City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2016 Unidentified erbalV Objects: Contemporary French Poetry, Intermedia, and Narrative Eric Lynch Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/764 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] UNIDENTIFIED VERBAL OBJECTS: CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY, INTERMEDIA, AND NARRATIVE by ERIC LYNCH A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 © 2016 Eric Lynch All Rights Reserved Lynch ii UNIDENTIFIED VERBAL OBJECTS: CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY, INTERMEDIA, AND NARRATIVE by Eric Lynch This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in French to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. January 26, 2016 ____________________________________ Mary Ann Caws Chair of Examining Committee January 26, 2016 ____________________________________ Francesca Sautman Executive Officer ____________________________________ Peter Consenstein ____________________________________ Evelyne Ender Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Lynch iii Abstract UNIDENTIFIED VERBAL OBJECTS: CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY, INTERMEDIA, AND NARRATIVE By Eric Lynch Adviser: Mary Ann Caws This dissertation examines the vital experimental French poetry of the 1980s to the present. Whereas earlier twentieth century poets often shunned common speech, poets today seek instead to appropriate, adapt, and reorganize a wide variety of contemporary discourses. Narrative also reemerges both in hybridized writing fusing prose and verse and in sequences of digressions and anecdotes. Poetic form becomes specific to a given text as poets adapt techniques from other fields, such as the visual arts, and integrate a wide array of media into literary works. In recent pieces, poets such as Emmanuel Hocquard and Olivier Cadiot incorporate new media into works that move literature from the book to video and performance spaces. I argue that these new poetic activities challenge traditional definitions of poetry as lyrical expression through formal innovation and alternative concepts of identity and affect. Lynch iv Acknowledgements This dissertation features material adapted from published articles. A section of chapter three has been adapted as an article entitled, “Olivier Cadiot’s Robinson, or A Portrait of the Artist as ‘Auto–usine,’”L’Esprit créateur. 54.1 (2014): 86-99. Print. A portion of chapter four has been adapted as an article entitled, “Nathalie Quintane: « Nous », le peuple,” Marges. (2015): 96-105. Print. Lynch v Table of Contents I. Introduction. p. 1. II. Chapter One: Emmanuel Hocquard: Towards a Grammar of Intermedia Poetics. p. 39. III. Chaper Two: Jean-Marie Gleize and the Site of the Enigma. p. 93. IV. Chapter Three: Olivier Cadiot, or A Portrait of the Artist as “Auto-usine.” p. 136. V. Chapter Four: Nathalie Quintane: Poetry as Political Speculation. p. 181. VI. Conclusion: Passages between Poetry and the Visual Arts. p. 229. VII. Bibliography. p. 242. Lynch vi Lists of Figures Figure 1: Hocquard, Emmanuel, and Juliette Valéry. Le Commanditaire. Paris: P.O.L, 1993. Print. Unpaginated. Figure 2: Ibid. Unpaginated. Figure 3: Ibid. Unpaginated. Figure 4: Hocquard, Emmanuel, and Alexandre Delay. Le Voyage à Reykjavik : Chronique. Paris: P.O.L, 1997. Print, ii. Figure 5: Ibid. 47-49; 52. Figure 6: Ibid. 68-9. Figure 7: Gleize, Jean-Marie. Néon, actes et légendes. Paris: Seuil, 2004. Print, 94-5. Figure 8: Gleize, Jean-Marie. Tanac, un acte préparatoire. Paris: Seuil, 2011. Print, 40-1. Figure 9: Cadiot, Olivier. Un mage en été. Paris: P.O.L., 2010. Print, 90-1. Figure 10: Ibid. 142-3; 150-1. Figure 11: Guerrin, Michel (text) and Zaouar, Hocine (photograph). “Une madone en enfer,” Le Monde. 26 September 1997. Print. Figure 12: L’Express. August 1972. Photograph. Lynch vii Introduction Poetry in the Age of the OVNI Contemporary French Poetry This dissertation examines the vital experimental French poetry of the 1980s to the present. Whereas earlier twentieth century poets often shunned common speech, many poets today seek instead to appropriate, adapt, and reorganize a wide variety of contemporary discourses. Narrative also reemerges both in hybridized writing fusing prose and verse and in sequences of digressions and anecdotes. Poetic form becomes specific to a given text as poets adapt techniques from other fields, such as the visual arts, and integrate a wide array of media into literary works. In recent works, poets such as Emmanuel Hocquard and Olivier Cadiot incorporate new media into pieces that move literature from the book to video and performance spaces. These new poetic creations have garnered the name OVNIs, the French for UFO, for their radical formal experimentation. In the short-lived journal Revue de littérature générale (RLG, 1995-6), editors Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi theorize the assembly of literary constructs outside of preexisting forms, naming the resulting works “unidentified verbal objects (Objets verbaux non-identifié or OVNI).” These works operate fusions of texts from a range of registers alongside non-linguistic elements. Individual pieces often develop unique methods of transposing another art’s techniques into written form, or alternatively, of fusing poetry with other media, such as photography, video, audio recording, and the internet. Whereas twentieth- century avant-garde poets collaborated with other artists - incorporating, for example, pictorial or musical elements into literature - contemporary poets have intensified these interactions to the point of leaving behind the book itself. While poetry in book form continues to flourish, writing Lynch 1 that foregoes the page, such as performance or digital poetry, creates new possibilities for the creation and reception of poetic texts. By drawing on multimedia technology, literature moves to a period “après le livre,” in the words of François Bon (Après le livre). Simultaneously, contemporary poetry within the book embraces narrative to move beyond traditional notions of genre. Differing from prose poetry, these texts experiment with the distribution of text on the page, while also using sequences of digression. For example, Cadiot's Retour durable et défintif de l'être aimé, operates an innovative fusion of prose and verse within digressive, anecdotal passages. Thus, the “unidentified verbal object” is a highly adaptive literary concept that encompasses intermedia and narrative alongside other experimental, post-genre forms. French poetry may be seen as operating a loss of genre identity from the end of the nineteenth-century onward, a phenomenon that Mallarmé famously characterized as the crisis of verse. If this crisis seemed to strike the heart of what defined poetry throughout much of the 19th century, namely the twelve syllable poetic line articulated around a caesura, it also offered opportunities for formal experimentation. The emergence of prose poetry in works such as Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose and Rimbaud's Illuminations offered serious challenges to the dominance of the Alexandrine. Likewise, the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century emphasized continual formal innovation as an essential aesthetic criteria. Yet, in his La vieillesse d'Alexandre, poet Jacques Roubaud traces the persistence of meter in twentieth century poetry and undermines the radicality of formal innovations in movements such as Surrealism.1 While thematically these avant-garde movements were adventurous, Roubaud argues, they were often more conservative metrically than previously believed. Indeed, even as purporting to draw out experiences of radical psychological significance, these works often returned to deeply 1 La vieillesse d'Alexandre 151. Lynch 2 resonant forms like the alexandrine. While Oulipian formal experimentation holds certain affinities with the work of the four authors analyzed here (Roubaud is among the authors featured in Revue de littérature générale), they have generally sought to push beyond questions of verse and prose, bidding adieu to the aging Alexanderine. Outlining various possibilities for contemporary poetry, Jean-Marie Gleize advances the possibility of leaving behind all reference to the verse: “La troisième [possibilité] consiste à dire qu'il ne s'agit peut-être pas de continuer l'art des vers. Ou qu'il s'agit de savoir comment continuer la poésie d'après la poésie, ou la littérature après la poésie” (Sorties 50).2 Gleize traces not only a crisis of the verse but something like a crisis of the genre of poetry, where the question becomes that of working with literature after poetry. For the four authors discussed here, Gleize, Emmanuel Hocquard, Olivier Cadiot, and Nathalie Quintane, vital experimental texts must necessarily push beyond the boundaries between poetry and its outsides, embracing the novel, photography, video, and other sources within the poem. Yet, this dissertation does not seek to merely address questions of poetic form, but rather interrogates broader developments in contemporary poetry in France. Ultimately, this work has three main