Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  The work of Saint-John Perse also bears a definite resemblance to that of Whitman—both in the nature of his stanza and in the rolling, cumulative force of his long syntactic breaths. If Larbaud in some sense domesticates Whitman, Saint-John Perse carries him beyond universalism into a quest for great cosmic harmonies. The voice of the poet is mythical in its scope, as if, with its thunderous and sumptuous rhetoric, it had come into being for the sole purpose of conquering the world. Unlike most of the poets of his generation, who made their peace with temporality and used the notion of change as the premise of their work, Saint-John Perse’s poems are quickened by an almost Platonic urge to seek out the eternal. In this respect, Milosz also stands to the side of his contemporaries. A student of the mystics and the alchemists, Milosz combines Catholicism and cabalism with what Kenneth Rexroth has described as “apocalyptic sensualism,” and his work draws much of its inspiration from numerological treatment of names, transpositions of letters, anagrammatic and acronymic combinations, and other linguistic practices of the occult. But, as with the poems of Yeats, the poetry itself transcends the restrictions of its sources, displaying, as John Peck has commented, “an obsessive range of feeling, in which personal melancholy is also melancholy for a crepuscular era, that long hour before first light ‘when the shadows decompose.’”

  Another poet who resists categorization is Segalen. Like Larbaud, who wrote his poems through an invented persona; like Pound, whose translations stand curiously among his best and most personal works, Segalen carried this impulse toward self-effacement one step further and wrote behind the mask of another culture. The poems to be found in Stèles are neither translations nor imitations, but French poems written by a French poet as if he were Chinese. There is no attempt to deceive on Segalen’s part; he never pretended these poems were anything other than original works. What at first reading might appear to be a kind of literary exoticism on closer scrutiny holds up as a poetry of solid, universal interest. By freeing himself from the limitations of his own culture, by circumventing his own historical moment, Segalen was able to explore a much wider territory—to discover, in some sense, that part of himself that was a poet.

  In many ways, the case of Jouve is no less unusual. A follower of the Symbolists as a young man, Jouve published a number of books of poetry between 1912 and 1923. What he described as a “moral, spiritual, and aesthetic crisis” in 1924 led him to break with all his early work, which he never allowed to be republished. Over the next forty years he produced a voluminous body of writing—his collected poems run well over a thousand pages. Deeply Christian in outlook, Jouve is primarily concerned with the question of sexuality, both as transgression and as creative force—“the beautiful power of human eroticism”—and his poetry is the first in France to have made use of the methods of Freudian psychoanalysis. It is a poetry without predecessors and without followers. If his work was somewhat forgotten during the period dominated by the Surrealists—which meant that recognition of Jouve’s achievement was delayed for almost a generation—he is now widely considered to be one of the major poets of the half-century.

  Supervielle was also influenced by the Symbolists as a young man, and of all the poets of his generation he is perhaps the most purely lyrical. A poet of space, of the natural world, Supervielle writes from a position of supreme innocence. “To dream is to forget the materiality of one’s body,” he wrote in 1951, “and to confuse to some degree the outer and the inner world … People are sometimes surprised over my marvelling at the world. This arises as much from the permanency of my dreams as from my bad memory. Both lead me from surprise to surprise, and force me to be amazed at everything.”

  It is this sense of amazement, perhaps, that best describes the work of these first eleven poets, all of whom began writing before World War I. The poets of the next generation, however, who came of age during the war itself, were denied the possibility of such innocent optimism. The war was not simply a conflict between armies but a profound crisis of values that transformed European consciousness, and the younger poets, while having absorbed the lessons of Apollinaire and his contemporaries, were compelled to respond to this crisis in ways that were without precedent. As Hugo Ball, one of the founders of Dada, noted in his diary in 1917: “A thousand-year-old culture disintegrates. There are no columns and no supports, no foundations anymore—they have all been blown up … The meaning of the world has disappeared.”

  The Dada movement, which began in Zurich in 1916, was the most radical response to this sense of spiritual collapse. In the face of a discredited culture, the Dadaists challenged every assumption and ridiculed every belief of that culture. As artists, they attacked the notion of art itself, transforming their rage into a kind of subversive doubt, filled with caustic humor and willful self-contradiction. “The true Dadaists are against Dada,” wrote Tzara in one of his manifestoes. The point was never to take anything at face value and never to take anything too seriously—especially oneself. The Socratic ironies of Marcel Duchamp’s art are perhaps the purest expression of this attitude. In the realm of poetry, Tzara was no less sly or rambunctious. This is his recipe for writing a Dada poem: “Take a newspaper. Take a pair of scissors. Select an article as long as you want your poem to be. Cut out the article. Then carefully cut out each of the words that form this article and put them in a bag. Shake gently. Then take out each scrap, one after the other. Conscientiously copy them in the order they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are, an infinitely original writer, with a charming sensibility, beyond the understanding of the vulgar.” If this is a poetry of chance, it should not be confused with the aesthetics of aleatory composition. Tzara’s proposed method is an assault on the sanctity of Poetry, and it does not attempt to elevate itself to the status of an artistic ideal. Its function is purely negative. This is anti-art in its earliest incarnation, the “anti-philosophy of spontaneous acrobatics.”

  Tzara moved to Paris in 1919, introducing Dada to the French scene. Breton, Aragon, Éluard, and Soupault all became participants in the movement. Inevitably, it did not last more than a few years. An art of total negation cannot survive, for its destructiveness must ultimately include itself. It was by drawing on the ideas and attitudes of Dada, however, that Surrealism became possible. “Surrealism is pure psychic automatism,” Breton wrote in his first manifesto of 1924, “whose intention is to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought and thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. Surrealism rests on the belief in the superior reality of certain previously neglected forms of association; in the omnipotence of dream, and in the disinterested play of thought.”

  Like Dada, Surrealism did not offer itself as an aesthetic movement. Equating Rimbaud’s cry to change life with Marx’s injunction to change the world, the Surrealists sought to push poetry, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, “to the utmost limits of possibility.” The attempt was to demystify art, to blur the distinctions between life and art, and to use the methods of art to explore the possibilities of human freedom. To quote Walter Benjamin again, from his prescient essay on the Surrealists published in 1929: “Since Bakunin, Europe has lacked a radical concept of freedom. The Surrealists have one. They are the first to liquidate the liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom, because they are convinced that ‘freedom, which on this earth can only be bought with a thousand of the hardest sacrifices, must be enjoyed unrestrictedly in its fullness, without any kind of programmatic calculation, as long as it lasts.’” For this reason, Surrealism associated itself closely with the politics of revolution (one of its magazines was even entitled Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution), flirting continually with the Communist Party and playing the role of fellow traveler during the era of the Popular Front—although refusing to submerge its identity in that of pure politics. Constant disputes over principles marked the history of the Surrealists, with Breton holding th
e middle ground between the activist and aesthetic wings of the group, frequently shifting positions in an effort to maintain a consistent program for Surrealism. Of all the poets associated with the movement, only Péret remained faithful to Breton over the long term. Soupault, by nature averse to the notion of literary movements, lost interest by 1927. Both Artaud and Desnos were excommunicated in 1929—Artaud for opposing Surrealism’s interest in politics and Desnos for supposedly compromising his integrity by working as a journalist. Aragon, Tzara, and Éluard all joined the Communist Party in the thirties. Queneau and Prévert parted amicably after a brief association. Daumal, whose work was recognized by Breton as sharing the preoccupations of the Surrealists, declined an invitation to join the group. Char, ten or twelve years younger than most of the original members, was an early adherent but later broke with the movement and went on to do his best work during and after the war. Ponge’s connection was peripheral, and Michaux, in some sense the most Surrealist of all French poets, never had anything to do with the group.

  This same confusion exists when one examines the work of these poets. If “pure psychic automatism” is the underlying principle of Surrealist composition, only Péret seems to have stuck to it rigorously in the writing of his poems. Interestingly, his work is the least resonant of all the Surrealists—notable more for its comic effects than for any uncovering of the “convulsive beauty” that Breton envisaged as the goal of Surrealist writing. Even in Breton’s poetry, with its abrupt shifts and unexpected associations, there is an undercurrent of consistent rhetoric that makes the poems cohere as densely reasoned objects of thought. With Tzara as well, automatism serves almost as a rhetorical device. It is a method of discovery, not an end in itself. In his best work—especially the long, multifaceted Approximate Man—a torrent of images organizes itself into a nearly systematic argument by means of repetition and variation, propelling itself forward in the manner of a musical composition.

  Soupault, on the other hand, is clearly a conscious craftsman. While limited in range, his poetry displays a charm and a humility absent in the work of the other Surrealists. He is a poet of intimacy and pathos, at times strangely reminiscent of Verlaine, and if his poems have none of the flamboyance to be found in Tzara and Breton, they are more immediately accessible, more purely lyrical. By the same token, Desnos is a poet of plain speech, whose work often achieves a stunning lyrical intensity. His output extends from early experiments with language (dexterous, often dazzling exercises in wordplay) to free-verse love poems of great poignancy to longer, narrative poems and works in traditional forms. In an essay published just one year before his death, Desnos described his work as an effort “to fuse popular language, even the most colloquial, with an inexpressible ‘atmosphere’; with a vital use of imagery, so as to annex for ourselves those domains which … remain incompatible with that fiendish, plaguing poetic dignity which endlessly oozes from tongues…”

  With Éluard, arguably the greatest of the Surrealist poets, the love poem is accorded metaphysical status. His language, as limpid as anything to be found in Ronsard, is built on syntactic structures of extreme simplicity. Éluard uses the idea of love in his work to mirror the poetic process itself—as a way both to escape the world and to understand it. It is that irrational part of man which weds the inner to the outer, rooted in the physical and yet transcending matter, creating that uniquely human place in which man can discover his freedom. These same themes are present in Éluard’s later work, particularly the poems written during the German occupation, in which this notion of freedom is carried from the realm of the individual to that of an entire people.

  If Éluard’s work can be read as a continuous whole, Aragon’s career as a poet divides into two distinct periods. Perhaps the most militant and provocative of the French Dadaists, he also played a leading role in the development of Surrealism and, after Breton, was the group’s most active theorist. Attacked by Breton in the early thirties for the increasingly propagandist tone of his poetry, Aragon withdrew from the movement and joined the Communist Party. It was not until the war that he returned to the writing of poetry—and in a manner that bears almost no relation to his earlier work. His Resistance poems brought him national fame, and they are distinguished by their force and eloquence, but in their methods they are highly traditional, composed for the most part in alexandrines and rhyming stanzas.

  Although Artaud was an early participant in Surrealism (for a time he even headed the Central Bureau for Surrealist Research) and although a number of his most important works were written during that period, he is a writer who stands so defiantly outside the traditional norms of literature that it is useless to label his work in any way. Properly speaking, Artaud is not a poet at all, and yet he has probably had a greater influence on the poets who came after him than any other writer of his generation. “Where others present their works,” he wrote, “I claim to do no more than show my mind.” His aim as a writer was never to create aesthetic objects—works that could be detached from their creator—but to record the state of mental and physical struggle in which “words rot at the unconscious summons of the brain.” There is no division in Artaud between life and writing—and life not in the sense of biography, of external events, but life as it is lived in the intimacy of the body, of the blood that flows through one’s veins. As such, Artaud is a kind of Ur-poet, whose work describes the processes of thought and feeling before the advent of language, before the possibility of speech. It is at once a cry of suffering and a challenge to all our assumptions about the purpose of literature.

  In a totally different way from Artaud, Ponge also commands a unique place among the writers of his generation. He is a writer of supremely classical values, and his work—most of it has been written in prose—is pristine in its clarity, highly sensitive to nuance and the etymological origins of words, which Ponge has described as the “semantical thickness” of language. Ponge has invented a new kind of writing, a poetry of the object that is at the same time a method of contemplation. Minutely detailed in its descriptions, and everywhere infused with a fine ironic humor, his work proceeds as though the object being examined did not exist as a word. The primary act of the poet, therefore, becomes the act of seeing, as if no one had ever seen the thing before, so that the object might have “the good fortune to be born into words.”

  Like Ponge, who has frequently resisted the efforts of critics to classify him as a poet, Michaux is a writer whose work escapes the strictures of genre. Floating freely between prose and verse, his texts have a spontaneous, almost haphazard quality that sets them against the pretensions and platitudes of high art. No French writer has ever given greater rein to the play of his imagination. Much of his best writing is set in imaginary countries and reads as a bizarre kind of anthropology of inner states. Although often compared to Kafka, Michaux does not resemble the author of Kafka’s novels and stories so much as the Kafka of the notebooks and parables. As with Artaud, there is an urgency of process in Michaux’s writing, a sense of personal risk and necessity in the act of composition. In an early statement about his poetry he declared: “I write with transport and for myself. a) sometimes to liberate myself from an intolerable tension or from a no less painful abandonment. b) sometimes for an imaginary companion, for a kind of alter ego whom I would honestly like to keep up-to-date on an extraordinary transition in me or in the world, which I, ordinarily forgetful, all at once believe I rediscover in, so to speak, its virginity. c) deliberately to shake the congealed and established, to invent … Readers trouble me. I write, if you like, for the unknown reader.”

  An equal independence of approach is present in Daumal, a serious student of Eastern religions, whose poems deal obsessively with the rift between spiritual and physical life. “The Absurd is the purest and most basic form of metaphysical existence,” he wrote, and in his dense, visionary work, the illusions of appearance fall away only to be transformed into further illusions. “The poems are haunted by a … conscious
ness of impending death,” Michael Benedikt has commented, “seen as the poet’s long-lost ‘double’; and also by a personification of death as a sort of sinister mother, an exacting being avaricious in her search for beings to extinguish—but only so as to place upon them perversely the burden of further metamorphoses.”

  Daumal is considered one of the chief precursors of the “College of Pataphysics,” a mock-secret literary organization inspired by Alfred Jarry that included both Queneau and Prévert among its members. Humor is the guiding principle in the work of these two poets. With Queneau, it is a linguistic humor, based on intricate wordplays, parody, feigned stupidity, and slang. In his well-known prose work of 1947, for example, Exercices de style, the same mundane event is given in ninety-nine different versions, each one written in a different style, each one presented from a different point of view. In discussing Queneau in Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes describes this style as “white writing”—in which literature, for the first time, has openly become a problem and question of language. If Queneau is an intellectual poet, Prévert, who also adheres closely to the patterns of ordinary speech in his work, is without question a popular poet—even a populist poet. Since World War II, no one has had a wider audience in France, and many of Prévert’s works have been turned into highly successful songs. Anticlerical, antimilitaristic, rebellious in political attitude, and extolling a rather sentimentalized form of love between man and woman, Prévert represents one of the more felicitous marriages between poetry and mass culture, and beyond the charm of his work, it is valuable as an indicator of popular French taste.