Allegories of Temporality: Philippe Jaccottet and the Poetics of the Notebook

Abstract

Without hesitation, critics of contemporary French poetry have placed Philippe Jaccottet squarely in the tradition of German Romanticism. According to Jean-Claude Mathieu, Jaccottet prolongs Romanticism (100) while for Peter Low, Jaccottet's elegiac tone and his nostalgia for a lost plenitude are H61derlin revisited (61). The poet himself foregrounds the Germanic influences on his work, citing Novalis, for instance, when he evokes the poetic function in La Promenade sous les arbres: Le Paradis est dispers6 sur toute la terre, c'est pourquoi nous ne le reconnaissons plus. II faut reunir ses traits epars (28). For most critics, this last quote has served as a kind of unofficial poetics for Jaccottet's project as a whole, one that defines writing as a gathering together of a disseminated unity. It is not surprising that Jaccottet would be identified as a neo-Romantic, or that he would be linked to a tradition that posits the poet as self-present visionary, scribe of the a-temporal transcendent insaisissable.' What is surprising, however, is that contemporary critics would neglect to search for the kind of disruptive ironies and subversive dismantlings of the self-present subject that have recently been located in the works of Jaccottet's predecessors, Rousseau, H6lderlin and Goethe. Critical assessments that neglect to problematize Jaccottet's explicit celebrations of unity treat only one moment in a dialectical poetics.2 Such assessments obscure a crucial, perhaps the crucial aspect of Jaccottet's work, absenting him from critical discussions that