Henri Meschonnic: Rhythm as Pure Historicity

Abstract

ENRI MESCHONNIC is one of the key figures of French New Poetics but is still wholly unknown here. Outside the United States he is best known for contributing to an understanding of rhythm. Critique du rythme, anthropologie historique du langage (The Critique of Rhythm: A Historical Anthropology of Language), his central text, is neither a metrical study nor the usual sort of rhythmic analysis, but something quite other. As a poet and as a translator of the Hebrew verse of the Bible, Meschonnic contends that rhythm governs meaning.' He defines rhythm in language as the continuous movement of signifiance2 constructed by the historical activity of a subject. His book considers all theories of rhythm ever put forward and shows how each is limited by its time and place-indeed that there is no such thing as an absolute statement about rhythm but that it is always historicized. For rhythm is heard only when the subject prevails. Rhythm in discourse exposes the subject (sujet d'6nonciation) in that activity of language we call poetry. Human beings think with their whole body, but such body language is easier to grasp in speech and posture than in written discourse. Yet even in discourse, the larger the role of rhythm, the greater the fullness of body. Because its language has best retained rhythm from the body and imposes a perception not yet conceptualized by culture, poetry is the mode of signifying that says the most, and most transforms the modes of signifying. Meschonnic shares with Derrida and Foucault the notion that discourse shapes and circumscribes the subject, but he goes further, as a poet, to suggest that this form of power flows in the other direction, from the bottom up: the subject also determines