EXILE, NON-BELONGING AND STATELESSNESS IN GRANGAUD, JABÈS, LUBIN AND INJABÈS, LUBIN LUCA GRANGAUD, EXILE,AND NON-BELONGING STATELESSNESS ComParative Literature and CuLture ture L Cu ‘Kerr’s book is a major contribution to Francophone studies, and to modern poetry studies more generally, in its penetrating exploration of the migrant, the stateless, and the diasporic and writer ... Kerr opens readers’ eyes and minds to how poetry undoes national and linguistic orthodoxies and makes its counterblast.’ – Susan Harrow, University of Bristol At least since the Romantic era, poetry has often been understood as a powerful vector of collective belonging. The idea that certain poets are emblematic of a national culture is one of the chief means by which literature historicizes itself, inscribes itself in a shared cultural past and supplies modes of belonging to those who consume it. But what, then, of the exiled, migrant or translingual poet? How might writing in a language other than one’s Greg Kerr ComParative Literature mother tongue complicate this picture of the relation between poet, language and literary system? What of those for whom the practice of poetry is inseparable from a sense of restlessness or unease, suggesting a condition of not being at home in any one language, EXILE, NON-BELONGING even that of their mother tongue? These questions are crucial for four French-language poets whose work is the focus of this study: Armen Lubin (1903–74), Ghérasim Luca (1913–94), Edmond Jabès (1912–91) and AND STATELESSNESS IN Michelle Grangaud (1941–). Ranging across borders within and beyond the Francosphere – from Algeria to Armenia, to Egypt, to Romania – this book shows how a poetic practice inflected by exile, statelessness or non-belonging has the potential to disrupt long-held GRANGAUD, JABÈS, assumptions of the relation between subjects, the language they use and the place from which they speak. LUBIN AND LUCA Greg Kerr Greg Greg Kerr is Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow. He was co-editor of the Modern Languages Open special collection ‘Between borders: French-language poetry No man’s language and the poetics of statelessness’ in 2019 and is the author of the monograph Dream Cities: Utopia and prose by poets in nineteenth-century France (2013). m Cover design: www.ironicitalics.com Cover image: © zoom-zoom / iStock Exile, Non-Belonging and Statelessness in Grangaud, Jabès, Lubin and Luca COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CULTURE Series Editors TIMOTHY MATHEWS AND FLORIAN MUSSGNUG Comparative Literature and Culture explores new creative and critical perspectives on literature, art and culture. Contributions offer a comparative, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary focus, showcasing exploratory research in literary and cultural theory and history, material and visual cultures, and reception studies. The series is also interested in language-based research, particularly the changing role of national and minority languages and cultures, and includes within its publications the annual proceedings of the ‘Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies’. Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, UCL. Florian Mussgnug is Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature, UCL. Exile, Non-Belonging and Statelessness in Grangaud, Jabès, Lubin and Luca No man’s language Greg Kerr First published in 2021 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Text © Greg Kerr, 2021 Images © Copyright holders named in captions, 2021 Greg Kerr has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). This licence allows you to share and adapt the work for non-commercial use providing attribution is made to the author and publisher (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) and any changes are indicated. Attribution should include the following information: Kerr, G. 2021. Exile, Non-Belonging and Statelessness in Grangaud, Jabès, Lubin and Luca: No man’s language. London, UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111. 9781787356733 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creative commons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to re-use any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-78735-675-7 (Hbk) ISBN: 978-1-78735-674-0 (Pbk) ISBN: 978-1-78735-673-3 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-676-4 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-677-1 (mobi) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356733 Contents List of figures vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Solemn attestation: illness and statelessness in Armen Lubin 15 2 No grounds for looking: Edmond Jabès and the questioning of the image 57 3 ‘Brûler les états / Brûler les étapes’: Ghérasim Luca 101 4 Taking leave of one’s self: Michelle Grangaud between propre and commun 147 Conclusion 185 Index 191 CONTENTS v List of figures 2.1 Diagram from: Edmond Jabès, Le Livre des questions, II: Yaël; Elya; Aely; • (El, ou le dernier livre), Paris: Gallimard, 2008: 503. 84 2.2 Diagram from: Edmond Jabès, Le Livre des questions, II: Yaël; Elya; Aely; • (El, ou le dernier livre), Paris: Gallimard, 2008: 526. 84 2.3 Edmond Jabès, drawings. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France. 87 LIST OF FIGURES vii Acknowledgements This book was in large part made possible by the award of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship at the Analyse et traitement informatique de la langue française laboratory in Nancy during the academic year 2016–17. My primary personal debt of gratitude is to Véronique Montémont, without whose great expertise, support and inspiration (and deep knowledge of the work of Armen Lubin) the project would not have been possible in the first place. I would like to thank Gérard Malkassian for the opportunity to present some of this work at the Conférences du Salon seminar series, held at the Maison des étudiants arméniens at the Cité universitaire, Paris, and Krikor Beledian for a similar opportunity at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales. I am grateful to both for their numerous astute suggestions in relation to my research on Armen Lubin, and to Sophie Balastre and Johana Dunlop for their help on other matters Armenian. I wish to thank Nimet Frascaria Jabès and Viviane Jabès Crasson for permission to reproduce the drawings by Edmond Jabès in the chapter devoted to his writings, and Éditions Gallimard for permission to reproduce images from the Livre des questions. Much of the archival work on Armen Lubin and Ghérasim Luca was made possible by the permission of the late Arpik Missakian and of Micheline Catti to consult manuscripts at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet. Philippe Blanc and Dominique Nobécourt Mutarelli of that library were also extremely helpful, as were Anne Mary-Verdure and Guillaume Delaunay of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Further archival work at the Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides was made possible with the assistance of Aline Angoustures and Marie Gonzalez-Perez. Previous versions of some of the material contained in this book have appeared in the following articles, and I am grateful to the editors of those publications for permission to reproduce the material here: ‘“Travail d’abolition”: Illness and statelessness in Armen Lubin’, Irish Journal of ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix French Studies 14 (2014): 39–53, and (co-authored with Véronique Montémont) ‘Introduction [to special collection]: Between Borders: French-language poetry and the poetics of statelessness’, Modern Languages Open 1 (2019), http://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.208. I am grateful for exceptionally generous and insightful suggestions regarding drafts of some of the material from yasser elhariry, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Barnaby Norman, Éanna O’Ceallacháin and David Scott. A similar debt of gratitude is owed to the peer reviewers of this manuscript for their extensive comments. I also wish to thank Chris Penfold and the editorial team at UCL Press for their assistance in the final stages, and Jill Bowie for her superb copy-editing. Colleagues and friends at Nancy were a great source of support and encouragement during the academic year 2016–17, especially the following: Thomas Beuchot, Laurent Gobert, Toma Gotkova, Yan Greub, Sarah Kremer and Lou Lee. The advice and friendship of numerous colleagues at the University of Glasgow have been vital, as has the precious support of those close to me over this time. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 704528. x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Introduction At least since the age of European romanticism, poetry has often been understood as a powerful vector of collective belonging, particularly at the level of the nation. From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Taras Shevchenko to Alexander Pushkin to Dionysios Solomos, those figures consecrated by tradition as ‘national poets’ often stand in metonymic relation to a territory, a language and a literary system.