Colorsteps in Modern and Contemporary French Poetry

Abstract

Color fills an important space of coincidence and of difference between verbal and visual media, yet receives strikingly little attention in discussions of poetry (or, indeed, in studies of literature more generally). Bound by the monochrome world of the printed word, literary researchers appear prismatically indifferent, judging as a referent somehow not proper to their domain, viewing as improper even. (1) When engages us directly as readers and critics, we often deem it inconsequential or incidental; is perceived as decorative, supplementary, and secondary; synonymous with and reducible to local And a line is thus drawn--a black line. Unlike our co-workers in film, history of art, textile studies or musicology, literary researchers are remote from those perceptual and pleasurable pressure points that may be acoustic, tactile or visual, and which, in this instance, are prismatic. (2) Color practice is a blind spot in contemporary critical readings of French poetry and poetic writing, a paradoxical situation given critics' attentiveness to the interart and intermedial significance--manifest and latent--of French modern poetic practice. (3) The obscuring of is anomalous, too, given our concern to bring into dialogue concepts and tropes drawn from cognate research disciplines as part of a wider arts and humanities project. (4) Our color blindness as critics is ironic when counterpoised with the sustained reflection of modern and contemporary poets on the color-practice of painters, and the alertness of poets to their own verbal engagement with color. (5) Yves Bonnefoy's Le Nuage rouge: Dessin, couleur et lumiere (1977) and Francis Ponge's L'Atelier contemporain (1977) are signal contributions to the reading of Renaissance and modern painting, while Rene Char's work with Miro on Flux de l'aimant (1964) exemplifies the livre d'artiste, and Bonnefoy's collaboration with Genevieve Asse for Debut et .fin de la neige (1991) illuminates the interart impetus of twentieth-century poetic innovation. (6) And then there are the myriad instances where poetry, with or without a direct pictorial referent, moves beyond the evocation of the enduring tropes of art, such as landscape, and begins to reflect on the visual quality of poetry and its potential to stir acts of chromatic imagining in its narrators and its readers. Jean-Michel Maulpoix provides mesmeric instances of contemporary poetry's reflection on this prismatic project in Une histoire de bleu (1992): L'azur, certains soins, a des soins de vieil or. Le paysage est une icone. II semble qu'au soleil couchant, le ciel qui se craquelle se reprenne un instant a croire a son bleu. (Le Regard bleu) (7) The writing of has important implications for poetry's capacity, as the fragment from Maulpoix quoted above suggests with its speculative mode (il semble), with the intentionality it imputes to color, and with its stress on the tending of (L'azur [...] a des solos). By I want also to suggest poetry's potential to shape attentiveness. In this article I begin to address that occluded capacity of in poetry. My concern is with the movement of poetry (or of poetic writing in the case of Helene Cixous) towards (as artistic memory and as remembered--or imagined--visual sensation), and with readers' reception of color--of color-made-language--in poetry. I explore these issues in prismatic practice with reference to Apollinaire, Cendrars, Michaux, Maulpoix, and Cixous. Color instances in their work will provide illuminating points de repere, markers as we move towards a more focused reading of a range of texts by Jacques Roubaud, a poet renowned for writing black. First, I want to consider some of the conceptual, material and affective implications of writing. I begin with Helene Cixous's reflections on Rembrandt's Bathsheba bathing (1654) in an essay that is instructive for how may be written and how it might be read. …