamman et Jean Durand, dans Western Camarguais, Actes Sud, Arles, 2016, p. 50. 6. François Amy de la Bretèque, Le paysage de la Camargue dans le western français : un rôle discret, dans Western Camarguais, Actes Sud, Arles, 2016, p. 112. 7. Lewis Batz cité dans Plossu, Bernard, Western Colors, éditions Textuel, Paris, 2016. 8. http://www.focus-numerique.com/test-3434/interview-rencontre-bernard-plossu- arles-2016-1.html 9. Proust insiste sur la puissance évocatrice des mots dans la troisième partie (Noms de pays: le nom) du premier volume (Du côté de chez Swann) de son œuvre A la Recherche du temps perdu.

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

AUTEUR

CHIARA SALARI Université Paris Diderot

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“For the benefit and enjoyment of the people”: from wilderness icons to National Geographic’s bear’s-eye views on the occasion of the National Park Service's 100th anniversary

Chiara Salari

1 On August 25, 2016 the National Park Service celebrated a hundred years of managing and protecting the United States National Park System, which is made up of 59 national parks, but also includes recreation areas, national lakeshores, national monuments, national battlefields, scenic trails and other protected landscapes for a total of 412 units of wild nature, history and sacred sites. Today, the National Park System embraces vast preserved areas in the West from the iconic Yellowstone and Yosemite to the instantly recognizable Grand Canyon and deserts as different as Death Valley and Joshua Tree, as well as "parks for the people where the people are”, such as the Golden Gate recreation area near San Francisco or the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington D.C. Together, they form an essential part of the American experience.

2 Preserved national areas mean different things to different people. On the occasion of this 100th anniversary, the online platform “find your park” (http:// findyourpark.com/) helps to personalize one’s own experience and allows people to share images and stories to support the parks , while the National Parks Service website (https://www.nps.gov/index.htm) proposes events and activities: recreation, conservation, and historic preservation programs like ranger talks and walks, special hikes, landscape photography exhibitions, movie screenings, and theatrical or musical performances.

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Homepage of the website “Find your park”

3 “Join the celebration to explore, learn, discover, be inspired, or simply have fun”. This call reflects the recreational impulse at the origin of the park preservation movement: Yosemite Valley was set aside in 1864 as “a park for public use, resort and recreation”, and the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, was established in 1872 as a “public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people”. Other preservation acts followed, but in 1912 parks were visited by a mere fraction of their owners, the “American people”. The National Park Service was established in 1916 by the Department of the Interior to respond to the administrative chaos, stating that « the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments, and reservations… is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations”1.

4 Parks are both to be used and preserved, in the present and for the future. A new concept of government administration of natural scenery as heritage was born, along with the recognition of the effects of the scenery on the “enjoyment of mankind”. Recreation2 and health3 , but also heritage4, patriotism5 and economics are at the basis of the creation and preservation of the national parks as “natural antiquities”, as American wilderness wonders opposed to European castles and cathedrals. Indeed, according to the former National Park Service director Horace M. Albright, the general functions of the parks included the development of citizens' physical and mental health, their interest in outdoor life, and their knowledge of wild animals and natural history, but also the development of national patriotism, and the diversion of tourist travel from foreign countries in order to retain the money spent by American tourists abroad in the country.

5 Paintings, photographs, maps and videos are used to promote, document or substitute the national parks experience. This article will explore this communicative role but also the images' political power in creating and preserving protected landscapes, in particular through photography for its realistic effect and National Geographic magazine for its iconic status.

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National parks and visual culture

6 Yellowstone was a harsh wild place in the popular imagination before the artist Thomas Moran and the photographer William Henry Jackson brought back pictorial records from the Hayden expedition in 1871.6 Reaching the popular press and presented to Congress, Jackson’s photographs were proof that what the artist (Moran) was showing really existed, and they are said to have influenced the vote on the passage of the National Park Bill in 1872.

7 Images of the American landscape have been linked with politics of the land from the beginning, and the genesis of parks with the rise of tourism: Yellowstone’s paintings and photographs helped eastern audiences to picture the marvels of the West and the drama of its exploration, while in 1869 Powell's Grand Canyon expedition book fired up the public’s imagination; the “Yosemite book” (1869), with photographs by Charleton Watkins, represented one of the first economic exploitations of the picturesque, and in 1890 John Muir's articles for preserving Yosemite as a national park were filled with illustrations.

8 In particular, the link between natural heritage management and photographic politics is visible in the work of the photographer Ansel Adams from the 1930s and in the Sierra Club exhibit format series of the 1950s and '60s. They offer a “best general view” of national parks, developing the strategy of using untouched beauty as an incentive to conservation, in the conviction that making people understand beauty is the first step towards preserving it. Photography played a major role in the fight between conservationists and preservationists, the former defending a wise use or planned development of resources (following the ideas of the forester and politician Gifford Pinchot), and the latter responding with a rejection of utilitarianism and advocating nature unaltered by man (following the environmental writer and philosopher Muir).

9 There are two moments in 20th century environmental history that can be taken as examples: the failure in preventing the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite (1913), and the Echo Park victory in stopping the Colorado River storage project in Dinosaur National Monument in the 1950s. Considered as the wilderness movement’s “finest hour to that date”, the Echo Park dam block was a test case for the changing public opinion about the conservation issue. Although the Hetch Hetchy fight used essays and photographs to support its cause , Echo Park supporters used David Brower’s photographs of Hetch Hetchy Valley “then and now” and some audiovisual materials as a negative example . The same combination of words, photographs and films would be used during the Rampart Dam controversy in Alaska (1950s), and in preventing the damming of Colorado's Glen Canyon (the Sierra Club devoted an exhibit format series to it in 1963, François Leydet’s color photographs of the Grand Canyon in 1964 and some film showings). Photography still plays a major role today in many environmental organizations, which use images pristine landscapes, books and films as vehicle for politics.

10 While images have been used as political weapons (to stimulate or prevent action) by environmentalists and artists, private and governmental institutions have also made use of them for promotional purposes. For example, railroad companies have always been interested in the tourist appeal of national parks, as shown in the 1884 Northern Pacific Railroad's travel brochure entitled “Alice’s Adventures in the New Wonderland” or in the Great North West's 1900-1916 “See America First” campaign .

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11 In 1938, the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration asked artists to create National Park posters, inviting Americans to experience “all day hikes, nature walks, and campfire programs.” The WPA posters’ iconic look and timeless mission inspired Max Slavkin and Aaron Perry-Zucker (co-founders of Creative Action Network) to reinvent not just the national park poster series, but also the concept behind the WPA itself: from the idea of an organizing force putting artists to work for the public good we move to a combination of grassroots organizing techniques with the Internet’s ability to connect people in different places. “See America” is a contemporary project that invites artists and designers from all 50 states to create a new collection of posters celebrating U.S. landmarks, hoping to continue to do what many generations of artistic and conservationist collaborations have done: encourage a new generation to embrace the parks and the job of creating new parks.7

National Geographic post-iconographic

12 National Geographic magazine celebrated this 100th anniversary with special articles, issues, and multimedia projects, confirming the support it has provided to the National Parks since some copies of the April 1916 issue covering a trip to the Sierra Nevada were given to members of Congress. Almost five months later, the federal law establishing the National Park Service passed, and a unique cooperation with the National Geographic Society only one year after, led to the appropriation from private owners of the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park.8

13 Later in the century, National Geographic sponsored an ecological survey of California’s coastal redwoods that, in 1968, would be set aside as the Redwood National Park by President Johnson (It is said that he exclaimed, “Look at this monster… it must be saved!” on a huge National Geographic photograph of one of the world’s tallest living things). From the preservation to the promotion of national parks, the collaboration between National Geographic and the National Park Service will continue, for example, with the production of national parks guides or special audiovisual programs.

14 With “the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge” as its mission, National Geographic evolved from a scientific specialists' journal (founded in 1888) to a commonplace item in ordinary American households, medical waiting rooms and schools, bringing distant images to the most intimate local spaces and becoming an influential American institution. National Geographic's “view of the world” (represented by the yellow bordered cover as “a window on the world”) has been criticized as a Western and Imperialist viewpoint that is absorbed uncritically by its readers .9 But a study of the varieties of spectatorship and the rituals of readership has revealed readers’ attentiveness and readiness for critical debate (so that the yellow frame would be more mediating rather than controlling)10, as well as a variety of imaginative appropriations of the magazine as a textbook or guidebook, an object to display or collect, an invitation to travel, or a substitution for travelling. Both cosmopolitan and middle American, mainstream and exclusive, a product of the progressive era and an expression of Victorian values, the magazine managed to combine professional and amateur and high and low culture. It is today a popular icon but also a generator of icons or iconic types, partly thanks to its success in using photography to blend the art of storytelling and objective science, aesthetic sensitivity and journalistic objectivity, and realistic and romantic dimensions.

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15 As for the coverage of the national parks, National Geographic has often perpetuated romantic stereotypes, for example that of picturesque nature photography (American wilderness images as ceremonial objects) or the photographer in the field as a hero (a professional adventurer seeking memorable views). But it seems that the idea of photographs as secular icons and the possibility of experiencing a “romance of the real” through the photographer's lens are being challenged by technological innovations and the consequent (supposed) democratization in seeing, creating and diffusing images. In 1981, the president editor of National Geographic Melville Bell Grosvenor still distinguished between photographs “made for publication” by professional photographers and amateur photographs “made to preserve memories” 11, while today members are asked to share their favorite views of national parks on “yourshot.ngm.com” (and not just of grand landscapes but also of daily life, people and animals). Another example is the one-year trip to visit all 59 national parks that was undertaken by National Geographic photographer Jonathan Irish12 , as well as by the “ordinary couple” Elizabeth and Cole Donelson (with careers in teaching and health care IT) 13: both stories have had the same space and type of coverage in the magazine.

16 While these recent examples show the rapprochement between professional and amateur photography, the photographer Stephen Wilkes reverses the idea of the wilderness icon with his composed vistas of national parks that were featured in the January 2016 issue of National Geographic. He realized the dream of “compressing the best parts of a day and night into a single photograph”, making a seamless composite image of spectacular scenery and magical moments for people. For his Yosemite vista he took 1035 photos over 26 hours, then digitally combined the images to make the panorama; for Old Faithful in Yellowstone he made 2625 images, then put both sunrise and moonrise into a composite; for the Grand Canyon Desert View Watchtower he took 2282 photos over 27 hours and said that “the tourist put into perspective just how big the canyon is”.14

17 “One of the duties of the National Park Service,” Albright wrote in 1929, “is to present wild life ‘as a spectacle.’”15

18 Starting from the 70s a growing awareness in ecology and the pressure of the environmental groups have changed the priorities from human recreation to wildness preservation (from anthropocentrism to biocentrism), and today’s new concerns about the Anthropocene and the climate change bring a new light to the importance of preserving entire ecosystems (like the “Greater Yellowstone System”) rather than parts of landscape, and to consider the interconnectedness of wildlife and wildness.

19 To know more about the eating habits and habitat use of bears some experts attached special cameras to the tracking collars of two grizzlies and two black bears in Yellowstone: this will give biologists a bear's-eye perspective they didn't have before, 20 seconds at a time, and a basis of comparison to see how bears might shift their diet as the climate changes.

20 “For the first time, trek into the wild backcountry of America's first national park and see what it looks like from a bear's point of view”. The project has been published on the National Geographic website, in the form of a platform that allows and invites to choose a bear and an itinerary through maps, drawings, photographs and videos.16

21 From science to vicarious travel through art: “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people”.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

AA.VV., Images of the world. Photography at the National Geographic, National Geographic, 1981

AA.VV., Our big trees saved, National Geographic, January 1917

AA.VV., The New America’s Wonderlands. Our National Parks, National Geographic, 1975

AA.VV., The power of the parks. A yearlong celebration of our common ground, National Geographic, January 2016

AA.VV., Yellowstone. The battle for the American West, National Geographic, May 2016

Adams, Ansel – Newhall, Nancy, This is the American Earth, Sierra Club, San Francisco, 1968

Garrett, W. E., Grand Canyon, National Geographic, July 1978

Grosvenor, Melville Bell, Today and Tomorrow in Our National Parks, National Geographic, July 1966

Hawkins, Stephanie L., American Iconographic. National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville and London, 2010

Heacox, Kim, The national parks. An illustrated history, National Geographic, Washington, 2015

Mitchell, Elliott, A New National Park, National Geographic, March 1910

Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), Yale University Press, Fifth edition, New Haven and London, 2014

Wirth, Conrad L., Heritage of Beauty and History, National Geographic, May 1958

NOTES

1. Quoted in Grosvenor, Melville Bell, Today and Tomorrow in Our National Parks, National Geographic, July 1966. 2. “The nation that leads the world in feverish business activity requires playgrounds as well as workshops”, George Otis Smith quoted in Mitchell, Elliott, A New National Park, National Geographic, March 1910. 3. Nature’s healing and renewal powers, since the Greek concept of a “fifth essence”, are celebrated by philosophers and psychologists as antidotes to modern life. The National Park Service director Conrad L. Wirth said that national parks have the power to “strengthen bodies, refresh minds, uplift the spirits… enrich leisure”, in The New America’s Wonderlands. Our National Parks, National Geographic, 1975. 4. “You own this national park. This is part of your heritage as Americans.”, David Vela quoted in Ouammen, David, Yellowstone's Future Hangs on a Question: Who Owns the West?, http:// www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/05/. 5. The national park system is considered as a uniquely American idea, “something never before tested in the arch of human history” that will be copied by nations all over the world, said Kim Heacox in The national parks. An Illustrated History, National Geographic, 2015. 6. AA.VV., Yellowstone. The battle for the American West, National Geographic, May 2016. 7. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/features/20-twentysomethings-in-national- parks/see-america-art-and-activism/. 8. AA.VV., Our big trees saved, National Geographic, January 1917.

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9. Some references are the 1993 study of Lutz, Catherine A. – Collins, Jane L., Reading National Geographic Rothenberg, and the more recent (2007) Tamar Y., Presenting America’s World. Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888-1945. 10. Hawkins, Stephanie L., American Iconographic. National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville and London, 2010. 11. AA.VV., Images of the world. Photography at the National Geographic, National Geographic, 1981. 12. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/features/20-twentysomethings-in-national- parks/elizabeth-and-cole-donelson-national-parks-tour/. 13. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/travel-interests/active-and-adventure/pictures- national-parks-road-trip/59-national-parks-52-weeks/. 14. AA.VV., The power of the parks. A yearlong celebration of our common ground, National Geographic. January 2016 15. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/05/ 16. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/05/yellowstone-national-parks-bears- video/

INDEX

Subjects: Trans’Arts

AUTHOR

CHIARA SALARI Université Paris-Diderot

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Review of Méliès to 3D: the Cinema Machine exhibition at the Cinémathèque de Paris (October 5th-January 29th, 2017)

David Lipson

1 The title might lead one to believe the exhibit is about cinematic pioneers like Méliès, D.W. Griffith and Serguei Eisenstein among others, but except for a part dedicated to Méliès at the beginning they are nowhere to be found. Neither is it about famous historic cinema actors like Gloria Swanson, Marlon Brando or Elizabeth Taylor to name but a few. The true stars of the exhibit go by the name of Mitchell BNC, Bell and Howell and Todd-AO. We learn about Technicolor, Cinemascope and the Vitaphone projector. Here, the history and evolution of cinema are shown through the lens of the machines and technology that made the filmmaking process possible. Indeed, the exhibit, with over 300 pieces on display, is replete with machines, devices, contraptions of all sorts related to the seventh art. This exhibition, the first of its kind linking technique and esthetics in cinema1, can be traced back to the Will Day collection exhibited at the Science Museum of London in 1922, which was later sold to Henri Langlois and the Cinemathèque of Paris in 19592.

2 The exhibit begins with an initial narrow corridor lined with old posters from France, the USA and Russia, leading up to the aforementioned Méliès excerpts and camera display. The hallway continues turning on itself and leading in the opposite direction, lined with still more posters and antique cinematic paraphernalia such as an old Pathé Gaumont 1930 clock from London or a Belgium Ciné neon sign dating back to 1950. In this second corridor, the transparent glass wall on the left gives us a glimpse of the pièce de resistance where all the action is taking place. This impression is immediately confirmed when one comes to the end of the second corridor and enters a large rectangular room where the eye is immediately overloaded by several different items that compete for attention.

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3 Perhaps in an effort to mimic modern day media oversaturation, there are non-stop cinematic projections on numerous screens, with two TVs displaying looped excerpts as well. The two long sides of the rectangular room are linked by four individual bridge- like zones that likewise contain nonstop projections. In full center stage of the room, large old-model projectors preside over the myriad excerpts playing. At the back of the room—if you are going forward from the hall—are fragments of film indicating in great detail all the technical possibilities that the film reel can provide. The left-hand side of the exhibit tells the story of the birth of cinema. Here we find Edison’s kinetoscope as well as other bizarre obscure machines from yesteryear. The right-hand side of the room tells the story of the silent film era and as you move forward, a projection of the Jazz Singer lies with the original speakers hidden in a deep alcove as the exhibit proceeds into the talkie era. The back of the room is devoted to modern techniques like 3D and virtual reality.

4 Just in front of the cinema fragments at the back of the room, is a huge projector designed especially for this exhibition—so the guide told us—in order to show a 10- minute excerpt of Le mépris nonstop. The machine, open on one side, reveals its inner workings as the reel winds its way through the apparatus. It reminded me of the anatomy exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, showing the human body cut open on one side, displaying the inner anatomy of the human body. In fact, the whole exhibition had this Museum of Science-type feel to it. The show laid bare all the technical details of every aspect of filmmaking: the camera, the sound, the lighting, the evolution of different techniques, Cinerama, technicolor and 3D. It also vaguely reminded me of another Chicago museum: the Field Museum of Natural History with its stuffed animals and reconstructed dinosaur skeletons here represented by huge ancient long-forgotten film devices.

5 One of the more innovative aspects of the exhibit could be found in the back right-hand corner of the big rectangular room. I spotted several people sporting nifty cardboard virtual reality-style head fixtures and wearing headsets. These zombie-like individuals were moving their heads left to right, while standing on a carpet in a small area in front of the back exhibition stand. There were two hosts handing out and explaining these special devices. I went and tried one myself and learned that it could be powered by one’s own cell phone by connecting up to youtube and choosing the correct cinematograph file3. A truly rich 360-degree visual story of the history of cinema followed. Not only could lateral head movements allow you to see all around you, but moving your head up and down also enlarged your field of vision to see above and below the action on the screen. The name of the device is called “Google Cardboard”.

6 Despite the rich educational experience, this exhibit is not without criticism. At the end, there is a T-shirt with a series of pictures of Eadweard Muybridge’s galloping horse printed on it. Why put this T-shirt at the end of the exhibition, taking into account the chronological nature of the exhibition and that Muybridge did his experiments in 1878 (wrongly attributed as 1886 on the T-shirt)? Indeed, Sallie Gardner at a Gallop is considered by some to be one of the earliest silent films4. In the birth of the cinema section, Jules Marey, who did similar experiments in animated photography in 1882, is mentioned. When I asked the guide about this oversight, she simply replied “Marey is French, Muybridge is English”. Of course, to be totally fair, Muybridge is not the only one left out, there is no mention of Christiaan Huygen’s magic lantern, Joseph Plateau’s zoetrope or John Barnes Linett’s flip book, either. Another criticism is the unorthodox

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visit route to follow the numbers of the exhibition. “1. The birth of cinema” was at the back of the main room on the left, then “2. The silent film era” was on the other side on the right opposite. Interestingly enough, the guide did not follow this route but instead chose a more spatial-logic approach starting at the back and moving along the walls, instead of undertaking a crisscross route inside the main room. There is no audio guide, so the exhibit-goers not fortunate enough to be present when the “conférencier” was there to guide them would have a harder time understanding the logic and educational aspect of the exhibit. As I mentioned at the beginning, the title is also not clear. “Du kinétoscope à la 3D : la machine cinéma” certainly would have been more fitting, albeit not as commercially appealing as “De Méliès à la 3D : la machine cinéma”.

7 Despite these minor flaws, all in all, it was for me, someone already familiar with the history of cinema, an enjoyable and enriching experience. Indeed, the excerpts projected showcased iconic and groundbreaking moments in filmmaking history, such as the famous two-minute sequence of sound from the Jazz Singer, Dziga Vertov’s masterpiece The Man with the Movie Camera, and his use of the reflexive documentary mode, Jean-Luc Godard’s Le mépris, where we see the Mitchell camera in action on a film set with his cinematographer, to name but a few. The guided tour was definitely of interest as well. We learned all sorts of interesting fun facts about the exhibition and the history of the filmmaking process: the guide showed us a manual camera and demonstrated the speed needed to film correctly (two turns per second), and told us that 90% of silent films were burnt and recycled. She also showed us the first TV that was made in 1926, an alien-looking contraption that nobody would identify as a TV if not for the inscription “Televisor” on top of it. It is for these reasons that I highly recommend the exhibition as the novice, the amateur and the cinematic scholar will all find something of interest for the reasonable price of 11 euros (free for children under 6).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cinémathèque française (La), KINOSCOPE – un voyage en Cinéma et en Réalité Virtuelle, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nXWcWxxlE0 (last accessed on October 31st, 2016)

GARSON, Charlotte, « Le journal l’accrochage » Cahiers du Cinéma, May 2005, https:// www.cahiersducinema.com/Journal-Le-grand-accrochage.html (last accessed on October 31st, 2016)

MANNONI, Laurent, « La Machine Cinéma – Conférence de Laurent Mannoni », http:// www.cinematheque.fr/cycle/de-Méliès-a-la-3d-la-machine-cinema-356.html (last accessed on October 31st, 2016)

SANFORD, John, “Cantor Exhibit Showcases Motion-Study photography” The Stanford Report, February 12, 2003, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2003/february12/muybridge-212.html (last accessed on October 31st, 2016)

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NOTES

1. Laurent Mannoni, La Machine Cinéma – Conférence de Laurent Mannoni, http:// www.cinematheque.fr/cycle/de-melies-a-la-3d-la-machine-cinema-356.html (last accessed on October 31st, 2016) 2. Charlotte Garson, “Le journal l’accrochage” Cahiers du Cinéma, May 2005, https:// www.cahiersducinema.com/Journal-Le-grand-accrochage.html (last accessed on October 31 st, 2016) 3. La cinématheque française, KINOSCOPE – un voyage en Cinéma et en Réalité Virtuelle https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nXWcWxxlE0 (last accessed on October 31st, 2016) 4. John Sanford, “Cantor Exhibit Showcases Motion-Study photography” The Stanford Report, February 12, 2003, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2003/february12/muybridge-212.html (last accessed on October 31st, 2016)

ABSTRACTS

The exhibition delves into the history and evolution of cinema, shown through the lens of the machines and technology that made the filmmaking process possible. It reveals how technological progress brought about new forms, and conversely, how esthetic pursuit—the desire to see new images—gave birth to new devices and techniques. http:// www.cinematheque.fr/cycle/de-Méliès-a-la-3d-la-machine-cinema-356.html.

L’exposition explore les grandes étapes de l’histoire du cinéma, à travers le prisme des machines et la technologie qui l’a rendu possible. On verra comment la technique engendre des formes inédites, et réciproquement, comment la recherche esthétique – le désir de voir de nouvelles images – donne naissance à de nouveaux appareils ou procédés. http://www.cinematheque.fr/ cycle/de-Méliès-a-la-3d-la-machine-cinema-356.html.

INDEX

Subjects: Trans’Arts Keywords: Exhibition, film history, cinematic apparatus, filmmaking techniques, Cinémathèque de Paris Mots-clés: Exposition, histoire du cinéma, appareil cinématographique, procédés cinématographiques, Cinémathèque de Paris

AUTHOR

DAVID LIPSON Paris Sud

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Passion Patchwork : l'étoffe de l'Amérique

Adélaïde Desnoé

1 Lors de la première exposition de la saison 2016-2017 d’Art Hop Polis, le rendez-vous culturel « inter-maisons » de la Cité internationale, les quilts de la collection de Charles- Edouard de Broin ont fait l’objet de deux expositions successives, exposées aux cimaises de la galerie de la Fondation des Etats-Unis. Ces expositions inédites sont un hommage au patchwork américain, dont une formidable sélection a été proposée aux visiteurs.

2 Géraldine Chouard, Professeure à l’Université Paris-Dauphine, Directrice du groupe de recherches HIMAN (Histoire des Images en Amérique du Nord), au sein du LARCA (UMR 8225) à l’Université Paris-Diderot, spécialiste de patchwork et commissaire des expositions, et Charles-Edouard de Broin, collectionneur de quilts et passionné d’art populaire partagent ici leur passion commune. Retour sur une pratique très florissante aux Etats-Unis, depuis toujours, et pourtant encore relativement peu connue en France.

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Fig. 1 : Géraldine Chouard et Charles-Edouard de Broin, Fondation des Etats-Unis, Vernissage de l’exposition « Le fil de la désobéissance : les Crazy Quilts », 5 novembre 2016

© Philippe Lissac

Adélaïde Desnoé [A. D.] : Question de lexique pour commencer, quelle est votre définition du quilt ? Ch-E. de Broin : Le terme « quilt » fait référence au procédé de matelassage du tissu par des points de couture qui le rendent plus solide et plus confortable. Conçu à l’origine comme un simple objet utilitaire, le quilt est peu à peu devenu un objet d'art, qui s’affiche aujourd’hui aux cimaises des musées comme un tableau. G. Chouard : Le patchwork (littéralement : patch-work) désigne la pratique, c’est-à- dire l’art de mettre ensemble des morceaux de tissu. La prononciation du mot « quilt » est importante : il ne s’agit pas de « kilt », comme on l’entend parfois, qui renvoie à une autre culture. En français, on préfère utiliser le terme « patchwork », ce qui simplifie les choses.

A. D.: D’où est venu votre intérêt pour les quilts? Ch-E. de Broin : Comme une rencontre amoureuse. C’était en 1985 à Houston, au Texas, lors d'un séjour inhérent à mon métier de géophysicien. Une précédente expatriation avait suscité chez moi une vive curiosité pour l’art populaire des Etats- Unis. Et je m'intéressais par ailleurs, depuis longtemps, aux ouvrages textiles, ayant collectionné et brodé moi-même des abécédaires. Et c’est là que j'ai découvert ces assemblages bariolés, ordonnés autant que fantaisistes, composés à partir de tissus de récupération, presque toujours chargés d’histoire. Il faut rappeler que le quilt est parfois le seul bien qu’emportaient les pionniers au moment de quitter une Europe famélique ou en guerre pour rejoindre le Nouveau Monde. Ces objets d'art populaire si simples, si utiles et si beaux m'ont immédiatement séduit.

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Fig. 2 : Charles-Edouard de Broin, devant « Crazy Quilt, From Mollie », New York Co, 1901 (158 x 210 cm) © Adélaïde Desnoé

G. Chouard : De mon côté, mon intérêt, qui remonte déjà à plus d’une vingtaine d’années, vient de la littérature. Du texte, je suis passée à l’image, puis de l’image à la chose. Dans la fiction américaine, il est souvent question de patchwork. Par exemple, dans un roman d’Eudora Welty, Losing Battles (1970), l’intrigue est centrée autour d’un certain quilt au nom de Delectable Mountains (modèle assez rare, dont l’exposition comporte un exemplaire).

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Fig. 3 : « Delectable Mountains », South Carolina 1890 (detail), (193 x 210 cm) © Géraldine Chouard

J’ai donc souhaité en savoir davantage. Mon premier contact avec le patchwork américain est lié à la consulation d’encyclopédies, de livres illustrés, d’ouvrages d’histoire. Je cherchais à retrouver visuellement le patchwork. En lisant cette vaste littérature, j’ai alors compris que la pratique américaine avait un lien très fort avec la vie sociale et culturelle des Etats-Unis, qu’elle était très différente de la tradition du patchwork français qui est importante, certes, mais plutôt décorative. Je n’ai depuis plus lâché le fil. Ch-E. de Broin : Il est vrai que c’est une passion qui ne vous lâche pas ! Cela fait maintenant plus de trente ans que je suis collectionneur de quilts. Mon goût a beaucoup évolué au fil du temps. Si c’est la qualité graphique de cet art textile qui a d’abord attiré mon regard, leur contenu historique a vite pris le relai, venant ajouter à leur valeur esthétique. Car chaque quilt a une histoire (individuelle, collective, nationale), qu’il faut constituer, ou reconstituer. J’ai monté cette collection en l’accompagnant d’un catalogue raisonné où chaque quilt est répertorié avec autant d’informations qu’il m’a été possible de rassembler : date, auteur, nom du modèle, circonstances de l’exécution. Quand un quilt ne possède aucun de ces éléments, il est parfois possible de le dater grâce à son modèle (« pattern »), mais aussi grâce à certains tissus, suivant le titre d’un ouvrage d’une experte du patchwork, Barbara Brackman, Clues in the Calico: A Guide to Identifying and Dating Antique Quilts (1997). On finit par voir tout quilt comme une énigme à résoudre.

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Fig. 4 : Quelques spécimens de la collection de Charles-Edouard de Broin

© Géraldine Chouard

A. D. : Voyez-vous les quilts comme des objets utilitaires ou comme des œuvres d’art ? Ch-E. de Broin : Il m’est impossible désormais, en partie pour les raisons que je viens d’indiquer, de faire la distinction. Et c’est précisément cette combinaison qui m’intéresse. Un quilt rustique, ou en très mauvais état, peut être une œuvre d'art. Tout dépend de la manière de le voir.

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Fig. 5 : « Crazy Quilt: from Mollie », New York, 1901 (détail), (158 x 210 cm)

© Géraldine Chouard

Fig. 6 : « Crazy Quilt, Literary Ladies », New York, 1898 (détail), (100 x 116 cm)

© Géraldine Chouard

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AD : Quel est le lien spécifique entre l’Amérique et le patchwork ? G. Chouard : C’est une vaste question ! Cette pratique de seconde main, commence dès la période coloniale et scande l'avancée de la nation jusqu'à la période contemporaine, sans interruption. Métaphore géographique de l'Amérique dans tous ses états, le patchwork a été et reste une occasion de la découvrir, quilt après quilt, à chaque étape de son histoire, sous toutes ses coutures. J’ai eu d’abord du patchwork une approche globale, n’ayant pas idée, au départ, qu’il y avait tant de variétés de quilts, que chaque tendance correspondait à des aires géographiques, à des communautés spécifiques, ou encore à des projets politiques. Ainsi, par exemple, au nord-est, où se sont installés les premiers puritains, les quilts sont souvent réalisés dans des couleurs sobres, suivant des motifs classiques (maison, étoile, compas). En Pennsylvanie, les formes sont épurées et les constructions géométriques. La région de Lancaster est le fief des Amish, dont les créations aux couleurs fortes et tranchées sont proches de l'abstraction contemporaine (Rothko, Albers, Newman), à l’instar de celui qui est présenté dans l’exposition, dans de magnifiques tonalités de pourpre et d’indigo.

Fig. 7 : « Bars, Amish, Pennsylvanie, Lancaster County, c. 1930. (180 x 192 cm)

© Charles-Edouard de Broin La fonction mémorielle du patchwork américain est également particulièrement intéressante. Il existe un modèle pour chaque type d'occasion, de la naissance à la mort, du « crib quilt » (« patchwork de berceau ») au « mourning quilt » (« patchwork de deuil ») en passant par le « wedding quilt (patchwork de mariage), pour ne citer que quelques classiques du répertoire, parmi tant d’autres.

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Au plan collectif, la coutume est de préserver dans la fibre textile les souvenirs du passé pour leur assurer diffusion et durée : toutes les grandes étapes de la destinée des Etats-Unis sont représentées (naissance de la nation, avancée de la frontière, Guerre de Sécession, abolition de l’esclavage, lutte pour les droits civiques, élections présidentielles, entre autres). La réalisation de quilts conçus en groupe et destinés à être montrés dans des lieux publics donnait ainsi une visibilité aux moments-clés de l'histoire. Signe des temps, il existe aujourd’hui des 9/11 Quilts sur lesquels figurent le nom des victimes et des messages de soutien de la nation tels que « Remember Always » ou United After all », sur fond de symboles de New York (notamment les tours jumelles). Ces œuvres de mémoire sont aujourd'hui exposées dans des casernes de pompiers ou dans le hall du récent 9/11 Memorial Museum, à New York. Ch-E. de Broin : Quand j'ai appris le mode de fabrication des quilts - par les femmes, souvent en groupe, mettant en commun leurs talents d'aiguille pour célébrer un événement dans leur famille, leur communauté villageoise et paroissiale, leur Etat ou leur pays naissant -, j'y ai lu à livre ouvert la vie de la société américaine rurale et laborieuse des XVIIIème et XIXème siècles, sur la côte Est puis au mythique Far West. Humaine, sociale, religieuse ou politique, l'histoire racontée par les patchworks, que je collectionne et restaure depuis plus de trente ans, est passionnante. A y regarder de près, ces morceaux de tissus disparates, que de minuscules points relient à des centaines voire des milliers d'autres, s'inscrivent dans un ensemble très organisé, résultat d'innombrables combinaisons entre carrés, rectangles et triangles. Tout patchwork est conçu à partir d'un motif - le pattern - représentation symbolique du quotidien des pionniers américains. Cabane de rondins (avec en son centre la chaleur du foyer), construction de la grange, marches du tribunal, vol d'oies sauvages, arbres, sillons des champs, paniers, fleurs ou étoiles figurant un Etat, toute l'Amérique, elle-même en construction, est là sous nos yeux.

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Fig. 8 : « Lemoyne Star, Berkshire Co., Pennsylvanie, 1900-1930 (détail), (196 x 199 cm)

© Charles-Edouard de Broin

Fig. 9 : « Log Cabin-Pineapple, Connecticut, 1870 (détail), (153 x 163 cm)

© Charles-Edouard de Broin

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Même le « crazy », un genre fort loin de la rigueur et de la tradition, peut prendre discrètement part au débat public. C’est le cas de « Vignettes » (1900), extraordinaire assemblage de plusieurs milliers de minuscules pièces de soies multicolores, qui fait figurer les portraits du Président William Mc Kinley et du Vice-Président Théodore Roosevelt, élus en 1897, sur des vignettes textiles qu'on trouvait à l’époque dans les paquets de cigarettes. Art de la récupération et expression politique se rejoignent ici de manière exemplaire.

Fig. 10 : « Crazy Quilt , Vignettes », Mrs Bond, Pennsylvanie, 1900, (191 x 204 cm)

© Charles-Edouard de Broin

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Fig. 11 : détail de « Crazy Quilt , Vignettes », Mrs Bond, Pennsylvanie, 1900, (191 x 204 cm) et

© Charles-Edouard de Broin

A.D. : Comment ces expositions ont-t-elle vu le jour ? En tant que commissaire, comment vous avez-vous procédé au choix des quilts ? G. Chouard : Le patchwork est souvent affaire de partage de tissus, d’histoires, d’affects. Et de rencontre. Cette exposition ne fait pas exception à la règle. J’ai eu l’occasion de travailler sur ce sujet avec Anne Crémieux (qui co-dirige avec Sophie Vasset la Fondation des Etats-Unis), que j’ai en quelque sorte « convertie » au patchwork il y a plus de dix ans ! Sa recherche sur les minorités ethniques aux Etats- Unis, notamment sur la communauté afro-américaine, a croisé la mienne, sur les arts textiles. Nous avons réalisé ensemble deux documentaires sur des artistes afro- américaines contemporaines du patchwork, Riché Richardson. Portrait of the Artist: From Montgomery to Paris (2008) et Gwen Magee, Threads of History (2012), qui ont été montrés en France et aux Etats-Unis. C’est à l’occasion d’une projection-débat du second documentaire, lors de l’exposition « Art Quilt » à la Fondation Mona Bismarck, en 2013, que j’ai eu la chance de rencontrer Charles-Edouard, expert textile et collectionneur, qui avait accumulé une collection de quilts américains aux multiples motifs, genres et provenances, d’une qualité digne des plus grands musées textiles. Nous avons donc monté ensemble ce projet d’exposition, à l’invitation de la Fondation des Etats-Unis. En fait, sa collection est telle qu’il y avait vraiment l’embarras du choix… Le plaisir esthétique du quilt étant souvent lié à ses couleurs, le premier regroupement envisagé était d’ordre chromatique, autour du rouge et du bleu en particulier, à l’origine de créations souvent spectaculaires. Mais pour mieux diffuser la connaissance de la pratique, nous avons finalement préféré donner à en voir un large panorama, c’est-à-dire panacher à la fois des modèles classiques du répertoire, souvent géométriques, tels que le « Log Cabin » (cher au collectionneur) ou les

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« Tumbling blocks », mais aussi un Amish, un quilt -américain, ou une pièce historique rare (« Burgoyne Surrounded »).

Fig. 12 : « Tumbling Blocks », Connecticut, 1860-90, (détail), (168 x 189 cm)

© Charles-Edouard de Broin

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Fig. 13 : « Blocs afro-américains », Virginia, 1940, (180 x 214 cm)

© Adélaïde Desnoé

Fig. 14 : « Burgoyne Surrounded », Pennsylvanie, 1910-20 (détail), (190 x 241 cm)

© Adélaïde Desnoé

Après cette focale large, si l’on peut dire, la seconde exposition proposait de faire le point sur les « Crazy », un genre tout à fait à part, aussi chatoyant que…désobéissant.

A.D : Pourquoi cet intérêt spécifique pour le crazy, justement ? Ch-E. de Broin : Ce qui est « fou » dans ce style de quilt, c’est la libération des femmes qui les ont faits. Le « Crazy » est un moment très particulier qui émerge vers la fin du 19ème, dans un milieu victorien très rigide. Au lieu de suivre les patrons (patterns), comme elles l’avaient (presque) toujours fait jusqu’alors, les femmes ont laissé libre cours à leur imagination et se sont mises à assembler couleurs et matières en toute fantaisie.

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Fig. 15 : « Charles-Edouard de Broin & Crazy Quilt : Dresden Plate », New York, 1890, (207 x 208 cm)

© Géraldine Chouard

Un des quilts exposé représente une petite fille qui soulève son jupon… A l’époque victorienne, voilà qui a dû faire du raffut ! L’audace, l’inventivité, et parfois la désinvolture de ces pièces sont saisissantes.

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Fig. 16 : « Crazy quilt: With a Doll”, New York, 1890 (détail), (168 x 168 cm)

© Charles-Edouard de Broin

En réalité, il y a deux types de « Crazy » distincts, qui sont ici représentés. Les premiers, que l’on trouve surtout dans les milieux aisés de la côte Est, et notamment à New York, visent à montrer les tissus de luxe dont les femmes disposent, ainsi que leur savoir-faire en matière de broderie. Dans les milieux plus modestes, par exemple dans les campagnes, les femmes suivent cette mode à distance, et recyclent des tissus plus simples (lainages ou cotonnades), créant des compositions d’un charme rustique hors du commun. Elle n’hésitent pas à y ajouter des initiales ou des messages d’une orthographe approximative, ce qui ajoute encore un côté désarmant à ces ouvrages.

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Fig. 17 : « Crazy Quilt: from Mollie », New York, 1901 (détail), (158 x 210 cm)

© Géraldine Chouard

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Fig. 18 : « Whin you see me, remember me », « Crazy Quilt: from Mollie », New York, 1901 (détail), (158 x 210 cm)

© Géraldine Chouard

G. Chouard : Les « Crazy » sont un type de quilts tout à fait à part. Pour comprendre ces pièces hors du commun, il faut bien sûr rappeler l’indépendance dont l’Amérique est (t)issue. L’indépendance, ou même la résistance américaine s’est souvent exprimée à travers le patchwork, notamment au XIXème, par le biais des « Protest quilts », au service des plus grandes causes de l'histoire nationale, comme l’abolition de l’esclavage, la lutte contre l’alcoolisme ou le droit de vote des femmes. En 1876, lors de l’Exposition universelle de Philadelphie célébrant le centenaire de l’Indépendance, les visiteurs s’extasient devant les arts décoratifs du Pavillon japonais, qui deviennent aussitôt une nouvelle source d’inspiration pour les arts populaires en général et pour le patchwork en particulier. Avec ses motifs pleins de fantaisie, suggérés par les magazines féminins de l’époque, vite relayés par l’imagination infinie des quilteuses, le « crazy » est un anti-modèle plus qu’un modèle, il leur permet de créer un univers textile où se côtoient étoiles et toupies, éventails et marguerites, chapeaux et bottines, monogrammes et papillons, en toute licence poétique. Loin des classiques du répertoire, souvent géométriques, le crazy a fait un temps fureur chez les petites mains d’Amérique, renouvelant ainsi leur formidable audace. La mode ne durera que quelques décennies, tombant déjà en désuétude en 1910. C’était une immense chance de pouvoir admirer quelques spécimens de la collection de Charles-Edouard de Broin, et l’effet de chatoyance produit par chaque quilt était comme décuplé par l’ensemble. Un vrai feu d’artifice.

A.D : Qu’en est-il du quilt aujourd’hui ? Ch-E. de Broin : C’est un extraordinaire business, avec plus de vingt-vinq millions de femmes qui font aujourd’hui du patchwork aux Etats-Unis. La meilleure façon de se rendre compte du phénomène est le succès des foires au patchwork, très nombreux, avec leurs expos-ventes, à la fois de quilts, mais aussi de tissu et tout le matériel permettant de les réaliser, comme par exemple le festival de Houston, qui se tient tous les ans en novembre. Sans oublier la littérature qui accompagne le patchwork (ouvrages, magazines). En dehors des prouesses techniques dont témoignent les femmes (et aussi les quelques hommes) qui poursuivent ces travaux d’aiguille, le patchwork sert de terrain d’expression sociale et politique, d’une manière qui a toujours défini l’histoire américaine et qui continue de le faire. Il n’y a pas d’équivalent dans d’autre société. G. Chouard : Le quilt continue aujourd’hui à être un vecteur privilégié de la mémoire et à accompagner les grandes causes de la nation. C’est notamment le cas de The Names Quilt (ou The AIDS Memorial Quilt) un projet majeur, datant de 1987, qui réactualisait la tradition du Mourning Quilt (réalisé à l’origine avec les vêtements du défunt). Ce gigantesque patchwork de patchworks conçu en hommage aux personnes décédées du SIDA (dont chaque pièce portrait le nom) fut d’abord exposé à Washington pour alerter les pouvoirs publics sur la gravité de l’épidémie, avant de faire le tour des États-Unis : une manière de redonner corps à ceux qui ne faisaient plus partie du tissu social et de se souvenir d’eux (c’est le double sens du mot re- member). The Names Quilt a été partiellement ré-exposé sur le Washington Mall en

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2012, pour les vingt-cinq ans du projet, et il était alors saisissant de voir ce monument textile, telle une pierre tombale « molle », étendue à l’horizontale sur l’esplanade, faire écho aux monuments aux morts (« memorials ») dressés dans toute la ville. Et de constater, encore et toujours, le pouvoir fédérateur du patchwork, capable, en l’occurrence, de rassembler les morts et les vivants. Le Patchwork des Noms a tenté de prendre le relai en France, mais les événements proposés par l’association ne rencontrent auprès du public français qu’un écho mitigé, signe que notre culture n’a guère intégré cette valeur sociale et militante de la pratique.

A.D : Votre impression générale sur ces expositions ? Ch-E. de Broin : Nous avons été très bien accueillis, Géraldine Chouard et moi-même, par Anne Crémieux et Sophie Vasset (Directrices de la Fondation des Etats-Unis) et par Noëmi Haire-Sievers (responsable culturelle à la FEU) qui ont mis à notre disposition une galerie qui se prêtait fort bien à l’accrochage des quilts et aux panneaux explicatifs dont l’objectif était de permettre à chacun de contextualiser la pratique. Toute exposition est une réjouissante occasion de raconter l'histoire, petite ou grande, de chaque quilt, un à un, d'en faire admirer l'équilibre, l'harmonie, et aussi d'entrer dans d'infimes détails, dont certains se révèlent parfois en les montrant.

Fig. 19 : « Once Upon a Quilt: l’Amérique comme Patchwork », Fondation des Etats-Unis, octobre 2016

© Adélaïde Desnoé

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Fig. 20 : « Le fil de la désobéissance : les Crazy quilts », Fondation des Etats-Unis, novembre 2016

© Géraldine Chouard

Le public de la Fondation des Etats-Unis a été fort éclectique et fort réceptif. Les nombreux visiteurs, échangeaient volontiers autour de ces quilts, ce qui a donné lieu à de riches échanges. Une résidente de la Fondation, Marva Dixon, étudiante à l’Institut d'Études Supérieures des Arts, ravie de découvrir sa propre culture ainsi présentée, et appréciée, a proposé de faire le compte-rendu de la première exposition, qui témoigne de sa vision tout à fait originale de l’ensemble. Le souvenir le plus amusant de cette saison reste celui de ce visiteur, arrivé sur les lieux un peu par hasard, le jour de « Art Hop-Polis ». S’il avait su que c’était une exposition de patchwork, a-t-il dit en partant, il ne serait pas venu. Mais il est resté, médusé par ce qu’il voyait… Ce détour par le patchwork lui avait fait découvrir l’Amérique. Lui aussi!

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Fig. 21 : Décrochage, Fondation des Etats-Unis, novembre 2016

© Géraldine Chouard

RÉSUMÉS

Entretien avec Géraldine Chouard et Charles-Edouard de Broin de deux expositions à la Fondation des Etats-Unis « Once Upon a Quilt: l’Amérique comme Patchwork » et « Le fil de la désobéissance : les Crazy Quilts » (octobre-novembre 2016)

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

AUTEUR

ADÉLAÏDE DESNOÉ Étudiante en Master 2 Intelligence et Innovation Culturelles - Université Paris Diderot, Assistante culture & communication à la Fondation des Etats-Unis

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“Restructuring of Forms in American Patchwork” Exhibition “Once Upon a Quilt: America as a Patchwork,” Fondation des Etats-Unis, 2-26 octobre 2016

Marva Mercedes Dixon

“Once Upon a Quilt : L’Amérique comme Patchwork”,

Fondation des Etats-Unis

1 Seldom does one see gallery walls dominated by quilts. Considering the level of creativity and skill required to create a quilt and the massive amounts of information

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one can glean about culture and history from studying them, I find the art world’s lack of appreciation for these objects curious. Noticing the absence, collector Charles- Edouard de Broin and curator Géraldine Chouard, both quilt experts, have dedicated decades to filling this void. One of their two exhibitions, “Once Upon a Quilt: America as a Patchwork,” shown in the gallery space of the Fondation des États-Unis, at the Cité universitaire internationale aims to rectify this oversight.

2 At first glance, one is enthralled by the array of color, line and shape that has taken hold of the space. A medley of quilts, each with their own story, work together to transform the gallery walls into a series of histories. Some of these histories use symbolism to explain fictional stories or past events. Others provide clues of the owner’s social status, geographic location and/or relationship with family and friends. In “Once Upon a Quilt: America as a Patchwork,” 18 discrete quilts of the 150 in de Broin’s collection have been selected to line the walls, hang from pillars and be draped over tables. The focus of this exhibition is American patchwork from the 19th and 20th centuries.

3 While it would be impossible to cover the entirety of American quilting practices in the course of one show, the exhibition provides a diverse set of quilts from the centuries covered.

4 Some, like Burgoyne Surrounded, serve as a retelling of historical events. This Pennsylvania quilt, created some time between 1910 and 1920, describes the Battle of Saratoga from the 1777 American War of Independence, which proved to be a turning point in the war.

5 It was constructed using a series of solid colored squares—white and blue. Many of the white squares are several times larger than those in blue, possibly representative of the arrogance of British General John Burgoyne. It was because of his underestimation of his opponent that the American Army won this battle. The American soldiers, like the blue squares, were more numerous than the British Army, surrounding them until they were forced to surrender. By use of size, shape and color, this original quilt represents a historical scene that was instrumental to the ultimate formation of the United States of America.

6 BURGOYNE SURROUNDED

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Pennsylvania, 1910-20 190 x 241 cm

7 Bars, Amish is a quilt created by a member of one of Pennsylvania’s several Amish communities. The Amish are made up of a group of people who choose to isolate and separate themselves from non-Amish societies. They are known for living simply, rejecting most modern technology in favor of the customs and ways of their ancestors. This quilt reflects their minimalist lifestyle geometrically. Instead of the intricate designs displayed on several of the other quilts in the exhibition, this piece, like most Amish design, follows an interesting yet uncomplicated pattern. In Bars, Amish, a split- bars pattern was employed. This centrally focused pattern has been preferred among the Lancaster County Amish located in Pennsylvania, and resembles an aerial view of farmland divided into rows of crops. This particular example is made up of large rectangles created in bold, jewel like colors of varying shades of purple and blue. Made primarily of wool, this object, like most Amish creations, most likely had a utilitarian purpose, almost certainly meant to keep warm as opposed to being purely decorative.

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BARS, AMISH BARRES / SILLONS, AMISH

Pennsylvania, Lancaster County, c.1930 180 x 192 cm

8 Also present in “Once Upon a Quilt: America as a Patchwork” is an overview of how the Log cabin, a fundamental pattern in American quilt making, constantly evolved over time. This pattern became popular during the American Civil War, possibly as a way to support Abraham Lincoln and his aim to preserve the Union; for over a century it has persevered as a staple of American patchwork. The Log Cabin outline traditionally consists of a square “hearth” surrounded by rectangular strips of fabric acting as logs. There is often a strong contrast among the colors of the logs with with one half using light materials and the other half using dark, thereby maximizing the visual liveliness of the composition. The show showcases several examples of this pattern along with its many variations, including the Pineapple and Courthouse steps.

9 A version of the log cabin design can be seen in Log Cabin, Courthouse Steps, a piece from around 1890 made of silk and lace. In this work the “Log Cabin” blocks are perfect squares with a hearth at the center. The fabric strips surrounding the hearth are arranged in a way that causes the logs to slightly overlap each other. Like traditional notions of the motif, half of the logs are light in color while the other half are dark. This particular arrangement has each block divided into four triangular areas with the top and bottom triangles mostly created using pale colored material while the left and right often fashioned with a bolder color palette. This is a popular version of the Log Cabin referred to as Courthouse Steps. In addition to contrast of pigment, this work, in using silk, velvet and lace, also juxtaposes texture while displaying an air of extravagance that was common in the Victorian era.

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LOG CABIN COURTHOUSE STEPS, Silk & Lace

New York State, c.1890 162 x 164 cm

10 Created in 1940 by an African American artist, Blocks, African American further pushed the boundaries of the log cabin. Like classical renditions of this motif, the pattern blocks consist of a four-sided hearth surrounded by rectangular logs. Although each hearth is surrounded by only four logs—far fewer than most—the blocks retain the traditional color shift between light and dark strips. As was the case with Log Cabin, Courthouse Steps, the light and dark spaces are defined horizontally and vertically, lying across from each other as opposed to perpendicularly. Through abstraction, these basic components are transformed into a unique representation.

11 Blocks, African American strongly resembles the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Gee’s Bend is a small, African American community along the Alabama River known for a quilting tradition that pieces together strips a cloth in a way that is geometrically simplistic and vibrant in color. These quilts have been apart of several successful exhibitions in major museum spaces including the Philadelphia Museum of art and the Whitney Museum of Art. Like Gee’s Bend’s quilts, the artist of Blocks, African American used a minimalist approach to create a sophisticated design. This work avoids symmetry in favor of improvisation to express a variety of cabin proportions and dimensions. Like the jazz composer, the free-form pattern blocks produce a work that is complex in its spontaneity. The bold coloring and modest geometric design also bears resemblance to Kente cloths of Ghana.

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BLOCKS AFRICAN-AMERICAN

Virginia, 1940 180 x 214 cm

12 Also evolving from the Log Cabin is the Pineapple pattern. Like the Log Cabin, the pineapple design retains elements of a hearth surrounded by logs. However, unlike Log Cabin and Courthouse Steps, the logs are no longer sewn exclusively parallel to the hearth. Instead, pineapple pattern blocks are created when logs are sewn both parallel and perpendicular to the hearth. The outcome is an extremely complex design that produces streaks of color radiating from the center of each hearth.

13 Log Cabin, Pineapple, created in 1870 in Connecticut, uses a variation of this technique. Made from an assortment of velvets and silks, the artist carefully constructed this piece as a series of hexagons, with each comprised of 6 triangles of color. Like classic Log Cabin designs, the colors often alternate between light and dark. The resulting composition resembles the symmetrical trefoil emblem used to warn of hazardous waste; this ends up further complimenting the quilt’s explosion of color. “I’ve had this quilt for 30 years and every time I look at it, I see something different,” de Broin said of this piece. Indeed, it is impossible to take in the intricacies of such a skillfully designed work within a single glance.

LOG CABIN PINEAPPLE

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Connecticut, 1870 153 x 163 cm

14 For the next show (2-30 November 2016), the focus was on crazy quilts. As a preview, “Once Upon a Quilt: America as a Patchwork” showcased two examples. Crazy quilts are known for a style that lacks the repeating motifs seen in most quilting patterns. Instead of the symmetrical pieces of fabric employed by the traditional Log Cabin pattern, for example, the artist of a crazy quilt fits irregularly shaped fabrics together to create a jigsaw puzzle effect. These quilts are characterized by being creative and free flowing in a way similar to those of Gee’s Bend. They are also known for being created with a multitude of colors and cloths that are often hand-stitched together with elaborate embellishments and embroidery.

15 Crazy Quilt with a Swan (1890) was created with a variety of velvets and silks among other fabrics. In addition to these lavish materials, it has several images of animals and plants appliquéd its surface. Among the horses, birds, flowers, it is the white swan that is most likely to draw the eye. Placed on a dark, triangular cloth, the contrast makes it stand out from the others. Constructed primarily in wool, satin and velvet, Crazy Quilt Literary Ladies, (1898) was created by a group of women who belonged to the Easton Literary Society in Pennsylvania. Like most crazy quilts, this one is characterized by its embellishments, here naive appliquéd representations of a horse, boots, a snowman and a ship. Additionally, this quilt has been initialed by Becky, Amy, Jill and Emma, the “literary ladies” who made it.

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CRAZY QUILT WITH A SWAN

New York, 1890 145 x 202 cm

CRAZY QUILT LITERARY LADIES

Easton, Pennsylvanie, 1898 100 x 116 cm

16 At its base, creativity calls for the restructuring of known elements. The ability of quilters to invent patterns that were simultaneously familiar in design while also original in fabrication is a result of that creativity. With “Once Upon a Quilt: America as

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a Patchwork,” we are confronted with many ideas, including the reimagining of the Log Cabin motif. With it, viewers gain insight on how a series of patterns were used as tools for both self-expression and innovation to create utilitarian objects. By showcasing this line of thought, this exhibition works to further legitimize quilting as a form of art. “If it were up to me, quilts would spend much more time in art galleries and museums,” Chouard commented during my tour of the space. After this exhibition, I must agree.

INDEX

Subjects: Trans’Arts

AUTHOR

MARVA MERCEDES DIXON Institut d'Études Supérieures des Arts

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Revue de l’exposition The Color Line – Les artistes africains-américains et la ségrégation (1865-2016) Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac, Paris, 4 octobre 2016 – 15 janvier 2017

Églantine Morvant

Depuis le 4 octobre 2016 et jusqu’au 15 janvier 2017, le Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac accueille l’exposition The Color Line – Les artistes africains-américains et la ségrégation, événement historique, assurément dans l’histoire muséographique française, voire mondiale. En effet, si la réunion en si grand nombre d’œuvres d’art visuel produites par des artistes africains-américains est déjà rare aux États-Unis, elle est résolument pionnière en France. De plus, la formidable étendue de la période couverte par l’exposition permet d’observer l’évolution des ressources et ressorts artistiques autant qu’esthétiques depuis le milieu du XIXe siècle jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Entièrement bilingue (sans traduction forcée : le mouvement de la « Harlem Renaissance » est désigné tel quel), ce long et riche parcours chronologique au travers de 15 salles1 présente 200 œuvres aux médias variés : principalement des dessins, aquarelles, peintures, linogravures, sculptures et installations, mais aussi pochettes de disques, extraits de chansons ou de films. Cette diversité artistique est étayée d’un effort de contextualisation tout aussi varié à l’aide de la reproduction de 400 documents d’époque : affiches, illustrations, articles et unes de presse, couvertures de romans, bandes dessinées offrant ainsi une compréhension large et quasi exhaustive d’un processus sûr mais sourd car condamné au silence. Chaque salle, mettant en regard les œuvres avec leurs contextes de production et de réception, rend apparents les enjeux tant identitaires que politiques qui sous-tendent la production artistique. Car, comme l’indique le sous-titre de l’exposition avec l’inscription du terme « ségrégation », l’éclairage porté sur ces œuvres d’art et choisi par le commissaire d’exposition, Daniel Soutif, est décidément politique.

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Une exposition magistrale : production artistique et ancrage historique toujours en regard

L’ambition réussie de cette exposition est de donner à voir et donc à comprendre la production artistique et culturelle par les artistes et penseurs africains-américains en regard des contextes sociaux et politiques de production et de réception de ces œuvres. Cet ancrage est très présent quand le propos est essentiellement historique et qu’il a trait à l’abolition de l’esclavage, à la Reconstruction, à la Première Guerre Mondiale, à la Grande Migration, à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. La reproduction de lithographies apporte des représentations d’époque de moments et de personnages politiques africains-américains déterminants dans la lutte pour l’émancipation, telle celle des First Coloured Senators and Representatives in the 41st and 42nd Congress of the United States. Photographies, peintures, dessins présentent certaines de ces figures historiques. Réalisés a posteriori ces portraits rendent hommage au rôle fondateur du personnage qu’ils donnent à voir. En attestent le dessin au fusain de Fredrick Douglass (1818-1895) exécuté par Charles White en 1940 ou bien le portrait de Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) peint à l’huile sur toile par Henry Ossawa Tanner en 1917 deux ans après la mort du leader. Quand ils sont contemporains au sujet qu’ils représentent, ils manifestent sa notoriété. On trouve ainsi le dessin Martin Luther King exécuté en 1965 par Hale A. Woodruff au fusain sur papier, la lithographie très connue de W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) réalisée par Benjamin Ide Wheeler vers 1901. Témoin de l’entrée dans l’ère contemporaine, l’autoportrait Wanted by the FBI (1975) qu’Angela Davis réalisa en détournant l’avis de recherche dont elle fut l’objet en 1970 fait autant œuvre d’art qu’acte de protestation. L’ancrage contextuel est éclairant quand il introduit à des mouvements artistiques telle la Harlem Renaissance ou quand, sous la forme d’un thème, il rend compte de la pratique du lynchage. Toutefois, il perd quelque peu en vigueur en fin d’exposition quand le propos s’intéresse à la période plus récente. Aussi, la salle « Harlem on their Minds » expose-t-elle différentes représentations de Harlem parmi lesquelles celles de Romare Bearden (1911-1988) et de Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), mais les éléments de contextualisation sont trop rares pour rendre tangible la réalité de vie de ce quartier effervescent à tous points de vue. Par ailleurs, il n’apparaît pas assez clairement que ce phénomène ne se cantonnait pas à Harlem mais qu’il se manifestait dans les quartiers de nombreuses grandes villes nouvellement peuplées par les Africains-américains après la première guerre mondiale (Chicago, Detroit, Boston…). En témoigne, du reste, le tableau Douglas Square, Boston (1936) d’Allan Rohan Crite (1910-2007). Enfin, les deux dernières salles consacrées à la production plus contemporaine, notamment à partir des années 1960, mettent parfois trop peu en lumière les conditions de production de certaines œuvres et la motivation de les inscrire dans ce parcours de The Color Line. Pourtant, l’exposition a su recourir à une prodigieuse diversité d’œuvres et de documents contextuels, qui lui fait embrasser un éclairage à la fois historique, sociologique, littéraire, philosophique, anthropologique et artistique. Ainsi, des photographies et graphiques commandés par W.E.-B. Du Bois pour l’Exposition des Nègres d’Amérique lors de l’Exposition universelle de Paris 1900 renseignent sur les difficiles conditions de vie sociales et politiques des Africains-américains peu après la Reconstruction. Certains textes fondateurs2 de Booker T. Washington, de W.E.-B. Du Bois et d’Alain Locke (1885-1954) sont donnés à voir dans leur matérialité, de même que

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certains ouvrages littéraires majeurs. On peut découvrir les couvertures de livres de la Harlem Renaissance : Cane (1923) de Jean Toomer (1894-1967), Home to Harlem (1922) de Claude McKay (1889-1948), le recueil de poèmes God’s Trombones. Seven Negro Sermons in verse (1927) de James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), plusieurs recueils de poésie de Langston Hugues (1902-1967) ainsi que l’édition de 1949 de One-way Ticket, illustrée par Jacob Lawrence. Plus loin, on peut voir des ouvrages plus contemporains, parmi lesquels The Invisible Man (1952) de Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) et Home (2012) de Toni Morrison (née en 1931). Dans une salle consacrée aux sportifs Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Mohamed Ali et d’autres, l’exposition rassemble des articles de presses français, espagnols, et états-uniens. Elle rend ainsi compte de l’étendue de la couverture médiatique de leurs exploits et de la révolution du regard public que ces derniers ont entrainée. En effet, considérées dans leur ensemble, les nombreuses affiches, couvertures de magazines, de journaux ou de revues permettent d’appréhender l’évolution du regard porté sur les Africains- américains autant par eux-mêmes que par le reste du monde. L’imagerie, pleine de clichés, associée aux minstrels racistes de la fin du XIXe siècle a peu à peu cédé la place à des articles de presse relatant certains faits talentueux, puis à des journaux ou revues créés par des Africains-américains comme instruments voire armes pour leur combat vers l’émancipation. Il en est ainsi de The Crisis – A Record of the Darker Races, revue créée par Du Bois en 1910 comme antenne de la National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People qu’il participa à fonder en 1909, et cinquante ans plus tard, de The Black Panther – Black Community News Service, qui exista de 1967 à 1980 et qui avait, comme le titre l’indique, la volonté d’affirmer en la servant l’existence de la communauté africaine-américaine. Leurs nombreuses unes données à voir ensemble permettent d’en apprécier la ligne éditoriale. Avec une intention moins exhaustive, bien d’autres journaux africains-américains au rôle influent auprès de la communauté africaine- américaine sont exposés, notamment Opportunity – A Journal of Negro life publié pour la première fois en 1923 par la National Urban League jusqu’en 1949, proposé comme un forum sociologique pour les Africains-américains. Également les journaux fondés par l’éditeur et homme d’affaires John H. Johnson : le Negro Digest établi en 1942 sur le modèle du Reader’s Digest mais centré sur la communauté africaine-américaine (lequel fut renommé Black World en 1970 avant de cesser d’être édité en 1976) et, inspiré de Life, Ebony en 1945, encore publié de nos jours. Cette diversité révèle l’ampleur et la complexité du long processus que fut l’affirmation identitaire africaine-américaine.

Ressources et enjeux artistiques – l’hybridité comme ressort esthétique

Dès sa salle introductive, l’exposition donne à voir le tableau de facture très classique Uncle Tom and Little Eva (1853) réalisé par le peintre Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872) en référence au roman paru un an plus tôt La Case de l’Oncle Tom de Harriet Beecher Stowe. La présence de ce tableau témoigne qu’avant même l’abolition de l’esclavage, les Africains-américains de condition libre dans le nord états-unien pouvaient s’adonner à la peinture, en faire profession et maîtriser cet art selon les conventions académiques, c’est-à-dire européennes à l’époque. À la génération suivante, Henry O. Tanner (1859-1937) a pu livrer au cours d’un périple transatlantique des scènes de vie

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observées en France, dont The Young Sabot Maker (1895) et, quelques années plus tard, de très belles scènes de rue à Alger.

Robert Duncanson, Uncle Tom and Little Eva (1853)

69,2 x 97,2 cm, huile sur toile ©Adagp, Paris, 2016

La salle consacrée à la Harlem Renaissance rassemble les grands noms du mouvement et leurs œuvres emblématiques. Dès l’entrée, on fait face au célèbre Into Bondage (1936) d’Aaron Douglas (1899-1979). Ce tableau mêle motifs du berceau africain (jungle, palmiers), bateaux négriers et esclaves aux mains liées, levées en direction de l’étoile du nord qui leur indiquait la voie vers la liberté.

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Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage (1936)

Huile sur toile, 153,4 × 153,7 cm © Adagp, Paris, 2016 (photographe G-Williams)

Ses tons pastel (bleu, rose, violet, jaune) sont typiques de la peinture à l’huile que Douglas faisait à cette époque et tranchent avec ceux vifs et saturés (noir, rouge et blanc) de la gouache sur papier Fire ! de 1971, offerte en contraste dans la même salle. Un autre mur donne à voir les premières peintures à l’huile d’Archibald J. Motley (1891-1981) qui, pour certaines, représentent des scènes de vie urbaines : Tongues (Holy Rollers) (1929), The Plotters (1933). Au cours de l’exposition, sont présentées des linogravures et aquarelles du peintre William H. Johnson (1901-1970) (à la prochaine exposition, on espère voir sa peinture : ses toiles très matiérées sont impressionnantes). Se trouvent également de nombreuses pièces de Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) et deux pièces en bronze du tout aussi célèbre sculpteur Richmond Barthé (1901-1989) : The Boxer (1948) et The Negro Looks Ahead (1950). Aussi est-il assez surprenant que Toussaint Louverture (ca 1743-1803) soit tout à fait absent de l’exposition. En effet, admiré pour avoir mené son peuple vers la liberté, le leader politique haïtien a constitué une grande source d’inspiration pour beaucoup d’artistes africains-américains, notamment pour Barthé et Lawrence. Une des premières commandes que le sculpteur reçut à ses tout débuts fut celle d’une statue monumentale de Toussaint Louverture destinée à Port-au-Prince. Quant à Lawrence, il réalisa entre 1936 et 1938 une de ses premières séries intitulée La vie de Toussaint Louverture, constituée de 41 pièces de tempera sur papier. L’exposition rassemble aussi des pièces rares telles que de nombreux dessins d’Albert Alexander Smith (1896-1940) exécutés au crayon sur papier en 1918. On trouve également du peintre autodidacte Horace Pippin (1888-1946), dont le style naïf et minutieux évoque quelque chose de Douanier Rousseau, d’une part son tableau The Victory Garden (1943) portant sur la première

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guerre mondiale durant laquelle il combattit au sein du célèbre régiment « Harlem Hell Fighters » et d’autre part, son formidable Journal qu’il tenait alors, illustré de dessins. L’ampleur de l’exposition offre la chance exceptionnelle d’observer non seulement des séries complètes d’artistes, mais aussi l’évolution de ces derniers sur plusieurs décennies du point de vue de leur technique, du choix des sujets, des médias employés.3 La diversité de Hale A. Woodruff (1900-1980) apparaît au gré des salles : sa peinture à l’huile sur toile à l’occasion de son célèbre Banjo Player (1929), ses linogravures des années 1930 à travers Gildage et By Parties Unknown, et son moins connu mais très délicat portrait au fusain sur papier de Martin Luther King réalisé en 1965. Des linogravures et sculptures d’Elizabeth Catlett sont exposées en nombre et rendent ainsi compte de l’engagement de l’artiste tant pour la cause des Africains-américains que pour celle des femmes. Sa série de quinze pièces de linogravures en noir et blanc réalisée entre 1946 et 1948 rend hommage aux grandes figures africaines-américaines féminines de l’émancipation : la poétesse africaine-américaine du XVIIIe siècle Phillis Wheatly (1753-1784), Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) et Harriet Tubman (ca. 1820-1913). Il est extrêmement intéressant de pouvoir apprécier le contraste avec la linogravure en couleur qu’elle réalisa en 1969 en hommage à Malcom X. Quelques pièces de sculpture en bronze des années 1980 donnent également à voir son engagement : Woman Walking (Standing Woman) (1987) et Hommage to Black Women Poets (1984). L’exposition permet également d’observer l’évolution vers l’abstraction de Norman Lewis (1908-2003) depuis sa toile Conflict (1942) d’expression plutôt figurative, en passant par Autumn Garden (1949), Night Walk # 2 (1956) qui font toutes deux transition vers ses toiles à tendance abstraite, plus connues, notamment What kind are you ? (1968) ou bien Untitled de la même année.

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Norman Lewis (1909-1979), Night Walk #2, 1956

Huile sur toile, 167,6 x 86,4 cm © Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Enfin, les installations de David Hammons (né en 1943) jalonnent l’exposition. Dès la seconde salle, est étendu le drapeau U.N.I.A. (1990). Autour du propos sportif, on découvre Air Jordan (1988) élaborée à partir d’une chambre à air et de capsules de métal. Enfin, la dernière salle présente Untitled (1995) composée de masques et de câbles. Devant l’hybridité manifeste de ces pièces, mais aussi de la production artistique africaine-américaine en général, on en vient à regretter l’absence de commentaires esthétiques. En effet, l’hybridité peut être conceptuelle et se manifester par l’assemblage de symboles, comme le montre le U.N.I.A. Flag (1990) de David Hammons. Ainsi, à l’occasion de l’élection du premier maire de New-York africain-américain, l’artiste a produit ce drapeau tissé de coton teint en combinant le drapeau américain et celui proposé en 1920 par l’association créée par Marcus Garvey, l’Universal Negro Improvement Association, pour rassembler la communauté africaine-américaine. L’hybridité peut être bien sûr matérielle et prendre la forme de l’assemblage de matières, matériaux ou objets divers. Cette qualité s’apprécie dès le premier objet exposé, le pot en argile de l’esclave David Drake, rempli de cannes en bois et d’un bouquet de coton. Essentielle aux collages, elle apparaît dans The Block II (1972) pour lequel Romare Bearden (1911-1988) a réuni feuilles d’aluminium, peinture, encre, graphite, sur dix-sept panneaux de fibres et contreplaqué dont il a gratté la surface, en incluant deux panneaux appliqués en relief et un autre plus enfoncé. Il est dommage que le cartel (ni même l’audioguide !) n’indique cette riche composition.

Romare Howard Bearden, The Block II, 1972

64,8 x 188 cm, Médias mixtes ©Adagp, Paris, 2016. The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art

Cette hybridité matérielle est encore plus patente dans la production contemporaine. En sculpture, pour sa pièce Malcom X # 13 (2008), Barbara Chase-Riboud (née en 1939) a drapé un bronze noir de gros brins de soie, laine, lin et fibres synthétiques. Dans les installations également, comme le donne à voir l’œuvre Deluxe (2005) d’Ellen Gallagher dont les soixante cadres mêlent différents matériaux :

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Ellen Gallagher, DeLuxe, 2005

© Ellen Gallagher and Two Palms Press

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Détail d’un des cadres

En peinture, des matériaux divers sont ajoutés sur le support utilisé. Ainsi en s’appropriant le célèbre tableau de Courbet, symbolique pour sa valeur transgressive, Mickalene Thomas (née en 1971) propose The Origin of the Universe I (2012). Sur le support d’un panneau de bois est peint un décor simplifié : le lit, grossièrement représenté en jaune, apparaît comme abstrait du réel et posé sur un fond bleu uni qui évoque un cadre incomplet. Contrairement au réalisme de l’image de Courbet qui mettait le regardeur en présence de la chair, ce cadre imparfait induit une forme de distance en soulignant la dimension iconique de la pièce et en lui conférant, par son incomplétude dans le coin supérieur droit, un caractère dynamique. Cette distance est derechef soulignée par les strass de couleur utilisés pour représenter les zones d’ombre du tableau original : en jaune celles du lit (plis froissés des draps), et en brun celles du corps féminin (plis de la chair) mais aussi le poil pubien. Le corps de la femme, désormais noire, est reproduit à partir de photographies que l’artiste a prises de son propre corps. Le titre du tableau, The Origin of the Universe I, semble indiquer que cette nouvelle origine englobe en la précédant L’Origine du Monde.

Détail d’un des cadres : Mickalene Thomas, Origin of the Universe I, 2012

121,9 x 152,4 cm, Strass, acrylique et huile sur panneau de bois © Adagp, Paris, 2016

Le tableau Souvenir (III) (1998) de Kerry James Marshall (né en 1955) est, quant à lui, composé d’acrylique noir, argent, doré et blanc et de paillettes sur toile non tendue. Il campe, dans un salon au mobilier de styles artistiques divers, le personnage d’une femme africaine-américaine vraisemblablement en maîtresse de maison. Dans sa partie supérieure, le tableau comporte entre autres les noms en gros caractères de neuf personnalités africaine-américaines dont l’œuvre a contribué à l’émancipation de la

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communauté. Autour de l’intellectuel W.E.B. Du Bois, inscrit en position centrale, on lit les noms d’artistes reconnus dont trois hommes : le sculpteur autodidacte Marion Perkins (1908-1961), le peintre Bob Thompson (1937-1966) et le poète Langston Hugues (1902-1967), ainsi que six femmes : les sculptrices Meta Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) et Augusta Savage (1892-1962), les écrivaines Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) de la Harlem Renaissance et Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), et la comédienne Dorothy Dandridge (1922-1965). À côté de chaque nom est indiquée une date, celle du décès de la personnalité, éclairant l’inscription « In memory » que le tableau comporte dans sa partie inférieure. Ainsi Souvenir (III) loue-t-il l’héritage artistique et intellectuelle de l’émancipation.

L’inscription contemporaine de l’exposition, témoin d’une lutte toujours en cours

Les trois dernières salles de l’exposition donnent à voir la production artistique depuis la période des années 1960, c’est-à-dire celle qui a accompagné les mouvements pour les droits civiques, jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Il apparaît que, malgré le Civil Rights Act de 1965, ces œuvres d’art continuent d’exprimer une préoccupation politique. En représentant un passé douloureux, elles montrent que faire reconnaître ce dernier demeure de nos jours encore un enjeu. En témoigne l’assemblage de Faith Ringgold (née en 1930), The American Collection # 1 : We came to America (1997).

Faith Ringgold (née en 1930). The American Collection # 1 : We Came to America, 1997.

189,2 x 201,9cm, Acrylique sur toile, peinture et pièces rapportées. Avec l’aimable autorisation de la Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Art by Women Collection, Philadelphie Don de Linda Lee Alter.

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Le tissu recouvert de peinture et de pièces rapiécées représente en premier plan la statue de la liberté incarnée par une femme noire. Cette dernière se voit conférer un air de madone car au lieu de tenir de sa main gauche la tablette comportant la loi, elle porte de son bras un jeune enfant noir rescapé du naufrage qui apparaît en arrière- plan. Au lieu d’un faisceau lumineux, la torche qu’elle brandit de sa main droite laisse s’échapper une fumée épaisse qui recouvre le ciel jusqu’à se mêler dans le dernier plan du tableau à celle d’un bateau négrier en feu. Entre ces deux plans, l’océan recouvert de rouge, reflet des flammes du bateau négrier mais aussi du sang versé des Africains déportés, est maculé de naufragés noirs aux regards et aux bras levés vers le ciel. L’expression de protestation plutôt que d’appel au secours exprimée sur leurs visages incline à y voir l’évocation de la traite négrière. Selon cette lecture, ces figures représenteraient les Africains déportés qui n’ont pu mener le voyage jusqu’au bout et dont les corps, jetés par-dessus bord, peuplent les profondeurs de l’océan. Au centre du tableau, un personnage fait exception : de ses yeux il semble interpeler le regardeur et l’inviter à reconsidérer le passé peut-être autant que le présent. En effet, il est intéressant d’observer que le bas de la statue n’est pas représenté et que, de ce fait, les chaînes brisées de l’aliénation ne le sont pas davantage. La libération semble bel et bien en cours, mais manifestement grâce à cette nouvelle statue de la liberté noire qui, en mettant fin aux ténèbres, désormais derrière, revêt un caractère quelque peu providentiel. Présentée au premier plan, cette statue actualisée semble ouvrir la voie aux naufragés et assurer leur salut comme celui de l’enfant noir qu’elle porte. Ce détournement du symbole états-unien communément appelé Statue de la liberté fait alors référence à son titre original La liberté éclairant le monde, tout en l’interrogeant. D’autres œuvres d’art manifestent une préoccupation politique en exprimant des revendications. Aussi celle de Freedom Now exprimée en 1965 par Reginald A. Gammon, Jr. (1921-2005) a cédé la place à celle de Equality (1999) d’après le titre de l’installation de Betye Saar (née en 1926).

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Betye Saar, Equality, 1999

40 x 57,8 x 5,7 cm, Assemblage, médias mixtes © Private Collection, New York, NY; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Au reste, une des dernières installations sur laquelle se clôt l’exposition est la très belle pièce Amandla (2014) de Hank Willis Thomas (né en 1976). Réalisée à partir de silicone, de fibre de verre et de traitements métalliques, elle donne à voir, surgissant au milieu d’un panneau fermé jaune pastel, un poing levé noir au bout d’un bras en chemise blanche, et suggère ainsi assez explicitement que la lutte continue. Aussi est-on surpris que l’histoire récente des États-Unis notamment l’assassinat de Michael Brown en août 2014 ou bien les soulèvements qui s’ensuivirent à Ferguson en octobre de la même année ne soit mentionnée ni par des articles de presse ni par des œuvres artistiques, à l’exception de deux couvertures de Times Magazine, l’une du 20 avril 2015 titrant « Black Lives Matter » et l’autre du 11 mai 2015 « America 1968-2015 – What has changed, What hasn’t ». Bien sûr l’élection de Barack Obama à la présidence du pays en 2008 est largement rapportée par les couvertures de journaux divers Newsweek, Ebony, Time, mais comparativement aux premières salles de l’exposition le contraste est patent. Par ailleurs, on se serait attendu à découvrir dans la dernière salle davantage de figures africaines-américaines intellectuelles, littéraires ou artistiques contemporaines. Par exemple, la personnalité, certes controversée, de l’intellectuel Cornell R. West, mais aussi celle du dramaturge engagé August Wilson (1945-2005). Ce dernier a reçu le prix Pulitzer une première fois en 1987 pour sa pièce Fences (1985) et une seconde fois pour The Piano Lesson (1990). Toutefois, ses prises de position dénonçant le monopole d’un théâtre blanc, c’est-à-dire de textes écrits par des dramaturges blancs mettant en scène des personnages blancs à l’intention d’un public blanc, lui ont valu quelque impopularité peu avant sa disparition4. Par ailleurs, les écrivaines Toni Morrison et Maya Angelou (1928-2014) sont peu, voire pas du tout, représentées. Pourtant la première a reçu le prix Nobel de Littérature en 1993 et le célèbre ouvrage de la seconde, I know why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), aurait tout à fait nourri le propos de l’exposition. Même William H. Cosby Jr. (né en 1937) aurait mérité d’être mentionné. Non seulement sa série télévisée à la diffusion internationale The Cosby Show, dans laquelle les personnages lisaient la revue Ebony, a joué un rôle considérable pour rendre populaire la communauté africaine-américaine. Mais plus encore, la prodigieuse collection d’œuvres d’art africain-américain que son épouse Camille O. et lui-même ont constituée réunit les plus grands noms des peintres africains-américains : depuis les tout premiers (Duncanson, Tanner) en passant par ceux de la Harlem Renaissance (Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, Charles White, Archibald J. Motley, Romare Bearden, Loïs Mailou Jones), jusqu’à des peintres beaucoup plus contemporains (notamment Faith Ringgold). Au reste, une partie de leur collection fut exposée en 2014 à Washington DC au Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. Elle permettait de voir la très célèbre toile de Henry O. Tanner The Thankful Poor (1894) représentant à la fin du XIXe siècle une famille africaine-américaine avec les personnages d’un père et son fils en train de prier avant d’entamer un repas. S’y trouvaient également plusieurs toiles d’Eldzier Cortor des années 1980, et même un assemblage de Faith Ringgold en hommage à Bill et Camille Cosby, Camille’s Husband’s Birthday Quilt (1988). Enfin, le dernier grand absent, certes français de naissance mais décédé à Bethesda, est le penseur Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). Son œuvre comportant son fondamental Peau noire Masques blancs (1952) a

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pourtant offert ses arguments majeurs à l’affirmation identitaire africaine-américaine telle qu’elle a été pensée et exprimée à partir des années 1960 dans les mouvements politiques, tels les Black Power, Black Panthers, et artistiques autour du Black Art. On signale ces absents parce qu’on espère que cette prodigieuse exposition d’art africain-américain sera la première de nombreuses à venir qui pourront resserrer le contenu sur certains artistes, ou bien sur des approches esthétiques ou thématiques. L’ambition d’initier le public français à l’art africain-américain et aux enjeux politiques qui en ont sous-tendu la production jusqu’aujourd’hui est réussie, et le pari muséal gagné : le désir de le découvrir plus avant est instillé.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

SHANNON, Sandra Garrett et WILLIAMS, Dana A., August Wilson and Black Aesthetics, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

SOUTIF, Daniel, The Color line – Les artistes africains-américains et la ségrégation (1865-2016), Paris, Flammarion, coll. Musée du quai Branly, 2016.

NOTES

1. Salle 1 d’introduction avec quatre objets dont une pièce de 1858 réalisée par David Drake, esclave et potier, composée d’un pot en argile, de cannes en bois et d’un bouquet de coton avec l’inscription humoristique autant que subversive : « Ce noble pot peut en contenir 20, remplissez- le d’argent et il vous le rendra bien ». Un tableau du peintre Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872), Uncle Tom and Little Eva (1853) en référence au roman paru un an plus tôt La Case de l’Oncle Tom de Harriet Beecher Stowe ; « Libre mais Noirs…. La Reconstruction » (salle 2) ; « Minstrels, Blackfaces et vaudevilles » (salle 3) ; « Premiers combats contre la ségrégation » (salle 4) ; « W. E. B. Du Bois à l’exposition universelle Paris 1900 » (salle 5) comprenant des couvertures de The Crisis, une ambiance chapiteau pour l’exposition de photographies et de graphiques présentés dans l’Exposition des Nègres d’Amérique lors de l’Exposition universelle de Paris 1900. Petite enclave mettant en dialogue des lithographies avec des pièces littéraires, comme par exemple The Negros Speaks of Rivers, encre sur papier réalisée par Aaron Douglas en 1941 pour illustrer le poème du même nom de Langston Hugues. « Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, et autres sportifs » (salle 6) ; « La Grande Guerre 1914-18 » (salle 7) ; « Harlem Renaissance : “le New Negro” » (salle 8) ; « Un cinéma séparé » (salle 9) ; « Strange fruit : l’héritage des lynchages » (salle 10) ; « Après la Grande Migration, la Guerre mondiale » (salle 11) ; « Harlem on their Minds » (salle 12) ; « En chemin vers les “Civil Rights” » (salle 13) ; « Black is beautiful : Black Power, Black Muslims, Black Panthers » (salle 14) ; « Contemporains et Africains-américains » (salle 15). 2. Notamment les essais The Souls of Black Folk (1903) de W.E. B. Du Bois et The New Negro (1925) d’Alain Locke. 3. La collection des œuvres de Dox Thrash (1893-1963) constituée par Samuel et Sally Nowak permet d’apprécier la diversité des techniques utilisées par l’artiste. De nombreuses pièces de Lawrence montrent également la variété de ses techniques (gouache ou tempera sur papier) et

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par ailleurs, sont projetés les 60 panneaux composant sa série The Great Migration (1940-44). Tout au long de l’exposition, on retrouve plusieurs séries du dessinateur humoristique Oliver W. Harrington (1912-1995). 4. Sur la dimension politique de l’œuvre de Wilson et sur son influence sur l’esthétique africaine- américaine, voir l’ouvrage édité par Sandra Garrett Shannon et Dana A. Williams, August Wilson and Black Aesthetics, NYC, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

INDEX

Keywords : african-american art, painting, sculpture, literature, american history, hybridity, Harlem Renaissance Mots-clés : art africain-américain, peinture, sculpture, littérature, histoire américaine, hybridité, Harlem Renaissance Thèmes : Trans’Arts

AUTEUR

ÉGLANTINE MORVANT Chercheuse indépendante

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La Peinture américaine des années 1930 Exposition du 12 octobre 2016 au 30 janvier 2017 au Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris

Muriel Adrien

1 En ces temps où les regards et interrogations sont très largement tournés vers l’Amérique, voilà que le Musée de l’Orangerie organise jusqu’au 30 janvier 2017, en collaboration avec l’Art Institute de Chicago et la Royal Academy à Londres, une exposition sur la peinture américaine des années 1930. Sont présentées une cinquantaine de toiles issues de collections muséales américaines (l’Art Institute à Chicago, le Whitney Museum, le Museum of Modern Art à New-York...) et de collections particulières. Le commissariat en a été assuré par Judith A. Barter, conservatrice du département de l’art américain à l’Art Institute of Chicago, laquelle a initié le projet, et par Laurence des Cars, conservateur général du patrimoine, directrice du Musée de l’Orangerie.

2 Les années 1930, qui sont celles de la Grande Dépression, connaissent, comme par un effet d’ironie, une forte vitalité artistique, caractérisée à la fois par l’ouverture de plusieurs musées et galeries de premier plan et par une production picturale abondante. La peinture aux États-Unis est alors encore très largement figurative — même si elle est traversée par l’influence des avant-gardes européennes — et en recherche de la définition de son histoire et de son art. L’ensemble que nous propose l’exposition est également émaillé d’œuvres qui contiennent les prémisses des mouvements artistiques qui allaient propulser l’Amérique sur le devant de la scène peu de temps après.

Scénographie de l’exposition

3 Du point de vue de la scénographie, le décor des salles ne reflète en rien la crudité et la rudesse de la Grande Dépression: le visiteur déambule sur une moquette dans une ambiance ouatée. Le cadre du tableau de Hopper illustrant une salle de cinéma (New

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York Movie — 1939) semble faire miroir à l’expérience du visiteur : on vient se régaler les yeux dans une atmosphère de confort feutrée malgré l’âpreté du contexte économique des tableaux. Par ailleurs, l’éclairage tamisé, bien étudié, a le mérite de rendre les tableaux et leur texture très visibles.

Edward Hopper (1882-1967), New York Movie, 1939

Huile sur toile, 81.9 x 101.9 cm

New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Given anonymously. Acc. n.: 396.1941.

© 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

4 Les cartels sont clairs et riches en explications et en chronologies : on comprend que le propos est de situer les œuvres dans leur contexte (économique, politique, social, culturel). Le souhait de Laurence des Cars est de donner au public des jalons historiques nécessaires à l’inscription de ces peintures dans leur cadre spatio-temporel. On y voit que cette époque malmenée par la crise économique produit des œuvres qui ne la reflètent souvent qu’indirectement, et qui peuvent être — stylistiquement et thématiquement — aux antipodes les unes des autres.

5 À la fin de l’exposition, une sorte de sas de transition donne à voir les deux pôles de l’art américain à venir : le réalisme mélancolique d’un tableau de Hopper et, en contrepoint, un tableau abstrait de Pollock, les deux préfigurant, respectivement, l’esthétique commerciale du Pop Art et l’énergie de l’expressionisme abstrait. En aparté, malgré quelques effets d’annonce, Hopper est finalement peu représenté au regard de sa notoriété (deux tableaux), peut-être pour éviter les redites ou répétitions : une exposition monographique lui avait été consacrée fin 2012-début 2013 au Grand Palais.

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Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Gas, 1940

Huile sur toile, 66.7 x 102.2 cm

New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. 577.1943

© 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

6 Les œuvres de l’exposition sont concomitantes avec l’apparition du cinéma parlant et du procédé en Technicolor : le visiteur est finalement conduit dans une toute dernière salle où sont projetés quelques extraits de films-culte des années 1930, relevant soit du réalisme social, soit de la comédie légère. Cette mise en relation des peintures avec les films hollywoodiens de l’époque (réalistes, historiques, fantastiques…) est spécifique au Musée de l’Orangerie et n’était pas présente dans l’exposition de Chicago.

7 Le lien avec le cinéma est souligné, que ce soit par les thèmes des tableaux (par exemple, celui de New York Movie (1939) de Hopper, celui de Reginald Marsh, Twenty Cent Movie (1936)), par cette inclusion d’extraits filmiques en fin de parcours ou par la programmation de films en marge de l’exposition proprement dite ;

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Reginald Marsh (1898-1954), In Fourteenth Street, 1934

Tempera à l’œuf sur panneau, 91.1 x 101 cm

New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Gift of Mrs. Reginald Marsh. 262.1957

© 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence © ADAGP, Paris 2016

Reginald Marsh (1898-1954), Twenty Cent Movie, 1936

Crayon carbone, encre et huile sur panneau de particules, 76.2 × 101.6 cm

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Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 37.43a b

© 2016 Estate of Reginald Marsh / Art Students League, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York © ADAGP, Paris 2016

8 le lien avec la danse (Dance Marathon (1934) de Philip Evergood) et le jazz également (les rythmes syncopés de Swing Music – Louis Armstrong (1938) de Arthur Dove), que ce soit via les sujets dépeints ou, une fois de plus, via la programmation de concerts prévus par le musée.

Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Swing Music (Louis Armstrong), 1938

Emulsion, huile et cire sur toile, 44.8 x 65.7 cm

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection

© The Art Institute of Chicago

9 En cette période sombre que sont les années 1930, l’industrie du divertissement est en effet un moyen de se changer les idées et de fabriquer des fictions de substitution, dont le caractère moral fait d’ailleurs parfois polémique avant l’instauration du code Hays en 1934.

10 Si les liens avec le cinéma, la danse et la musique sont bien évoqués, les relations de la peinture ou des peintres avec la photographie ne sont pour ainsi dire pas développées — tout au plus sont-elles furtivement mentionnées dans les cartels d’explication. Est-ce un parti-pris ? L’association de certains de ces peintres avec la photographie est très forte : Sheeler est parfois mieux connu en tant que photographe qu’en tant que peintre. Georgia O’Keeffe était la seconde femme d’Alfred Stieglitz, lequel eut un rôle déterminant dans la promotion et l’évolution de la photographie et de la peinture aux États-Unis. Il disait de Georgia O’Keeffe qu’elle était la première artiste authentiquement américaine, dans la mesure où elle n’avait jamais mis les pieds hors du continent américain et où elle tirait son inspiration de la terre même de l’Amérique,

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celle du Sud-Ouest qui plus est. C’est en grande partie grâce à lui qu’elle dut sa renommée, ainsi que Sheeler qui faisait également partie du cercle de Stieglitz. Le photographe n’eut de cesse d’encourager et de promouvoir leur art dans ses galeries new-yorkaises. Le travail des photographes de la FSA, conséquent et déterminant lors de la Grande Dépression, n’est pas non plus pris en compte.

L’art américain face à l’art européen de l’époque

11 La création des grands musées américains (MoMA en 1929, Whitney Museum of American Art en 1931…) sont contemporains du Musée de l’Orangerie, constitué en 1927. Cependant, la comparaison s’arrête là : l’exposition nous permet de mesurer l’écart entre l’évolution de l’art européen et de l’art américain à la même époque. L’art américain reste encore majoritairement réaliste, en quête de figuration de son identité et de son histoire, puis peu après basculera dans le Pop Art ou l’expressionnisme abstrait, là où la transition se fait beaucoup plus graduellement pour l’art européen. Jouxtant l’exposition, au sein-même du musée, les 144 toiles de la collection rassemblée par J. Walter et P. Guillaume nous le rappellent, si besoin en était : il s’agit d’œuvres qui ont négocié le tournant de l'impressionnisme à l'art abstrait (Cézanne, Renoir, Douanier Rousseau, Matisse, Derain, Picasso, Modigliani, Soutine, Utrillo, etc.).

12 De nombreux artistes américains de cette génération se sont rendus en Europe, y compris les régionalistes comme Grant Wood ou Thomas Hart Benton. Si l’influence européenne est relativement discrète dans les premières salles, elle se fait fortement sentir sur la fin, à la fois dans ses thèmes (Mussolini dans The Eternal City (1934-37) de Peter Blume, Lénine dans Phoenix (1935) de Oswaldo Louis Gugliemi, Guernica dans Mental Geography de Gugliemi (1938)…) et dans l’inspiration stylistique (surréalisme dans par exemple The Double Portrait of the Artist in Time (1935), biomorphisme à la Miró dans Indian Composition N°6 (1938) de George L.K. Morris, cubisme…).

Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981), Study for the Hall of Medical Sciences Mural at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, 1938-39

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Huile sur toile, 76.2 x 121.9 cm

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Wilson L. Mead Fund

© The Art Institute of Chicago © ADAGP Paris 2016

13 L’influence européenne s’exerce alors de manière encore unilatérale, mais on voit néanmoins poindre chez les artistes américains une volonté d’affirmation d’un art national affranchi des canons européens : il émerge très nettement un souhait de se détourner des avant-gardes européennes et de se singulariser en tant qu’art spécifiquement américain. Ainsi, cet art s’adosse au modernisme européen mais se construit également en opposition. Stuart Davis ou Charles Demuth combinent une inspiration moderniste ou cubiste et un attachement à la terre d’origine. Les qualités formelles et la stylisation de la structure empruntent au cubisme mais le paysage est encore tout à fait reconnaissable en tant que paysage national. Les toiles de O’Keeffe ou Marsden Hartley ont des thématiques et une palette patriotiques.

Une synthèse de la peinture américaine des années 1930

14 De manière générale, l’ensemble tient en équilibre sur une ligne de crête incertaine, penchant tantôt vers le passé, tantôt vers l’avenir. L’on peut relever plusieurs courants simultanés, lesquels évoluent de manière croisée plus que de façon parallèle : par exemple, l’un est tourné vers l’histoire du pays, cherchant à fixer sur la toile certains mythes ou archétypes fondateurs ou encore des images d’Épinal américaines, un autre est plus dénonciateur de la situation contemporaine, un autre encore est happé par l’avenir.

15 Le courant auquel est accordée une place de choix — les premières salles — est celui d’un art figuratif cherchant à définir ou à narrer les États-Unis en cette période de bicentenaire de la naissance de George Washington (1932). Il suffit, pour s’en convaincre, de regarder les thèmes (les épopées folkloriques telles que La Chevauchée nocturne de Paul Revere, les Shakers, Thanksgiving - auxquels on veut encore croire en cette période troublée) ou les titres (Paysage américain de Charles Sheeler).

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Grant Wood (1891-1942), The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931

Huile sur masonite, 76 x 101,1 cm

New-York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arthur Hoppock Hearn

Fund photo

© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image of the MMA

Doris Lee (1905-1983), Thanksgiving, vers 1935

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Huile sur toile, 71.3 x 101.8 cm

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan

Purchase Prize Fund

© The Art Institute of Chicago

16 Vestiges d’années plus fastes, les motifs indigènes ou les arts décoratifs et populaires — qui font alors l’objet d’un regain d’intérêt nostalgique tout particulier chez les amateurs de collections — ont la part belle en ces temps de crise, pendant que les régionalistes célèbrent les paysages américains du Midwest. L’État n’était pas en reste, avec les commandes du Public Works of Art Project de l’administration Roosevelt ou la fondation des National Archives en 1934. Par exemple, la fresque murale d’Ilya Bolotowsky Study for the Hall of Medical Sciences Mural at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York (1938-1939) fut peinte dans le cadre de la Works Progress Administration créée en 1935. La WPA fournissait à de nombreux artistes un gagne-pain bienvenu même si plus tard certains artistes tels que Robert Motherwell rejetteront l’esthétique réaliste prônée par cette institution.

17 Qui dit ‘paysage’, dit ‘pays’, dit ‘terre’ : les œuvres de la première salle montrent comment l’invention par la peinture de l’identité américaine se fait souvent en relation avec le sol américain au sens littéral du terme. Les charrues des paysages des régionalistes labourent les champs tout comme elles paraissent percer la surface picturale. Les fleurs de la peinture de Georgia O’Keeffe sont peintes avec des pigments qui semblent directement issus de la terre elle-même (Red Hill with Flowers (1937)) ; elle peint la flore et la faune qui poussent sur le sol américain, qui y meurent, qui le constituent; elle nomme Great American Things les crânes animaux, memento mori destinés à devenir poussière, à devenir terre américaine.

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Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses,1931

Huile sur toile, 91.4 x 61 cm

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, don de

Georgia O' Keeffe

© The Art Institute of Chicago © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / ADAGP Paris 2016

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), Red Hills with Flowers, 1937

Huile sur toile, 50.8 x 63.5 cm

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, legs d’Hortense Henry Prosser

© The Art Institute of Chicago © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / ADAGP Paris 2016

18 L’importance de la terre nous est aussi rappelée en fin de parcours par la dernière scène du film Gone with the Wind.

19 S’ils cherchent une identité propre aux USA, les peintres de paysage, contrairement aux photographes de la FSA dont la mission est de montrer la misère des populations des grandes plaines et du Dust Bowl, n’illustrent que très peu la Grande Dépression, et rares sont les indices des fléaux qui frappent et dévastent l’Amérique. Au contraire, tout du moins dans la sélection opérée par les commissaires d’exposition, les peintures regorgent de paysages bucoliques généreux aux formes rebondies et présentent le Midwest comme un idéal arcadien, un mythe pastoral, un pays de cocagne et d’abondance — soit par déni, soit pour offrir un contrepoint-refuge en ces temps moroses : par exemple, Young Corn et Fall Plowing (1931) de Grant Wood sont

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contemporains d’une des sécheresses les plus dramatiques de la Grande Dépression. À l’urbanisation, l’industrialisation capitaliste, la « colonisation esthétique » de l’Europe, ils opposent les paysages agraires de l’Amérique profonde, avec ses valeurs protestantes conservatrices, les vertus du travail et de la frugalité. Même les quelques rares paysages colorés de Thomas Hart Benton présentés dans l’exposition sont ondulants, sensuels et souriants, un peu à la manière des dessins animés chez cet homme qui fut un temps cartoonist, et la critique acerbe de ses tableaux, quand critique il y a, ne saute pas aux yeux immédiatement.

Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), Cotton Pickers,1945

Huile sur toile, 81.3 x 121.9 cm

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago

© The Art Institute of Chicago © T.H. and R.P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / ADAGP Paris 2016

20 Parallèlement, dans une veine plus moderniste, les tableaux d’usines des précisionnistes Charles Demuth ou Charles Sheeler montrent un paysage industriel ordonné, streamlined, aseptisé, sans aucune allusion aux conflits sociaux qui secouent l’Amérique à l’époque, et d’ailleurs quasiment sans présence humaine. Aucun militantisme dans ces scènes qui illustrent des usines au moment où ailleurs les ouvriers s’organisent activement. Ces images simultanément abstraites et figuratives, à l’inspiration cubiste, sont contemporaines de l’exposition « Machine-Age » à New York en 1927 qui, rassurante, glorifie la puissance industrielle de la nation américaine.

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Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), American Landscape, 1930

Huile sur toile, 61 x 78.8 cm

New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Acc. n.: 166.193

© 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

21 La géométrie rigide et rigoureuse est également une marque de fabrique de la ville américaine, d’après l’essai The Americanization of Art de Louis Lozowick en 1927.

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Charles Demuth (1883-1935), ...And the Home of the Brave, 1931

Huile et graphite sur toile, 74.8 x 59.7 cm

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, don de

Georgia O'Keeffe

© The Art Institute of Chicago

22 Plus loin, les tableaux de la Harlem Renaissance témoignent avec force de l’émergence d’une culture noire qui puise son inspiration dans l’art africain et privilégie l’art primitif ou faussement naïf, entrevu entre autres lors de l’exposition au MOMA en 1935, « African Negro Art ».

Charles Demuth (1883-1935), ...And the Home of the Brave, 1931

Huile et graphite sur toile, 74.8 x 59.7 cm

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, don de

Georgia O'Keeffe

© The Art Institute of Chicago

23 La violence du sort des Noirs n’y est pas beaucoup dénoncée, si ce n’est sous la forme d’ombres chinoises dans Aspiration (1936) de Aaron Douglas, qui privilégie l’optimisme et le rêve d’une nouvelle ‘City upon a hill’, clamée et réclamée par les Afro-Américains lettrés.

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Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), Aspiration, 1936

Huile sur toile, 152.4 x 152.4 cm

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco art

© Heirs of Aaron Douglas/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY © ADAGP, Paris 2016

24 Ces omissions volontaires ou points aveugles en disent long sur l’état d’esprit américain de l’époque. Ceci n’empêche pas certaines œuvres d’être ambivalentes, nostalgiques et acerbes, et parfois auto-réflexives : hommages et satires à la fois, à l’instar du tableau iconique American Gothic de Grant Wood, tableau phare de l’exposition, montré pour la première fois hors des États-Unis.

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Grant Wood (1891-1942), American Gothic, 1930 Huile sur panneau d’aggloméré, 78 x 65.3 cm Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection © The Art Institute of Chicago

25 Quelques tableaux relevant du réalisme social, grinçants ou anxiogènes, portent sur les difficultés économiques et politiques, mais ils sont plutôt placés en deuxième partie. En vrac, on trouve le militantisme ouvrier chez, par exemple, Joe Jones avec ses dockers de St Louis dans Roustabouts (1934) ou chez Alice Neel avec le portrait de Pat Whalen (1935). American Justice (1933) de Joe Jones, paradoxalement d’un chromatisme luxuriant, est un réquisitoire contre le système judiciaire et une dénonciation des exactions du Ku Klux Klan, lequel perpètre toutes sortes d’atrocités dans les années 1930.

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Joe Jones (1909-1963), American Justice, 1933

Huile sur toile, 76,2 x 91,4 cm

Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, achat du musée, Derby Fund, à la Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art 1930-1970

© Reproduced with the permission of James Jones

26 Les monstres désarticulés et maniéristes de Dance Marathon de Philip Evergood (1934), que l’appât du gain réduit à l’état de pantins agonisants, les accidents de voiture dépeints par Death on the Ridge Road (1935) de Grant Wood, les autoportraits d’artistes — depuis le clown fantomatique d’un Walt Kuhn bientôt interné, à celui boursouflé et putrescent d’Ivan Albright — sont autant de visions cauchemardesques et macabres.

Walt Kuhn (1877-1949), Portrait of the Artist as a Clown (Kansas), 1932

Huile sur toile, 81 x 56 cm

© Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth

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Ivan Albright (1897-1983), Self-Portrait, 1935

Huile sur toile, 77.2 x 50.5 cm

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Mary and Earle Ludgin Collection

© The Art Institute of Chicago

27 Cette veine de l’horreur gothique et de la sauvagerie, l’industrie filmique l’exploitera sans vergogne.

Morris Kantor (1896-1974), Haunted House, 1930

Huile sur toile, 94.3 x 84.5 cm

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan

Purchase Prize Fund

© The Art Institute of Chicago

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28 La peur d’une contamination du fascisme imprègne les tableaux à teneur surréaliste des peintres immigrés Paul Guglielmi, Federico Castellon, ou encore le tondo de Philip Guston représentant Guernica.

Oswaldo Louis Guglielmi (1906-1956), Phoenix (Portrait in the Desert; Lenin), 1935

Huile sur toile, 76.2 x 63.8 cm

Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NAA-Nelle

Cochrane Woods

Memorial, N-275.1969

Photo © Sheldon Museum of Art

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Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi (1906-1956), Mental Geography, 1938

Huile sur masonite, 91 x 61 cm

Collection privée

© Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth

29 L’ensemble a beau être à dominante réaliste, certains tableaux tels que Wrigley’s (1937) du Concretionist Charles Green Shaw préfigurent les courants artistiques qui rencontreront le succès que l’on connaît, qu’il s’agisse du Pop Art ou de l’expressionisme abstrait.

Charles Green Shaw (1892-1974), Wrigley’s, 1937

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Huile sur toile, 76.2 x 114.3 cm

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, don restreint de la Alsdorf

Foundation

© The Art Institute of Chicago

30 L’exposition nous montre parfois le maître et l’élève et l’on mesure le chemin parcouru. Parmi les élèves de Benton figurait Pollock, également influencé par la peinture murale de David Alfaro Siqueiros et les techniques sur sable amérindiennes. Hopper et les surréalistes se disent proches les uns des autres, mais Gas Station séduira surtout les tenants du Pop Art.

Actualité de l’exposition

31 Pour finir, il est émouvant que les musées nord-américains aient consenti à prêter des œuvres qui relèvent des récits de l’histoire nationale. Ces œuvres en quête d’une identité culturelle contiennent en germe les orientations que prendra une scène artistique qui détrônera Paris sous peu. Dans les années 1930, elles sont contemporaines d’une volonté de s’emparer des questions artistiques, comme en témoignent l’ouverture des divers musées et galeries (An American Place de Stieglitz par exemple) ainsi que les expositions de l’époque.

32 L’ensemble touche à plusieurs cordes sensibles, parfois en contrepoint l’une de l’autre, et la dynamique de la visite s’apparente à la gestuelle d’un funambule. Les conservateurs ont eu le nez creux puisque l’ensemble qui nous est présenté peut se lire facilement à travers le prisme de l’actualité brûlante : les tableaux ont avec nos temps incertains une résonance toute particulière. Sans doute ces échos avec la situation présente étaient-ils pressentis par les conservatrices. La marque d’une exposition vivante (dans le sens où l’on parle d’une langue vivante) est précisément sa capacité à inscrire les œuvres du passé dans le présent et à faire dialoguer entre eux ces différents moments de l’histoire, celui des œuvres, celui des visiteurs, dans un échange sensible et animé.

33 C’est paradoxalement la France qui accueille ces œuvres contemporaines d’une époque où l’art français qui voyageait aux États-Unis était l’objet d’une fascination autant qu’il fonctionnait comme repoussoir dans la recherche des peintres américains d’un art propre à leur pays ; ces œuvres qui témoignent d’un enracinement américain fort et d’une volonté de s’affranchir de la vieille Europe, jusqu’à peut-être la supplanter, font du musée français de l’Orangerie le dépositaire, le temps de l’exposition, de ces interrogations, clamées et affichées.

34 Un autre compte-rendu de cette exposition, plus journalistique, est paru fin janvier 2017 dans la revue The Conversation. Il faisait suite à une journée d’étude organisée le 17 janvier 2017 autour de l’exposition au Musée de l’Orangerie par Géraldine Chouard (Université Paris- Dauphine), Didier Aubert (Université Paris-Sorbonne Nouvelle) et Jennifer Donnelly (Université Paris-Diderot). Un dossier spécial consacré à cet événement, composé de lectures d'une douzaine de tableaux, sera publié dans le prochain numéro de Transatlantica.

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INDEX

Keywords : Musée de l’Orangerie, Art Institute of Chicago, Great Depression, Ku Klux Klan, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, Marvin Cone, Joe Jones, Charles Sheeler, Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas Thèmes : Trans’Arts Mots-clés : Musée de l’Orangerie, Art Institute of Chicago, Grande Dépression, Ku Klux Klan, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, Marvin Cone, Joe Jones, Charles Sheeler, Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas

AUTEUR

MURIEL ADRIEN Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès

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