Henry Bauchau, écrire pour habiter le monde éd. par Catherine Mayaux, Myriam Watthee-Delmotte

Abstract

MAYAUX, CATHERINE, et MYRIAM WATTHEE-DELMOTTE, éd. Henry Bauchau, écrire pour habiter le monde. Saint-Denis: PU de Vincennes, 2009. ISBN 978-2-84292-225-2. Pp. 396. 28 a. This volume contains the proceedings of an international conference held at l’Université de Cergy-Pontoise in March 2007. It privileges, much like JeanClaude Pinson’s incisive assessment of contemporary poetic production, Habiter en poète (1995), the Holderlinian view of habitation and habitability in relation to Henry Bauchau’s multifaceted writing. Emanating from his experience of psychoanalysis amid a period of personal turmoil, Bauchau’s first literary endeavours embrace poetry as a means of plumbing inner depths and go on to produce what Michele Mastroianni aptly terms a “laboratoire poétique polymorphe, complexe et variable” (334), from which the Belgian author draws in turn the other accomplished forms of his protean quest: plays, novels, essays, and journals. Divided into five sections, the collection offers an impressive range of approaches to Bauchau’s relatively late creative flowering and its intriguing ramifications that champion, from the late 1950s to the present, the healing power of art and the imagination. It is this power, harnessed through myth, through ritual, and through a writing informed by other aesthetic practices and different cultural heritages, that is repeatedly celebrated in these pages. Indeed, it might be noted that, since the conference, Bauchau received the “Prix du livre Inter” for his novel Le boulevard périphérique (2008). Publishing this novel at the age of 95 was a feat that is in itself illustrative of enduring existential anchorage in and through art. The initial grouping of texts explores the evasive or fleeting nature of meaning generated in the work of Bauchau, which Jean Leclercq relates to a “[l]ong processus inchoatif et incantatoire d’une réalité qui advient” (32) and Aude Préta-de Beaufort associates with the buried treasures of childhood and the unconscious mind. For Régis Lefort, it is the figure of the non-signifying and nondirectional slope that the poet espouses, “ce qui tend son désir, sa vie” (57), and this perspective resonates further on with Olivier Ammour-Mayeur’s notion of a “poétique contre-tendue” (274) predicated on the spiritual dynamics of Zen archery. The second grouping highlights the importance of the body in Bauchau’s writing, reappropriated and revitalised through dance, sculpture, and song, for example, and placed at the centre of any purposeful act of earthly habitation, as in the case of Bauchau’s Oedipus and Antigone. The restorative function of art and myth is the focus of the third section, wherein Sophie Lemaître uses the term “mythoth érapie” to signify how, for Bauchau, the archaic continues to illuminate our modernity. Diverse spaces, real and imagined, are the subject of the penultimate section. Béatrice Bonhomme demonstrates how Bauchau’s “Chine intérieure” and its “éthique de dessaisissement et de retrait” (253) owe much to Pierre Jean Jouve, while Catherine Mayaux probes in a similar vein how this China is an internalisation and transfiguration of other people’s writings, coloured notably by Taoist thought. Japanese, German, and African cultures are also discussed in this section as further sources of inspiration. The final grouping considers other types of language pertinent to Bauchau’s writing: scripture, prayer, legal discourse with all its rigour, musical composition with its ceaseless mobility. All the studies gathered here detail Bauchau’s hard-won self-realisation through art or, as JeanYves Carlier simply puts it, “le niveau d’intériorité qui conduit à l’essentiel de soi pour ouvrir le chemin vers autrui” (367). Art remains the essential pathway for Reviews 757 Bauchau, and our endless discovery of its ample branchings, the highest form of our ineluctably finite habitation of this world. University College Dublin (Ireland) Michael Brophy PIÉGAY-GROS, NATHALIE. L’érudition imaginaire. Genève: Droz, 2009. ISBN 978-2-60000539 -5. Pp. 204. 20 a. Tant va l’écrivain au document d’archives qu’à la fin il s’épuise. Fort de quelques convictions romantiques, on pourrait être tenté de croire à la vérité de cette pseudo-maxime. Comme le constate l’auteur de cet excellent essai, l’érudition a mauvaise...