"Le Temps rhumain": Time in the work of Philippe Beck

Abstract

Philippe Beck has published sixteen volumes of poetry since the mid-1990s, alongside prose works and essays that combine poetic, critical and philosophical modes. Frequently described as difficult, hermetic or didactic (this last term is one he applies to his own writing), with only a few dissenters among his critics and reviewers, (1) Beck's poetic writing appears to conform to much that is traditionally assumed to define poetry: he is more likely to choose verse as a privileged form than many of his contemporaries, and the question of rhythm recurs in his discussion of poetry in lectures, prose texts and interviews. His poetry is often elliptical and allusive, with a poetic persona whose identity is in question, as in much modernist writing. Beck cannot be aligned with either or objective tendencies in recent French poetry, although he participates fully in contemporary debates; he founded and edited the review Quaderno from 2000-2003, and published Quaderno: une idee de la poesie in Art Press, in which he set out its principles. (2) This article will consider three central aspects of Beck's poetic writing in verse and prose and consider what they reveal about his conception of time and the way time is embodied in his work. Two of those features--impersonality and citation--might seem to imply a focus on simultaneity, if the je is taken out of the linearity of an individual human life and the use of quotation assembles the words of others, from different times and places, in a simultaneous present. Meanwhile, Beck's interest in rhythm, the third feature to be examined, might appear to indicate that his time will be the unfolding of the poem. However, I shall argue that time in his work differs from both of these models and that he aims at producing what he names le temps rhumain that is neither linear nor simultaneous, neither outside human experience nor bound to teleological progression. Reference will be made principally to two works of 2007. Un journal subverts the conventions of the diary form because, despite its structure as a series of dated entries (it was first published in weekly installments on the website www.sitaudis.fr) this is not the record of an individual's thoughts and experiences. It is an impersonal diary. He writes at the start: Ici commence journal. Bien. J. est presque impersonnage principal. (3) Moreover, it is built on a complex and detailed engagement with the words of others. Chants populaires is predicated on the opposite of a diary because it does not emerge from a single voice; as a reworking of Grimm fairytales, it brings together the times of their composition and rewriting, as well as the oral and written traditions from which they came and future reinterpretations. (4) Chants populaires is written in verse, opening with an avertissement in prose, whereas Un journal is a prose text that includes two verse pre-journaux, one at the start and one at the end, as well as several short verse sections incorporated in the body of the volume. These two publications therefore appear to be the reverse of one another in ways central to the concerns this paper explores, but it will be shown that they nevertheless share a preoccupation with, and creation of, le temps rhumain. In Un journal, Beck rejects the confessional mode, the intimate and the lyrical expression of emotion. He expresses skepticism of sincerity and personal confidences, seeing these as a kind of sentimentality, mievrerie (126), which he categorizes as affected or stylized and overly hasty. In its place, he proposes l'extime (127), a neologism that is immediately comprehensible as it reverses l'intime and designates a general, impersonal, confidence, one that moves slowly, and accommodates variations and convolutions. (5) He writes that un mouvement au-devant de quelqu'un est lent et silr. (127) Movement, here, is not the property or capacity of a subject moving through life, but a phenomenon whose existence is independent of any given individual. …