Blaise Cendrars 5 — Portraits de l'artiste

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Sous la direction de Claude Leroy. (La Revue des Lettres Modernes). Paris — Caen, Minard, 2003. 251 pp. Pb €22.00. This, as the title indicates, is a book of portraits: self-portraits, portraits by the artist, portraits of the artist. Cendrars himself appears as the artist of self-multiplication, of mystification, the fugitive from identity who, however, cannot bring himself to leave the scene of the crime. The volume opens with a section on the autoportrait. Luce Briche, to whose memory the collection is dedicated, plumbs the Cendrarsian mirror: the baleful accomplice of Medusa, the place of self-dissolution, the mirror of self-confrontation must be outwitted by Perseus' alternative mirror of oblique reflections and scattered rays, and by the multiperspectival hide-and-seek of language. Jacqueline Bernard constructs a Chinese portrait of Cendrars, of a self continually re-metaphorized in his writing (autofiction). In the hands of Renaud Ferreira de Oliveira, Cendrars assumes the guise of the hunter whose ultimate goal is the ‘prise de conscience de cette réversibilité du regard, par laquelle celui qui croit viser le monde est lui-même visé par une Conscience’. The second section is devoted to Cendrars the portraitist. For Frédéric-Jacques Temple, Cendrars is an ornithologist, for Michèle Touret the group portraitist of his Foreign Legion squad, for Jean-Carlo Flückiger the one who finds an ever-available, hypothetical alter ego in Charlot. We then move on to Cendrars as himself the portrait. Jay Bochner traces connections between Cendrars and the agents of American bohemia and counterculture, while his fame in Brazil, as Maria Teresa de Freitas observes, revolves around the paradox expressed by Mário de Andrade: ‘Et, poète français, il m'a libéré de la France’. Myriam Boucharenc explores the intricate interwovenness of the lives of Cendrars and Soupault, with their little betrayals, and Fabrice Humbert ponders Louis de Calaferte's adoption of Cendrars as a spiritual father, despite the contradictions embedded in this relationship. Alexandre Castant's examination of Doisneau's images of Cendrars, as a contribution to the dialogue between the media, leads into the final section, Cendrars as a character in literature: Marie-France Borot reads Manuel de Seabra's Portuguese lieutenant Conrado reading Cendrars in war-torn Angola (Coneixes Blaise Cendrars?, 1984); and Claude Leroy concludes with a tentative, synthesizing typology — ‘chroniques romancées’, subdivided into ‘Cendrars sous son nom’ and ‘Portraits masqués’; ‘Fictions à clefs’, subdivided into ‘Collages’ and ‘Pilotis’; and, finally,‘Le Livre de Blaise’ (the legend of the forename) — followed by a répertoire. As an appendix, the volume includes two uncollected articles (Cendrars's pen-portrait of Doisneau which served as a preface to the latter's Instantanés de Paris (1925), and a preface written for Erich von Stroheim's novel, Poto-Poto (1956)) and a selection from Cendrars's unpublished epigrammatic thumbnail sketches of contemporaries (‘Épinglés’). It is the documentary value of this collection of essays which is most to be prized, and the variety of its angles of approach. Theoretical thinking about biography and autobiography is less conspicuous.